SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

SteinMo What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Phillipa Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

malcolmgsw This is a really plodding British western set at the time of the Boer war.Very little action occurs and when it does it is too little and too late and set in an extremely dark mine shaft.Dennis Price features but is murdered off screen half way through.Bernard Lee is the policeman to whom Peter Hammond slowly recounts the story in flashback.

ianlouisiana A poor - quality print shown on FilmFour the other night did this movie no good at all.Even in it's pristine 1951 form it was not much more than a"programmer" although Ossie Morris's photography lifted it slightly out of the rut.Jack Hawkins played a decent chap(although a Boer) and Dennis Price a cad.Gregoire Aslan - born to play bartenders, suspicious foreigners or club owners in British'B' pictures right up to the late 60s - has a decent sized part as a suspicious foreign bar tender/club owner. Blacks - -where they appear at all - are shown as idle,subservient and feckless.There is no sense that the movie is in fact set in their country. In other words,"The Adventurers"(a misnomer if there ever was one)is a product of its time.Think Festival of Britain,the death of King George VIth,the Korean War.All events receding into history along with the attitudes expressed in this movie set at the turn of the 20th Century but made fifty years later at a time when in fact very little had changed in South Africa since the time of the Boers. A sub Graham Greene tale of thwarted love creates little of a stir.Dennis Price looks bored with the whole thing and Jack Hawkins has "The Cruel Sea" just around the corner. It is to be hoped that a few weeks away from the gloom and austerity of post - war Britain gave the cast heart for better things to come. Certainly "The Adventurers " was a nadir that most of them happily escaped from.

Marlburian Fred Harvey's comments says it all really. It's a bit of a film noir, given that three of the four main protagonists are unlikeable, up against it and with little future (and this includes Jack Hawkins, who at least starts the film off with a stiff upper lip but then degenerates). The feeling of pessimism was accentuated by the photography itself appearing dark, and seeing it on TV didn't do justice to some of the panoramic outside shots.It wasn't all that clear what distance Hawkins had to travel at the beginning of the film to escape the British, but despite looking very tired he made it to civilisation; so it wasn't entirely convincing that he needed to mount an expedition costing more than £200 and necessitating an ox-drawn wagon to retrieve the diamonds; one would have thought that having made it one way in a distressed condition he could have made it back by himself, with just a couple of pack mules for his provisions - but then he wouldn't have needed to recruit his disparate accomplices to fall out with, so there would have been less of a plot.

hotspur95 This film was a bit like King Solomons mines at the beginning but not as exciting. Then it turned into a whodunnit towards the end although it was fairly predictable.Was watchable as an 'afternoon and its raining outside' sort of movie although there are lots of other old black and white films I like more.Interesting as it was set in a pre-apartheid South Africa and what was fine in 1951 ie being very dismissive and arrogant with black people is very far from OK today.My mum spent most of it trying to remember the name of the lead - Jack Hawkins it was though :)