Sands Of The Kalahari

Shot on location in South Africa, this adventure and social allegory, adapted by the highly talented director Cy Endfield from a novel by William Mulvihill, reveals the ethics of a group of plane-crash survivors as they move through the desert wildsincluding a self-absorbed, gun-packing American (Stuart Whitman), an English divorcee (Susannah York), a failed mining engineer (Stanley Baker), and a couple of middle-aged men from eastern Europe. Brittle and acerbic in the Endfield manner, with a fine visual sweep, this is a capable genre piece with little wasted motion; it can also be read as a brutal critique of American self-interest in a third-world context. With Harry Andrews, Theodore Bikel, Nigel Davenport, Barry Lowe, and a lot of justifiably pissed-off baboons (1965). (JR)

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