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Sands of the Kalahari sounds as if it is based on a book by Wilbur Smith, but actually it isn't. It features a top-drawer cast, some blazing African location photography, and a genuinely exciting storyline about survival in the wilderness.

The story deals with a plane crash. The survivors find themselves in the middle of the Kalahari desert, close to a barren, rocky outcrop inhabited by baboons. They manage to make a shelter in the rocks and await rescue, but after a while it becomes clear that no-one is coming to look for them. Tensions begin to rise, and various characters react in various ways: Stuart Whitman's character becomes more and more like the savage, primitive monkeys; Nigel Davenport finds himself sexually craving for one of the ladies in the party; Susannah York becomes increasingly flirtatious; Harry Andrews scientifically toils away trying to come up with a rational escape plan; Stanley Baker just deals with the situation in a quietly courageous way.

The film is very exciting. You get to know the characters quite well, and you find yourself considering their plight very seriously and pondering on how you would cope in similar circumstances. The unpredictable nature of Whitman's character and Davenport's character means that you are always on your guard, expecting the unexpected. This is a really good little film, generally forgotten now but well worth seeking out. If you get the chance to view it... do!

Running virtually parallel with "Flight of the Phoenix", "Sands of the Kalahari" rates ahead by a propeller in my opinion thanks mainly to the superb ensemble cast ably led by Stuart Whitman and Stanley Baker. The plot is uncomplicated concerning the survivors of a plane crash deep in the isolated Kalahari who must survive the ravages of the desert, its occupants, and themselves.

Davenport is a particularly nasty thug, the ubiquitous 'Mr Negativity' of a crisis situation, York desperately trying to deflect unwanted attentions, and Bikel offers the calming influence as the man who might be capable of engineering an improbable escape. Not too sure whether it's Whitman or Baker's picture per se, nevertheless, neither seems overshadowed despite Baker's producer credit and regular helmsman Cy Raker Endfield in the director's seat.

Searing heat and parched throats translates to the viewer, it's often tense despite the two hour run-time, and Endfield builds modest suspense out of limited material. Worth a look if you're intrigued by the "stranded" stories watching various personalities disintegrate, or galvanise, under survival stress.

Sands of the Kalahari is directed by Cy Endfield who also adapts the screenplay from the novel of the same name written by William Mulvihill. It stars Stuart Whitman, Stanley Baker, Susannah York, Harry Andrews, Theodore Bikel and Nigel Davenport. Music is by John Dankworth and cinematography by Erwin Hillier.

A raw survivalist thriller that finds a disparate group of people crash land in the deserts of Africa and promptly start to come apart as a group. Cue arguments, attempted rape, killings, animal slaughter, alpha male posturing and Adam and Eve complexes. The allegory is obvious but handled with skill by Endfield, and it all builds with great intensity towards a truly bleak, yet delightfully ambiguous finale. There's some over acting going on and the dialogue can stretch credibility at times, but yes this is a worthy entry in the survivalist hall of fame. 7/10

I have read most of the comments about Sands of the Kalahari, and like most of you have been looking for several years for the tape or DVD of this movie. Well, great news movie lovers, I found a site that offers the DVD of this movie and ships free. Price as advertised is 11.99. I have already ordered my copy and thought you would be interested in getting yours. Here's the web site. http://store.thesmallscreen.org/index.html Check under the action section. I saw this movie in 1965 when it first came out and was struck by the realism the movie contained. I think any one that likes action type films will surely like this movie. Of course Susannah York is also a very good actress and gives this movie an added attraction for watching it.

I had no idea this movie was from Stanley Baker and Cy Endfield, the producer/director team responsible for 1963's Zulu. It makes sense though, as both are above-average adventure movies with an emphasis on character as well as action. Slightly similar to Five Came Back perhaps, only with baboons instead of natives, but otherwise 100% original and entertaining.

The plot is simple enough. A plane crash lands in the desert, where survivors are forced not only to deal with hunger and the elements, but a pack of angry baboons who don't like trespassers. The Discovery Channel likes to remind us we're all just animals. Stuart Whitman confirms it in the performance of his life, playing a man determined to survive, at any cost, an almost psychotic Cornel Wilde from Naked Prey.

Great locations, good camera work, and some of the best primate performances ever put on screen. One look at the Kalahari baboons, and you'll remember Cujo was just a sick doggie.

Now forgotten aside from an occasional airing on daytime TV – where I was lucky enough to catch it – SANDS OF THE KALAHARI is a B-movie version of Hollywood's FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX. Like that film, it concerns a group of plane crash survivors attempting to adapt to live in an inhospitable desert climate, but there the similarities end. SANDS OF THE KALAHARI is very much smaller scale in scope, concentrating on group dynamics over big plotting and looking at what happens when disparate personalities are forced to work together.

The first half of the film is a little dull, I'll accept that. Spain stands in for Africa, and it works…I never questioned the bleakness of the surrounds for a second. But the characters are dry and dull and the film is saddled with an extremely lacklustre female lead, played by Susannah York. In the second half, the film throws us a decent twist and delivers an unexpected story which gets better and better as it goes on. By the end I had been thoroughly engrossed in and entertained by the story.

Stuart Whitman is no Jimmy Stewart, but he enjoys a multi-faceted role here and commands the screen like few leading men. Stanley Baker, here reteaming with director Cy Endfield a year after ZULU, is also excellent value for money. Believe me, this film is no ZULU, but it is a nice surprise for a B-movie. Add in a couple of distinguished Brit actors (Harry Andrews, Nigel Davenport), some killer baboons and plenty of in-fighting and you have an unfairly forgotten little effort.

I'm really gratified to find so many other reviewers having good memories of Sands of the Kalahari and feeling as put out as I do that it is not on VHS or DVD. Nor apparently has it been seen in America at least for some time.

This is a tale of survival, but the characters sure don't come out of Swiss Family Robinson. A small plane crashes in the Kalahari desert in South Africa. One woman, Susannah York, and five men. Only one of them Stuart Whitman who is a big game hunter is really trained for the business of survival. The others are products of the ease and comfort of civilization. One of them, Stanley Baker, is badly injured and needs constant nursing by York.

There's a colony of baboons nearby and Whitman starts identifying with them in every sense of the world. He turns on the others, eliminating them one by one except York who he decides will be his savage Eve to his savage Adam.

The injured Baker gradually heals and in the end proves to be the savior for York. I'm not going to say any more, but hopefully TCM or AMC will run this film at some point for American audiences.

Susannah York is beautiful and talented and goes through a gamut of emotions regarding Whitman and their predicament. Stanley Baker is a favorite of mine among British players, he never gave a bad performance in any film I ever saw him in. But the real treat is Whitman. His devolution of character out in that desert was Oscar caliber material and why he wasn't nominated in 1965 is a mystery.

If some American movie channel gets a hold of this film, do not miss it.

What a great flick. It's hard to believe that it never received the recognition it fully deserved. Acting is first-rate, the scenery magnificent and the plot hooked you in immediately. The ULTIMATE survival movie!

Stuart Whitman played his role as ultimate survivor to the hilt in probably the most effective role ever in his career.

I would hope that some day Paramount comes to it's senses and releases this on DVD. All fans of this movie should in fact demand no less- let's start lobbying Paramount. Until then, it is an all too rarely seen item on cable movie channels like A&E or AMC.

As you can read from others here, "Sands of the Kalahari" is one of those movies that if you saw it as a kid you're likely not to have forgotten it. It's also a good movie if you like to look at lots of shots of the desert (think: the beginning of "Planet of the Apes" [1968]) and people sweating. The plot concerns a small group of people that crash their plane in a remote area of South African desert. No one comes looking for them, so how are they going to get out? One is a woman, the rest all men. You can guess that things get tense and then mean. It make matters worse there's a nasty bunch of baboons living nearby and they look hungry. Why this has never come to video I don't know. The last place I saw it was on A&E some nine years ago. It was shot in Panavision, so it should be letterboxed. It was a Paramount film, so maybe if enough request to them are made it'll eventually come out on DVD.

Supposedly this was the movie that pushed Stanley Baker -- who'd just peaked with the same director Cy Endfield for ZULU -- into a career downturn, and not just because SANDS OF THE KALAHARI is a deliberately strange and uncomfortable survival tale initially involving seven passengers of a crashed plane stranded in the vast titular desert...

As producer, Baker didn't only give the best role to Stuart Whitman, but his own character's injured and therefore basically useless for most of the picture: one that features a somewhat convenient ensemble...

Also including veteran wildlife expert Harry Andrews, passive doctor Theodore Bikel, ingenue Susannah York and then Nigel Davenport, who initially attempts raping York before -- after the group finds refuge in a canyon/cavern area also inhabited by baboons -- wandering off for help, becoming a sporadic standalone comic relief...

And overall he's hardly even necessary... In fact, despite otherwise talented actors Andrews and Bikel, the only people who matter are the great looking would-be love triangle despite all the passion belonging to Stuart Whitman's O'Brien and the wistfully one-dimensional York... and who can blame her?

O'Brien's able to walk, run, has a gun, does the hunting, and isn't a bad sort until predictably deciding to put Darwin's Theory to human use...

Meanwhile first-billed Baker (who basically played Whitman's violently polarizing type in YESTERDAY'S ENEMY the previous decade), a consistent Cy Endfield collaborator since 1957's HELL DRIVERS, has the same amount of brawn, brains and good looks to potentially progress into a slow-burn hero against the sociopath alpha male -- yet he merely blends into the cavemannish landscape, visually reminiscent of ZULU where he also portrayed a bridge-builder...

Unfortunately, there's not much for an injured pacifist to do, making Whitman... who's never looked or acted better... the film's only real purpose, and who the audience might not be rooting for, but with such a long, often plodding run-time, they'll surely appreciate his determination and energy, nefarious or otherwise.

We saw this on TV, twice, back in the mid 60's... around 67 or 68, I think it was a "Saturday, Sunday or Monday Night at the Movies"...

I had recently thought of this movie, and thought it was part of "Flight of the Phoenix" with Jimmie Stewart... or another movie... I have not seen or thought about it for around 50 years. So, my muddled brain was not sure... I got it for a friend, and we might watch it tonight or soon.

My friend and I remember the part about the Baboons mostly.

It has some very intense scenes. I remember it as a "good" movie... we shall see how it holds up.

For those who believe that films no one remembers are without a doubt mediocre, look no further than the "Sands Of The Kalahari" - it may surprise you. It is beyond me how such a brilliantly crafted adventure masterpiece drama such as this was allowed to slip through people's fingers upon its release and escape to the forgotten dungeons of no return! For a film that hasn't been in print for 30 years, it is worthy of the title of greatest forgotten film of all time.

How could such a film, directed by the talented British director Cy Endfield (who brought you great monuments of cinema such as Zulu), with such breathtaking cinematography, famous British and American actors such as Stanley Baker, Stuart Whitman and Suzannah York, playing such complicated characters in a poignantly original story, filmed beautifully in Widescreen Technicolor of the 1960's have been treated in such an unjust manner is beyond our galaxy!!!

The "Flight Of The Phoenix" was a very similar film (equally as brilliant), yet received so much critical acclaim and box-office success upon its release. Geez it must have been James Stewart. Yet we have all noticed this: That if a film is not successful in America, then it isn't successful anywhere. Why? Because no other country in the world puts so much emphasis on advertising their films. It is why absolute garbage such as "Spiderman" robs people of their income and takes the throne as the biggest box-office draw of the year. But is this correct for such an 'explosive, action packed, predominantly CGI infested, plot less' mediocre effort in modern Hollywood film making? People have forgotten what a real film constitutes.

I have already forgotten Spiderman - except for its title! But "Sands Of The Kalahari" has lived in people's memories ever since it came out, due to it's brilliant execution and powerful story telling. Unfortunately not many have had the pleasure of seeing it, for it has been out of print for many years.

I am the proud owner of a copy of this survivalist killer of a film and every time I just want to sit back and escape our Predominant modern Hollywood world and watch a great achievement in the art of film making, I put in a film like "Sands Of the Kalahari" - a film that unlike most of the so called 'films' we see today, should have been embedded into our memories long ago as a 'classic'!

There were two movies released in 1965 that followed a group of plane crash survivors in the middle of the desert; I know, Hollywood isn't fair. Where The Flight of the Phoenix is inspiring and makes you stand up afterwards to applaud, Sands of the Kalahari is creepy and a total downer.

There's a key difference between the two films which might explain the two paths: a woman in the cast. With James Stewart at the helm, there wasn't a single woman in the film, so the men could just band together and try to fix their airplane. In the Stuart Whitman version, the other survivors are Stanley Baker, Nigel Davenport, and Susannah York. With a beautiful blonde in possession of a shapely figure, the men have an extra distraction and lose their camaraderie. Perhaps aided by a feeling of "it's now or never", all the men try their turn with Susannah. To be fair, Harry Andrews and Theodore Bikel are also survivors but they keep their hands to themselves.

I don't know why Stuart Whitman took this role. After an Academy Award nomination in 1961, he could have continued to headline heavy dramas. After this movie, however, he quickly became typecast in creepy, oddball films. Didn't he read the script? Didn't he know what his character would have to do in the later part of the movie - and why didn't he take a pass?

I really wouldn't recommend this movie, especially since there's another far, better choice with an extremely similar plot. This movie is downright disturbing, and there's no way anyone would stand up and cheer when the end credits roll. However, there is one reason to watch it: Nigel Davenport. My whole life, I'd only known him as George C. Scott's father in A Christmas Carol. The naïve child in me didn't even know he'd made other movies; I thought he was just hand-picked for the holiday classic. But twenty years earlier, he was young and able to pour his heart out on the screen. I can't talk about his character's path without spoiling plot points, but I had no idea he was such a talented actor. His tour-de-force scene is incredibly emotional, and it makes you want to watch other movies solely because he's in them. It was a very tough decision for Best Supporting Actor at the Hot Toasty Rag Awards of 1965, and even though Nigel didn't end up taking home the newspaper trophy, we were very proud to nominate him, which the Academy never did throughout his career.

Kiddy Warning: Obviously, you have control over your own children. However, due to violence and upsetting scenes involving animals, I wouldn't let my kids watch it. Also, there may or may not be a rape scene.

Plane of doofuses plus a hot dish crash-land in an African h3llhole. Instead of staying at the crash site, creating shelter, searching for water, and builing an S. O. S. Beacon, they wander off into a thousand miles of desert. They shoot some baboons.

They stumble upon a watering hole just in time. Do they stay put and build an S. O. S. Beacon? No, after they shoot more baboons they builda fire inside a cave and send off one of their party to, um, wander back through another thousand miles of desert.

Rinse and repeat.

I can't cheer for characters in movies who are too stup1d to know basic survival skills. And the baboon killing offended me.

I wanted all the humans to die.

When a flight to Johannesburg is delayed, a private charter offers to fly some of the willing passengers for a nominal fee. Unfortunately, a giant swarm of locusts causes the plane to crash in the Kalahari. Fearing the day will be at its hottest soon, the survivors waste no time in trying to find shelter, battling thirst and the scorching heat.

When they do find shelter, they find they are surrounded by a menacing troop of baboons. O'Brien (Stuart Whitman) takes the lead in providing food. He has little respect for nature, though, and we soon discover just how arrogant and selfish he is. He also becomes the film's antagonist.

Grace (Susannah York) is the only female among the men and she has her hands full with some of them (erm, pardon the pun!). Hunky Stuart Whitman with his beefy body allows for plenty of eye candy, although his character is not a nice guy.

'Sands of the Kalahari' is so much more than just a tale of survival, and I really enjoyed it.