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source: Sundown

Sundown

The main reason for watching SUNDOWN is to see exotic Gene Tierney looking ravishingly beautiful in some eye-catching costumes as an Arab girl who helps the British against the Germans during WWII in East Africa. It has the feel of a serial cliffhanger without the chapter separations because something violent is happening every twelve minutes in typical cliffhanger fashion before the talky scenes resume a slower pace. Henry Hathaway directs the action scenes with his usual style but even he can't overcome a rambling script that fails to develop any of the characters. In Tierney's case, it doesn't matter. She has seldom looked more beautiful in B&W than she does in this film and makes the film worth viewing for her presence alone. Good cast includes Bruce Cabot, George Sanders, Carl Esmond, Joseph Calleia, Harry Carey, Reginald Gardiner and Cedric Hardwicke. Nominated for three Academy Awards in techncal categories, including one for Miklos Rozsa's background score.

I just watched this movie on YouTube for one reason and one reason only: To see an early Dorothy Dandridge performance. She appears in the beginning about to be married to a man named Kipsang. She has no lines but director Henry Hathway gives her a couple of close-ups so we can see how beautiful she truly was. But because of her color, she would not become a star until she eventually took the lead role in Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones some 13 years after this film. As for the film itself, it's got some good action but it's mostly many officers like those played by Bruce Cabot and George Sanders talking lots of expository lines and I really couldn't understand them so part of me was almost bored at the whole thing. Good thing an Italian prisoner-of-war named Pallini (Joseph Calleia) provides some character flavor and Gene Tierney as a friend of his some more alluring close-ups. So on that note, Sundown is at least worth a look.

I found SUNDOWN to be an enjoyable film. It seems sort of a cross between a jungle flick and a World War II espionage thriller, a kind of a TARZAN VRS THE NAZI'S. The story involves the British trying to prevent the Germans from secretly supplying the native Africans with weapons for a rebellion. Plenty of action and political incorrectness, plus Gene Tierney's ever so sexy overbite. Simply a must for Bruce Cabot fans everywhere.

The story is nonsense, and Gene Tierney couldn't act, yet this Henry Hathaway-directed a adventure picture set in North Africa is solid entertainment thanks to Hathaway's no-nonsense handling of the material, Miklos Rozsa's stirring score, and its splendidly chosen largely no-star or near-star cast: Bruce Cabot, George Sanders, Harry Carey, Cedric Hardwicke, Marc Lawrence. Cabot is especially good in the lead, and his work here makes one wonder why he didn't become a bigger name. Walter Wanger produced this one, which was a big hit, and also somewhat of a hybrid, a mix of Korda-and-Sabu style exotica with Nazi intrigue out of Fritz Lang and Hitchcock, with Tierney in the Lamarr-Lamour exotic princess role. Ersatz, and never for a minute convincing, but hard to resist.

Veteran Hollywood cameraman Charles B. Lang peaked early in the Oscar stakes by winning his only statuette for the 1932 version of 'A Farewell to Arms'. Twenty years before his magnificent desert photography on 'One-Eyed Jacks' lost to 'West Side Story', Lang's incredible cloudscapes (when at least he was up against 'Citizen Kane'!) for 'Sundown' (set in Kenya when it was in British East Africa but shot in Arizona and New Mexico) lost out to 'How Green Was My Valley' (set in Wales but shot in California). So much for the Academy Awards...

I once saw a cinema program that combined "Of Mice and Men" with "Sundown". No greater contrast could possibly be imagined, yet both movies stand at the forefront of their particular genres. "Of Mice and Men" is Literature, "Sundown" a serial thriller from The Saturday Evening Post. Fresh from her triumph as Belle Starr (1941), lovely Gene Tierney is at her exotic best in Henry Hathaway's action-a-plenty Sundown (available on a 10/10 VCI DVD). Bruce Cabot, George Sanders, Harry Carey are the heroes battling a native uprising instigated by Nazis in Africa. Hathaway and his brilliant photographer, Charles Lang, handle this tosh with such pace and bravura as to engage the rapt attention of even the most jaundiced viewer. A superb Miklos Rozsa score adds to the excitement of Lang's noirishly atmospheric photography of the movie's really striking sets and locations. Who will ever forget the terrifying sight and sound of tracer bullets flashing through the night? Not me, that's for sure!