The Adventurers

This film was a bit like King Solomons mines at the beginning but not as exciting. Then it turned into a whodunnit towards the end although it was fairly predictable.

Was watchable as an 'afternoon and its raining outside' sort of movie although there are lots of other old black and white films I like more.

Interesting as it was set in a pre-apartheid South Africa and what was fine in 1951 ie being very dismissive and arrogant with black people is very far from OK today.

My mum spent most of it trying to remember the name of the lead - Jack Hawkins it was though :)

On returning from the Boer war Jack Hawkins finds a body holding a cash of diamonds. With a few dodgy characters along - Price etc heads back to find them, with the group all getting a touch of the Sierra Madres with each other.

Quite interesting piece focussing at its best on the double dealing going on between the characters. Hawkins is as solid as ever and Price his usual sneaky self.

A bleak cross between 'Treasure of the Sierra Madre' and 'Scott of the Antarctic' enhanced by superb location work by veteran cameraman Ossie Morris; combining the inhospitable terrain of the latter (oppressively hot rather than bitterly cold) with the squabbling amongst a small, ill-matched group searching for treasure of the former.

This is , to all intents and purposes , a Western although set in post Boer War South Africa rather than in the American West . The year is 1901 and the Boer War is over -two Boer soldiers , Brandt (Jack Hawkins ) and Hendrik ( Peter Hammond ) are returning home when Brandt stumbles across a body with a fortune in diamonds on his person

He conceals the treasure -fearing he may be waylaid by the British and on returninbg home finds his fiancee is now married to the worthless Clive Hunter (Dennis Price ) a former British officer now scrounging a bare existence from petty crime and card sharping . Brandt organises an expedition to locate the diamonds -Hendrik and Hunter go along as does the saloon owner " Dominic " who is funding the venture

Bitter rivalries soon break out and one of the party fails to return -it is believed he was murdered and the last section of the movie turns on who did the deed .

The plot has overtones of the vastly superior " The Treasure of the Sierra Madre " in its highlighting of the conflict between expedition members but is too limply directed and staged to really develop this in any striking way

All the actors did better work and the whole enterprise seems tired and under budgetted

Just about passable time filler on a rainy afternoon when you dont feel like doing much beyond slumping in front of the television set

Fred Harvey's comments says it all really. It's a bit of a film noir, given that three of the four main protagonists are unlikeable, up against it and with little future (and this includes Jack Hawkins, who at least starts the film off with a stiff upper lip but then degenerates). The feeling of pessimism was accentuated by the photography itself appearing dark, and seeing it on TV didn't do justice to some of the panoramic outside shots.

It wasn't all that clear what distance Hawkins had to travel at the beginning of the film to escape the British, but despite looking very tired he made it to civilisation; so it wasn't entirely convincing that he needed to mount an expedition costing more than £200 and necessitating an ox-drawn wagon to retrieve the diamonds; one would have thought that having made it one way in a distressed condition he could have made it back by himself, with just a couple of pack mules for his provisions - but then he wouldn't have needed to recruit his disparate accomplices to fall out with, so there would have been less of a plot.