Mozambique

The film opens with a moidah! A gentleman gets stabbed, and rolls down the steps. Then, we carry on with the story. Brad webster is having a hard time finding work, so he takes an unusual job offer handed to him by a police officer. The pilot job is in mozambique. We know that webster is being used as a pawn by the police investigating a crime. But webster does not! And he quickly makes friends with a young lady who has also been hired as a singer. Then things start to get even more odd. And dangerous. They are both working for high stakes drug runners, and probably would not have taken the jobs if they knew what they were in for ! Can they get away before they are killed? It's pretty good! Interesting locale. A few plot holes here and there. None of the guards seem to be able to hit anyone with their guns or rifles. But moving on... directed by robert lynn. Sadly, the lead, steve cochran, died of a lung infection shortly after filming this movie. He made one more film, but apparently didn't live to see it released. Quite young, at 48. Van den bergh, as the arab, also died young at 47.

MOZAMBIQUE This movie plays like a Euro-Spy but it is actually a South African German movie. I first heard about it in the Dec. 1964 issue of CONTINENTAL FILM REVIEW magazine where they gave the title as BLONDE FREIGHT FOR ZANZIBAR. Good news...It is being released on Blu-Ray DVD. Enjoy it.

In 1964, the year of production of MOZAMBIQUE, that territory was a Portuguese colony in East Africa. Well, the only thing Portuguese that appears in the entire film is some shots of Lisbon, the Portuguese capital, at the very start of this British-South African-German production.

Immediately reducing the film's authenticity, the names of supposed Portuguese cops and criminals are either Italian (Commaro) or Spanish (Gonzalez, Valdez, Rodriguez, etc). The only Portuguese word one hears is "obrigado" (thank you). The rest, even words like señora and señorita, are Spanish, which I - born and bred to the age of 16 in colonial Mozambique - never heard while there.

The official language being Portuguese, the only Portuguese word I saw was "bar", which is written exactly the same way in English. All public notices, company names and adverts are in English, a very rare occurrence in colonial Mozambique. Furthermore, car license plates are not Mozambican, they are Rhodesian.

Given that then Southern Rhodesia was landlocked, as Zimbabwe is today, the port scenes you see are surely South African, possibly Durban.

The buildings are all of British design, there is no Portuguese architecture on sight. The police uniforms are not Portuguese, in fact I saw no distinguishable badges or other insignia.

Southern Rhodesia would declare UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) the following year, 1965, as the UK came under increasing pressure to grant independence to its colonies. Given that white British citizens ran Southern Rhodesia, clearly the UK authorities and studios where this film was edited, thought it bad for business to label it with anything connected to the then fading British Empire.

The solution? Make the Portuguese look bad instead by naming it Mozambique, quickly run up a few supposedly Portuguese names - Da Silva is the most common of all Portuguese surnames, so a character so named does appear on the roll - and let the fan spatter it at leisure.

No doubt as a joke, and to give the film producers some of their own venom, the Portuguese authorities rendered the film's title as "Operação Zanzibar" (Operation Zanzibar). It is true that 10% of the film takes place on that island off then British colony Tanganyika, now Tanzania, but Portuguese spectators certainly wondered why a flick entitled MOZAMBIQUE should go on show as OPERATION ZANZIBAR instead. About 15 minutes into the flick and you knew why: it had naught to do with Mozambique.

As for the film itself, Steve Cochran looks too old for the part, his hairline receding badly. He plays a pilot who survived a crash and now fears flying, but dishy Vivi Bach helps distract him while aboard a Lufthansa aircraft. The support cast of unknowns is pretty dire, the saving graces being two stunningly beautiful women, Hildegaard Knef as the femme fatale and Vivi Bach. The former even sings a song in German - an out and out rarity in Mozambique in 1964 - and other songs are heard in restaurants where waiters speak native English, no accent at all.

The ageing Cochran, his career in decline, must have been in bad need of a paycheck, or he would never agree to participate in this farse. But all is not bad for the aged character he portrays: he has both female beauties interested in him, and manages to get into Bach's room in the dead of night and - lo and behold! - she promptly opens up to him. James Bond had just emerged as a film franchise with DR NO, FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE and GOLDFINGER, but not even Bond did it better!

South African actor Gert vanden Bergh plays an Arab smuggler, looking much too fat and white for the part.

The script is patchy, jagged, full of flat characters, and with more holes than the proverbial Swiss cheese. One sequence where Cochran and Bach are fleeing Zanzibari cops armed with rifles is particularly ludicrous: Bach is barefoot, Cochran looks old, yet they keep gaining in relation to their pursuers, who cannot fire a shot right to save their lives.

Cochran even has time to find rope, be the gentleman and allow Back to climb a wall first, go down the outside wall and jump onto a guard, thankfully avoiding impalement on the rifle.

The film's climax takes place at the famously beautiful Victoria Falls, in then Rhodesian territory. One of the main villains falls too suspiciously like a doll from the glorious Victoria Falls Bridge, which must have been a source of pride to Brits and Rhodesians alike at the time.

However... climax outside of Mozambique in a film entitled MOZAMBIQUE defies logic.

One star for decent photography, the other for gorgeous Knef and Bach. 2/10. The rest is a tissue of misrepresentations from beginning to end, poorly acted and suffering from pedestrian direction - to put it very mildly - by Robert Lynn.

Amateurish and unintentionally laughable waste of 97 minutes.

Despite the exotic-sounding destination, MOZAMBIQUE turns out to be one deathly dull movie and another lame potboiler from producer Harry Alan Towers. The only thing really interesting about it is that it was actually filmed on location in the country, but sadly the film-makers fail to make use of their locale to add authenticity to the movie. It could just as easily have taken place in London.

The plot sees ageing American hero Steve Cochran off on his holidays when he runs foul of a drug smuggling ring and soon finds himself mixed up in all kinds of spy-style shenanigans. Cochran is uninteresting in the role as are the rest of the no-name cast; the director is more interested in his dancing girls with the likes of Hildegard Knef relegated to eye candy. There are a couple of very average fist fights here but it's all so dull and desperately James Bond style that you just won't care about them or indeed anything in the movie.

Steve Cochran is a pilot stranded in Lisbon without a job. He crashed a plane, and although he was held blameless, no one wants to hire him. Then a one-way ticket to Lourenço Marques, (now Maputo) in Mozambique shows up, so he takes a Lufthansa(?) flight. His prospective employer is dead, but the organization is still active, and its current head, Martin Benson, takes him on, while he fights with widow Hildegarde Neff for control. Cochran soon discovers that a pilot is needed for flying illegal drugs around, and for smuggling. After an hour, there's a corpse to deal with.

Martin Curtis' camerawork is excellent, but the movie is wrecked by the editor, Peter Boita. The pacing is glacial, with Cochran needing twenty minutes to get out of Portugal. The movie times in at a hundred minutes, but it might have been a zippy seventy except that director Robert Lynn likes to show people strolling about, taking them from a car to a hotel's door, or shoot a chase scene with as few cuts as possible, and Boita indulges him in this.

Johnny Douglas' score makes this pace even more evident by the music he uses during what should be exciting scenes: he uses scales on a guitar, single notes taking about a second each.