Sorry, this movie sucks

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

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.

SUNDOWN is what you might call a minor epic. It is about the old British grandeur. Instead of Heston, we get Bruce Cabot, who still looks King Kong tall, before he was dwarfed by the duke in later films.Gene Tierney's beaut was probably the big marketing device here, and Hathaway directs to make full use of it.The story is one that some people today mistakenly think was normally acceptable as how people viewed life. Knowing people from the era, as they spoke in the sixties and seventies, it is obvious that they thought it was just as silly in 1941 as it is thought of today, the grand British presence in Africa, the "sahib", the almighty "bwana".Set during World War II, we get a look at the different countries and how their people naturally allied themselves. The Italian is a proud man, willing to live with the British, for instance.What you will probably note most about this film is that it doesn't adhere to modern acceptable story telling standards. It is expository with sudden jumps from one idea to another, particularly at the end, which seems to come out of nowhere. That doesn't mean it is bad story telling. It just isn't what we're taught today.Full of fairly common clichés, it doesn't dwell too much on any one of them, and proceeds to tell a story with believable characters.

This is a pretty good adventure tale of WWII before the US got involved.Perhaps the most interesting character is Pallini, the humane, civilized Italian gentleman who is not sorry to be a prisoner of the British rather than fighting on the side of the Axis.Maybe the most striking scene is the one in which they find the rifles that are being smuggled in to arm the natives against the British, and acid is used to raise the markings that have been ground off.When the markings indicate the Skoda Works in Czeckoslovakia(which had been occupied by Hitler several years before, so it was not the Czecks who were smuggling the guns) Pallini says with a shudder. "Its THEM!Its always THEM!".Without ever mentioning Nazis.Supposedly this was because we weren't in the war yet, but in fact it is extremely effective,like a monster whose presence is sensed, but not seen.It is as though Pallini is referring to some evil that is so terrible that he can't even bring himself to mention its name,the horror that is even more horrible because it has no name.

George Sanders, Bruce Cabot, Harry Carey, Reginald Gardner and Gene Tierney star in "Sundown," a 1941 film."Sundown" takes place in East Africa during World War II, but before the U.S. entered the conflict. The British, seeking to control the African colonies, find out that the Czechs are smuggling in guns to one of the tribes. An Arab merchant's daughter (Tierney) pretends to side with the German element in order to get at the truth.I have no idea why this film is on DVD except to show the ravishingly beautiful Gene Tierney. And ravishingly beautiful she was - her looks are the best thing about this film. The film itself is boring, and the script not very good. None of the characters are really fleshed out well enough so that we care about them, with the possible exception of the Italian prisoner of war, Pallini, played by Joseph Calleia. Director Henry Hathaway manages to build some excitement into the final battle scenes.Historically, the movie is interesting, with the U.S. filmmakers taking the side of the British here. Their control in Africa wouldn't always be so appreciated.