Safari * (1956, Victor Mature, Janet Leigh, Roland Culver, John Justin, Earl Cameron) – Classic Movie Review 7264

‘Murderous Mau-Mau! Maddened Beasts! Mighty Jungle Love!’ There are no surprises here in director Terence Young’s fumbling 1956 British adventure film Safari, which has little going for it except the reasonably enjoyable cast.

Hired by rich Sir Vincent Brampton (Roland Culver) and his fiancée Linda Latham (Janet Leigh), settler-hunter Ken Duffield (Victor Mature) goes hunting as the guide for a lion hunting party, while searching out the rebel leader of a Mau Mau tribe who has killed his son, in an exotic African landscape during the Mau Mau Uprising in British Kenya in the Fifties.

Anthony Veiller writes the struggling screenplay from an original story by Robert Buckner. It did have a useful relevance at the time as the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya was then contemporary. Both the hero and heroine are Americans played by American actors to try to attract an American audience.

Also in the cast are John Justin as Brian Sinden, Earl Cameron as Jeroge, Liam Redmond, Orlando Martins, Slim Harris, Harry Quashie, Cy Grant, John Wynn, Arthur Lovegrove, Estelle Brody, Christopher Warbey, John Cook, Bob Isaacs, John Harrison, Juma,  Lionel Ngakane, Glyn Lawson, Frank Singuineau and Charles Hayes.

Safari is shot in widescreen (CinemaScope) and colour (Technicolor) by John Wilcox, Frederick [Fred] Ford (director of photography: second unit) and Ted Moore (director of photography: second unit) in Kenya and London. It is produced by Irving Allen, Albert R Broccoli and Adrian D Worker (associate producer) for Warwick and released by Columbia.

Culver’s voice is dubbed.

Broccoli and Young worked together again on Dr No, From Russia with Love and Thunderball.

Earl Cameron was born on 8 August 1917 in Pembroke, Bermuda. He debuted in Pool of London (1951) and played Pinder in Thunderball (1965).

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7264

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