Sands of the Kalahari

Director: Cy Endfield Cy Endfield

Overview

Something goes horribly awry on a routine flight to Johannesburg and a plane crashes in the unforgiving title wasteland. The survivors include an attractive divorcee, a luckless mining engineer, an aging German, a handsome gun runner and the decidedly oily pilot. Despite their obvious and at times dangerous differences, the group must somehow pull together to make it to civilization. Star Stanley Baker co-produced this lively adventure drama with director Cy Raker Endfield, the same teaming that had been responsible for the successful Zulu (1964).

Product Details

Release Date:	08/02/2011
UPC:	0887090026703
Original Release:	1965
Rating:	NR
Source:	Olive
Region Code:	1
Sound:	[Dolby Digital Stereo]
Language:	English
Time:	2:00:00
Sales rank:	17,210

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Stanley Baker	Mike Bain
Stuart Whitman	Brian O'Brien
Susannah York	Grace Munkton
Harry Andrews	Grimmelman
Theodore Bikel	Dr. Bondarahkai
Nigel Davenport	Sturdevant
Barry Lowe	Detjens
John Dankworth	Composer

Technical Credits

Stanley Baker	Producer
Cy Endfield	Producer,Director
Cliff Richardson	Special Effects

Editorial Reviews

This production from the infamous Joe Levine is a familiar saga - an adventure yarn that recycles the worn-threadbare cliché of a party stranded in the wilderness and attempting to survive, to so-so effect. But it has one running thread throughout that touches the sublime: as the marvelously-named Brian O'Brien, B-movie favorite Stuart Whitman gets to play someone so sadistic, vile and nasty that one can't quite believe his actions. This psychopath's favorite pastimes consist of picking off innocent animals with his gun, torturing baboon chimps with fire, and attempting to strong-arm several other members of the expedition into the grave. Acting like the love child of Charles Manson and Bobby Berosini, O'Brien is an outrageously sick character, and the screenwriters use all of his ills against animals as narrative plants, over the course of the movie's running time. His evil actions build up to one of the most shocking conclusions in B-movie history, as nature itself turns on this sadist and asserts its anger in the most violent and retributive of ways. The surrealistic final sequence (which begins with a Whitman line that foreshadows Roy Scheider's "smile, you..." line in Jaws, and concludes with an image that may have inspired the last shot in Herzog's Aguirre: The Wrath of God) is nothing short of spectacular entertainment, and arguably makes the whole journey that has preceded it worthwhile.