Harockerce What a beautiful movie!

Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

Breakinger A Brilliant Conflict

Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

vincentlynch-moonoi When I was just 12, back in 1961, we had a Cornell University student from Kenya who often stayed at our home for a couple of years; he was actually the first Kenyan long distance runner to make his mark in the U.S. I was too young to join in the conversation, but I remember Stephen talking about the political situation in Kenya and mentioning the Mau Mau crisis of several years before. I wish I could go back now and be a part of that discussion.I thought this was a good film. Not perfect. I'm sure liberties were taken in the writing of the script that probably compromised historical accuracy. But it still, I think, gives you a sense of the time and the tensions, and shows us once again how futile -- and just plain wrong -- the earlier white domination of Africa was. Rock Hudson is very good here...except for one scene which stuck out because he was smiling in a situation where that was not appropriate. Dana Wynter is excellent as Hudson's young wife; not sure why she wasn't a more popular actress. Sidney Poitier has any number of films with a stronger performance, but he's good here. I always enjoy the actress Wendy Hiller, here as a mother.This film is worthwhile watching because it covers a part of history unknown now to most Americans.

jacobs-greenwood Throughout most of Sidney Poitier's career as an actor that primarily appeared in race relations dramas, he played African- Americans whereas, in this one, he actually plays an African, a Kenyan in fact, named Kimani Wa Karanja.As children, Peter (Rock Hudson) and Kimani grow up doing everything together. But as adults, the Black East African 'boy' is fit only to carry his White East African 'bwana' friend's rifle for him, something neither of them really understands though (naturally) Peter is slightly more accepting of it. When Kimani's father (Ken Renard) is imprisoned indefinitely for following a custom deemed barbaric by the ruling class of British colonists, he runs away to join a criminal gang (led by Juano Hernandez's character) that later becomes an insurgency group dubbed Mau Mau; read your history if you're unfamiliar with the real back-story.Predictably, Peter and Kimani will inevitably meet again on opposite sides of the law. The movie also features the comely Dana Wynter as Peter's love interest come wife; their relationship parallels that of his aunt Elizabeth (Wendy Hiller) and Uncle Jeff (Robert Beatty).Jeff and two of their children are murdered during the Mau Mau Uprising. Walter Fitzgerald plays Peter's father, who had been a friend of Kimani's dad and whose knowledge and skills help to end the revolt.Michael Pate plays a White settler that reflects the colonists' racism; William Marshall plays the Black leader that organizes the revolution starting with a meeting in Nairobi.Richard Brooks directed and adapted the screenplay from Robert C. Ruark's novel of the same name.

moonspinner55 Rock Hudson stars as the son of a white farmer living in East Africa near Nairobi circa 1950; he's as close as a brother to Sidney Poitier--portraying sort of a slave-cum-porter--until the laws of the domineering British interfere with the black people's superstition-laden ways of living. Poitier becomes part of a bloodthirsty revolt against the oppression of his people, eventually pitting him one-on-one against his friend. Robert C. Ruark's book of racial upheavals and issues (loyalties, betrayals, and injustices) has been adapted well for the screen by writer-director Richard Brooks, although Hudson's character doesn't have many dimensions (and he looks too old to be boyhood pals with Poitier, anyway). The scenes of violence are hard-hitting, yet Brooks' lumpy way of laying out this complicated story occasionally turns the proceedings into high-pitched melodrama. A romance sub-plot between Hudson and pretty-but-piqued Dana Wynter doesn't provide enough substantial release from the horror and strife surrounding them, and Poitier's final scenes are geared towards narrative action and not character motivation. A mixed-bag, but certainly not uninteresting. **1/2 from ****

carvalheiro "Something of Value" (1957) directed by Richard Brooks like that in itself it's a segregated specimen as genre in extinction of ancient black humor now as well told as positive discrimination, which means that memory and perception view from liberal democratic from the past itself is always old and not in mood. Even though when it was the rehearsal of the movie about Mau Mau incident, in 1952 and unrest that arose in the African continent, in which alarming peasants in a suddenly butchery contributes for that it finally aliments revenge from colons. The scene of the mentor chief in sermon of life, with some of the first group of insurgents, is still of master in black and white screening and screaming.There are some characters of hunters with bwana's spirits and in itself this movie has scenes that by its crudity shocking a while inside the home of a given farmer, constructed as a resort near a kind of precarious compound for natives a half there in unrest, which took the viewers for the tragedy and switched targets during the fighting, but its melodramatic realism surpasses the confusion by the clarification of the strengths in presence and that holds the concerned characters of the colonization in its diversified reaction, before the lack of local institutions to compromise with the unlocked way of the people, by whom had taking as peasants and servants the way of uncontrolled answer to the oppression. This movie is a failed compromise between father and son at the pace for substituting oppression by religion and civilized youth by owners against employees of the soil without changing costumes nor structure of the soil, with a local chief and a young Mau Mau in enraged and prolonged injustice, deep both in violence that caught this specific colonial situation at the brink of irrationality and army genocide by lack of comprehension for the standing that the African continent meant against European presence before independence. Except more patient compromising with religious differences and beginning of separatist mind for calming interests. As if things were like that in Kenya at the same time, that others out of this territoriality were also thinking less in such a dramatic structure, without enough presence to understand that phase of the fighting, without rules than terror and unrest out of democratic values of the colonists at the time. No way out at this stage of the movie, only waiting for the grow up of the black baby belonging to the killed young revolutionary - in 1954, Dedan Kimathi from Aberdare forest guerrilla whose evocation is made here in this movie three years after - at the time of awakening, as premonitory it was the book from where Brooks took his screenplay.