Waste of time

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

The acting in this movie is really good.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

A surprisingly efficient and startling adventure feature from Africa by Henry Hathaway for being so young and early - this is already Hathaway completely fledged, and it's a very colourful drama although in black and white. Gene Tierney, also very young and fresh, provides the romanticism with glowing colours, and George Sanders for once plays a very unusually honest and heroic role. It's a great adventure, and the cave scenes are gorgeously suggestive in both drama, invention and cinematography. The photo is stupendous, and although rather thin, brief and superficial, it must be deemed as a great film - on a small scale, but nevertheless.

Doubtless, the weirdest score even written by Miklos Rozsa, a pounding of drums and a howling chant by the Africans of Hollywood. Maddening. Enough to send Walter Neff into an epileptiform seizure.A bit slow out of the starting gate. Bruce Cabot and Reginald Gardiner are two British officers in charge of an army outpost in northern Africa in the early years of World War II. Their soldiers are committed native troops, unlike the neighboring Shenzi tribe who are warlike and xenophobic. Cabot's and Gardiner's sole enemy POW is Joseph Calleia, an Italian Captain who has given himself up to the British and now takes pride in his cooking. There's not much to do. "Miles and miles of nothing to do," remarks Gardiner.(PS: Kids, Italy joined Germany in fighting the Allies in Europe. This is World War II, the one that came after World War I.)But then George Sanders arrives and takes command of the post, a humorless by-the-book officer who brings news that the Shenzi are being provided with modern weapons by the Germans. The pace picks up when the Brits are joined by the young Gene Tierney, owner of hundreds of boutique shops around the world, half Arabic, leading her camel caravan through the desert. Yes, the pace picks up. How could it not, when she sprawls so languorously in her "Arabic" get-up across a bed so large that Moby Dick could sleep in it, in the bedroom of her Hollywood mansion with its filmy drapes, beaded curtains and its candles? She's supine on that bed because she was nicked by a bullet fired by a Thompson sub-machine gun into Bruce Cabot's sparser military quarters. It may be the first time that tracer bullets are depicted on screen, and put to effective use. Director Hathaway was no artistic genius but he knew how to put a movie together.It ends in a proper shoot out and a sentimental death.It's not a major picture and it does drag at times but it isn't badly done.

One judges films like this with criteria different from those applied to contemporary works, otherwise, it would receive a failing grade. However, as cinematic nostalgia it works well. The struggle against the Nazis and Fascists spread to Africa where the colonized population was enlisted to fight for the Allies in order to prevent a calamitous spread of an "evil empire". The images of "natives" is consistent with the stereotypes current at the time, but the plot---preventing the arming of tribes whose assistance was also desired by the Axis powers---is plausible. The techniques use to tell the story and the sets and scenes of skirmishes are a bit amateurish. The exteriors were obviously filmed in the Southwest and a large rock formation described a "Rhinoceros" mountain or peak looks like the Shiprock formation. For someone like me who spent Saturday afternoons at matinées, it's a trip back to another era of cinema; therefore a bit of fun. But,it's not a very good film.

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.