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Powerful

Fresh and Exciting

Excellent but underrated film

Absolutely the worst movie.

A surprisingly efficient and startling adventure feature from Africa by Henry Hathaway for being so young and early - this is already Hathaway completely fledged, and it's a very colourful drama although in black and white. Gene Tierney, also very young and fresh, provides the romanticism with glowing colours, and George Sanders for once plays a very unusually honest and heroic role. It's a great adventure, and the cave scenes are gorgeously suggestive in both drama, invention and cinematography. The photo is stupendous, and although rather thin, brief and superficial, it must be deemed as a great film - on a small scale, but nevertheless.

I once saw a cinema program that combined "Of Mice and Men" with "Sundown". No greater contrast could possibly be imagined, yet both movies stand at the forefront of their particular genres. "Of Mice and Men" is Literature, "Sundown" a serial thriller from The Saturday Evening Post. Fresh from her triumph as Belle Starr (1941), lovely Gene Tierney is at her exotic best in Henry Hathaway's action-a-plenty Sundown (available on a 10/10 VCI DVD). Bruce Cabot, George Sanders, Harry Carey are the heroes battling a native uprising instigated by Nazis in Africa. Hathaway and his brilliant photographer, Charles Lang, handle this tosh with such pace and bravura as to engage the rapt attention of even the most jaundiced viewer. A superb Miklos Rozsa score adds to the excitement of Lang's noirishly atmospheric photography of the movie's really striking sets and locations. Who will ever forget the terrifying sight and sound of tracer bullets flashing through the night? Not me, that's for sure!

One judges films like this with criteria different from those applied to contemporary works, otherwise, it would receive a failing grade. However, as cinematic nostalgia it works well. The struggle against the Nazis and Fascists spread to Africa where the colonized population was enlisted to fight for the Allies in order to prevent a calamitous spread of an "evil empire". The images of "natives" is consistent with the stereotypes current at the time, but the plot---preventing the arming of tribes whose assistance was also desired by the Axis powers---is plausible. The techniques use to tell the story and the sets and scenes of skirmishes are a bit amateurish. The exteriors were obviously filmed in the Southwest and a large rock formation described a "Rhinoceros" mountain or peak looks like the Shiprock formation. For someone like me who spent Saturday afternoons at matinées, it's a trip back to another era of cinema; therefore a bit of fun. But,it's not a very good film.

This is a pretty good adventure tale of WWII before the US got involved.Perhaps the most interesting character is Pallini, the humane, civilized Italian gentleman who is not sorry to be a prisoner of the British rather than fighting on the side of the Axis.Maybe the most striking scene is the one in which they find the rifles that are being smuggled in to arm the natives against the British, and acid is used to raise the markings that have been ground off.When the markings indicate the Skoda Works in Czeckoslovakia(which had been occupied by Hitler several years before, so it was not the Czecks who were smuggling the guns) Pallini says with a shudder. "Its THEM!Its always THEM!".Without ever mentioning Nazis.Supposedly this was because we weren't in the war yet, but in fact it is extremely effective,like a monster whose presence is sensed, but not seen.It is as though Pallini is referring to some evil that is so terrible that he can't even bring himself to mention its name,the horror that is even more horrible because it has no name.