Sammy va al sud

I saw this film when I was ten when it was first released. I have only seen it once but can vividly remember it. My father had already died and Sammy's experience of returning to his home and finding it bombed and his parents dead had a profound effect on me. I lived the fear as Sammy travelled south. I have often thought about the film but have never seen it again. I have tried to find it on DVD but unsuccessfully as I assume it's never been released. I remember Sammy's resolve and determination to complete his journey but I can also remember lying awake at night wondering if I would be orphaned. A fantastic film, release it on DVD.

On one level it is a straight adventure story -- an orphaned boy's adventures in trying to cross a continent to find an aunt he has never met.

At another level it is more complex, as it shows his relationships with the different adults he meets. Some are uncaring, while others try to exploit him, and leave him hardened by the encounters so that when he meets people who help him with no ulterior motive, he remains detached and withdrawn from real human contact. At first sight Fergus McClelland seems to have a rather wooden performance as the boy, Sammy Hartland, but in fact this is part of the character in the story.

Eventually it is a diamond smuggler, played by Edward G. Robinson, who breaks through his reserve, and begins to bring him out of his shell.

My review is based on my one viewing of this movie. I saw it in 1967, two years after its release. I was seven years old. My elementary school was showing it after school. I went because the title intrigued me. The title in this country was A BOY TEN FEET TALL. There was a poster on the wall, made by a student (or a teacher) with the title in big letters next to a line drawing of an extremely tall boy. The actual movie was disappointingly realistic to me. I was expecting something like a Popeye cartoon. Ever since seeing it I've asked fellow movie buffs if they remember a movie in which Edward G. Robinson gives sage advice to a boy in the jungle. Nobody I know has ever heard of this. Maybe the fact that it is also called SAMMY GOING SOUTH has caused confusion, because I have always referred to it as A BOY TEN FEET TALL. In the half-a-lifetime since seeing this, I've come to realize that Edward G. Robinson gave it his all. Late-career Edward G. was truly a scene-stealer. He's the reason we remember SOYLENT GREEN. I'll give it 7 stars because I saw it when I was seven and seven is a lucky number. I was lucky to see what has become a rare performance by a great actor.

This British film, whose original title was SAMMY GOING SOUTH but was retitled as A BOY TEN FEET TALL in America, is one of the many wonderful films directed by Alexander ('Sandy') Mackendrick. I knew Sandy very well before he went to teach film making in America. He was a kind, loving and sentimental man with a great fondness for children, which explains why he made three notable films featuring children, this one, MANDY, and A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA. This film is based on a novel by W. H. ('Bill') Canaway, who also wrote the script for THE IPCRESS FILE (1965). Shooting films like this on location is one of the riskiest things a director can do. With this film, it was shot from Egypt to South Africa, and down the entire length of the African continent. Sandy survived that danger to his career. But it was the location shooting for A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA later on which finished his career as a feature film director. It went so greatly over budget because of the location work that Sandy was the fall guy for a major budgetary disaster. He liked to shoot a lot of takes and was a perfectionist, but that did not explain the financial loss. If the film had been a big hit and made a profit, no one would have complained. But instead, HIGH WIND was used as a pretext to save the reputations of the producers and distributor by declaring Sandy responsible and spreading the word throughout the entire film industry that he was from thence forward to be 'unbankable', that dread word which means the end of any director's career. I know all of this for an absolute fact. Most people do not know what it means for a film director to be declared 'unbankable'. It means that the guarantors (a form of insurers) of the budgets will never approve the 'unbankable' director to direct any film again, no matter how brilliant and talented he is. This was also a problem for Orson Welles, who by the way was a great friend of Sandy's. One evening at dinner at Sandy's, the table was heaped with huge mounds of grey caviar from Iran. I never saw so much caviar before or since. Sandy explained that Orson was supposed to come but cancelled at the last minute, and he had a gargantuan appetite. So I shamelessly ate a great deal of Orson's caviar, as did we all, and it was a caviar feast never to be forgotten. This film stars the boy actor Fergus McClelland, and I recommend that everyone who gets the DVD watch the extra feature which is an interview with him remembering what it was like to work with Sandy on the film. Edward G. ('Eddie') Robinson added a great deal of gravitas to the film and did a wonderful job of playing a rogue diamond prospector who takes the wandering boy in and treats him like a son. Harry Corbett plays a straight role (this was before STEPTOE AND SON). The saga of the boy's lonely journey from Port Said, where his parents have been killed by British planes in a bombing raid during the Suez Affair of 1956, all the way to his aunt's Fairview Hotel in Durban, South Africa, alone and without money, is a truly amazing one. Sandy's original final cut was about 3 hours, whereas the released version of 129 minutes only appears to survive in the 114 minute version of the DVD, the rest being lost. How I wish the director's cut still existed! The adventures are so amazing, and we would have seen more of the magnificent cinematography which features so strongly in the film. This is a film every child should see, but also every adult. It is a film the appeal of which will never die. A great emphasis is placed by Sandy on the child's perspective as he makes the 5000 mile journey. The film is not at all sentimentally done, however, but is very realistic and does not hesitate to portray the terrible tragedies that happen on the way. When the Syrian's face is hurt by an explosion in the Sudanese desert, the shots of his disfigured face were removed, probably the only loss from the director's cut which was acceptable artistically. When the boy saves Eddie Robinson's life by shooting a charging mother leopard, it seems that a real tiger may actually have been shot. (I'm not certain about that.) That was in the days before animal rights groups. Sandy was a soft-hearted man who would never knowingly mistreat an animal, but the story was the story back in those days. In any case, the leopard's cub was taken away and nurtured. This film portrays a true epic journey, of the kind which would be impossible today. Who could walk across Africa now? There are too many civil wars and massacres taking place all the time, not to mention crazed terrorists. Possibly the best thing about this film is that it is not a pile of Hollywood mush with ersatz emotions and everybody splashing out their feelings in great torrents. Everyone, including the elderly African man in tribal dress on the White Nile ferry who befriends the boy, maintains a stiff upper lip throughout. This film was made in the days when people still had self-control, something all but unknown today in our decadent, narcissistic, and over-indulgent society. I cannot reveal the ending of the film, but will merely say that it is handled with such realism and delicacy that it lends the final elements of integrity to the entire film which preceded it.

I recall seeing this movie for the first time on TV back in the mid-70s when it went by a different title (possibly for US viewers), "A Boy 10 Feet Tall". Sadly I have only see this film one other time back in the late 80s. I too was drawn in by this film an it's youthful wanderer determined to make his own way from Egypt to South Africa despite all of the hardships involved. I credit this film in part in helping to pique my interest in travel and the world around me, especially Africa. It's too bad that a DVD or VHS version of this film were never officially released. This is one the films that remain on my 'Must Have' list.