Dark of the Sun (MGM, 1968)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 I put on a surprisingly interesting 1968 film from Turner Classic Movies called Dark of the Sun, directed by Jack Cardiff from a script by Ranald MacDougall (as “Quentin Werty” – I had my suspicions about the name when I realized it spelled “QWERTY,” the first six letters on the first line of a typewriter keyboard) and Adrian Spies from a novel called The Dark of the Sun (with the article) by Wilbur Smith. TCM was showing this as part of an all-night memorial tribute to its female lead, Yvette Mimieux – who died January 17, 2022 at age 80 – but as things turned out her part was pretty irrelevant to the overall story. The overall story is quite compelling, though: mercenary soldier Captain Bruce Curry (Rod Taylor, reuniting with Mimieux from their star-making film from 1960, The Time Machine) cp,e4s to the Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa to do a job for its dictatorial President Mwamibi Ubi (Calvin Lockhart) – we’re pretty sure he’s dictatorial because the outside walls of buildings in the capital city, Brazzaville, are plastered with multiple copies of his photo. The is to set up a rescue party by train to Camp Reprieve, a diamond-mining firm rum by a Belgian company, and rescue both the diamonds and about a hundred people threatened by the Simbas, a Congolese revolutionary group. (The actor playing the diamond executive Delage, Guy Deghy, looks, sounds and acts so much like Sydney Greenstreet I was surprised MGM was able to find a "Greenstreet type" 18 years after the original's death.)

Curry's sidekick is Sgt. Ruffo (Jim Browm, who at the time this film was made was still playing professional football for the Cleveland Browns), a Congolese native who was raised in the U.S. and went to the University of Southern California. (Given the schoo’s rep;ujtation as a football powerhouse, I wonder if he was supposed to have got through on a football scholarship.) Ruffo is there because he wants to bring peace to his native land and put an end to the conflicts raging within the co=untry even now. Curry could care less about that: all he wants is his money, the sooner the better, and in his case it jas to be sooner because Ubi has given him a three-day deadline: he needs to pay off the Western bankers who have been keeping his government afloat but who will withdraw their support and throw their weight behind another Congolese faction in the nation’s long-running multi-front civil war. (Plus ça change, plus ça même chose.) Curry and Ruffo assemble a team of 40 men to ride on the train and provide the military muscle they will need to confront the Simba rebels, and to serve as his field commander he recruits Captain Henlein (Peter Carsten) even though Henlein has a swastika pinned to his shirt’s chest pocket, indicating he’s an unrepentant Nazi. Along the way they pick up the stranded white people, including Claire (Yvette Mimieux), whose presence in the story can only be explained by the studio’s (MGM) desire to be able to advertise that a woman was in this film. She serves no plot function, we don’t get the romance between her and Captain Curry our movie-conditioned minds have led us to expect, and she certainly doesn’t take up arms and fight alongside the men. (I can still remember my sense of joy in 1977, when I saw the original Star Wars for the first time and saw Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia pick up a blaster and blast away at the bad guys; at long last we had a woman who was an actual fighter instead of the usual pathetic damsel in distress Mimieux plays here.) We don’t even get a scene in which the slavering Black Simbas gang-rape the white heroine and Curry has to rescue her à la For Whom the Bell Tolls – though D. W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation is name-checked in one of Jim Brown’s lines and it, too, was about slavering Black monsters drooling over the prospect of despoiling white women.

Alas, when they get to Fort Reprieve the place is being menaced by a Simba army and there’s a race against time because the manager of the diamond mine has set the vault door on a timer lock that can’t be opened for three hours. There’s also an alcoholic doctor as part of their party, Dr. Wried (Kenneth More, who played the lead in the 1959 remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 classic The 39 Steps), whom Curry has tried to keep sober but Henlein gets drunk again, and they encounter a pregnant Black woman who has to pull through long enough to give her a C-section and deliver her breech-birthed baby – which he does even though he has to stay behind and face virtually certain death from the Simbas. The Simbas duly arrive just as the time lock opens and Curry and his men can grab the diamonds. They attack the fleeing train and blow a hole in the trestle after derailing it, so instead of taking the train the principals have to commandeer trucks – one of which is a gas truck that literally explodes and kills everyone on board when the Simbas hit it with an artillery shell. Most of the people Curry and Ruffo were trying to rescue die on the way back, and Henlein kills Ruffo by impaling him with a long high-tech spear (it’s clearly of Western manufacture rather than a native product). He does this because he thinks Ruffo has the diamonds (ya remember the diamonds? Actually they’re the usual movie fakes of glass or paste that wouldn’t fool anybody, and in fact I looked phony enough I was wanting to see a Maltese Falcon–style twist in which they were supposed to be fakes). Curry hunts down Henlein and kills him, but then in an ending I literally did not see coming Curry is ashamed of what he’s done and turns himself in for court-martial.

Dark of the Sun isn’t a great movie, but it is a thoroughly entertaining one that at least touches on, if it doesn’t actually seriously explore, issues of colonialism, imperialism and capitalism. One thing about the movie that surprised and impressed me was the performance of Jim Brown: I had expected him to show a level of incompetence rivaling that of another football player who attempted a screen career, O. J. Simpson, but he turns in a genuinely moving and sympathetic performance showing serious acting chops. (It’s a pity writer-director Peter Hyams couldn’t have got Brown instead of Simpson for his 1977 film Capricorn One: he was stuck with Simpson by his producers and complained to them, “I don’t mind having a Black person in this movie, but couldn’t you at least have found me a Black person who could act?”) It has an unusually bouncy and not always appropriate musical score by Jacques Loussier, which sounds like he was trying to escape the usual clichés of movie underscoring from the classic era but ended up mashing together jazz themes with traditional Korngoldian action music. There's also a lot of Mickey-Mousing, notably when the music echoes the sounds of the train getting underway. (“Mickey-Mousing” is a technical term for an unusually tight synchronization of picture and sound; it came from Walt Disney’s belief that audiences wouldn’t accept a sound cartoon unless the picture and sound were really tightly linked.) Still, Dark of the Sun is a quite good action thriller, made at a time when films like Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch were revolutionizing the film industry by showing way more explicit violence than had previously been possible, and it’s a major accomplishment in filmmaking and a tribute to Jack Cardiff, who was an ace cinematographer before he became a director and still had a sense of visual flair. Oddly, though the exteriors look convincingly African, they were actually shot in Jamaica – just as another MGM film made around the same time, The Comedians, was set in Haiti but was actually shot in Dahomey, Africa!