Now here’s a horrid slice of ugly that is confused just from its title. 1968’s Dark of the Sun is the kind of title which immediately scans as a none too clever attempt to sound intelligent. In only this regard, I was reminded of Eyes Wide Shut. That one of the writers of the screenplay uses an alias of Quentin Werty not only reinforces my suspicions, but also leads me to think somebody was ashamed to contribute to this. Q. Werty—geddit?
Supposedly, Jim Brown was ashamed of this movie, and he is third-billed. Rod Taylor headlines, and I suspect he loved being in this production. After all, it takes the guy who was the rather mannered scientist of The Time Machine and turns him into a living action figure. He even fights bare-fisted against a Nazi (Peter Carsten) wielding a chainsaw. No surprise Tarantino is a fan of the picture.
Taylor and Brown play renegades who arrive in war-torn Congo. They immediately raise the hackles of U.N. peacekeepers, but these two have a letter from the country’s president (Calvin Lockhart), and so are admitted. At the presidential palace, they meet with Lockhart and Guy Deghy, the latter occupying, if this movie had been made two decades earlier, the Sydney Greenstreet role. Ostensibly, the mission is to rescue within three days a townful of people from within rebel territory. Really, the mission is to extract a great many diamonds of exceptional size. The gems will also turn out to already be cut, which reminded me of the only intentionally funny line in Battlefield Earth, which concerns gold our heroes supposedly mined, but is actually gold bars stolen from Fort Knox: “You not only had time to mine the gold, but to smelt it, too?!”
Even this early in the film, something felt a tad queasy about the endeavor. There is an openly racist guy in a bar trying to provoke Brown into a fight. Taylor stands up for his friend and makes angry guy look like an ass. And yet, this scene feels patronizing towards Brown.
It doesn’t help that Taylor radiates a peculiar eau de asshole throughout the runtime. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly why I think this, except he simply seemed like an unpleasant person, and I suspect that is actually the actor and not his character.
Other characters fare worse. There’s Carsten who, even as an unrepentant former Nazi, still appalls by machine-gunning two small children. He will also try to rape Yvette Mimieux, who has very recently become the widow of a man they were supposed to rescue. Kenneth More plays a perpetually pickled doctor, whose payment to be part of the crew is a case of scotch. There briefly appears to be a redemption arc for this character, yet that will come to naught. Rounding out the leads is Olivier Despax, who is deemed to not be a true man because he covers in a firefight. He will be raped by guerilla fighters in the third act, and I suspect that was the script punishing him for not being manly enough earlier.
And this is one manly movie. Even a montage early on with the train cars being joined together inexplicably shows in close-up every single conjugation of those parts, as if this is some sort of train porn. I swear we see more of those couplings than there are actually cars in the finished train. The engine is one of the cute lil’ ol’ steam-powered kind, so it will soon be chugging along across the African countryside going, “I think I’ll kill…I think I’ll kill…”
I will concede much of the action is exciting, with some decent explosions and a great deal of gunfire. Alas, everything hinges on a plot full of flimsy contrivances that do not feel organic. The weirdest may be André Morell, as the leader of the group of people to be rescued, setting the time lock on the vault for three hours just before the train arrives. That then allows time for a visit to the nearby mission, where nuns are tending a woman who has been in labor for three days with a breach birth and blah-de-blah-blah-blah.
The one time I could identify with Taylor in this is how pissed he is about Morell setting that lock on the vault. On the other hand, the train also needed to be turned around, and I’m not sure how long that would normally take in such conditions, but I’m going to guess even more than three hours.
And a three hour delay means Taylor will have to go that long without doing horrible things. He’ll make up for lost time by madly pursuing a man to not bring him to justice, but for revenge, deliberately breaking that man’s arm before stabbing him to death. Earlier, we’ll see something he inexplicably does to More’s doctor, tossing the man’s payment of that crate of whiskey over the side of the train while the man is asleep. Taylor promises he’ll buy the doctor two crates on their return, and I wondered if his plan was just to destroy those as well.
Dark of the Sun is an arm breakin’, nun rapin’, child killin’ mess of unpleasantness. It wants to both revel in the thrill of revenge while condemning those who seek that. Basically, it wants to bludgeon its cake and eat it, too. It is little more than unpleasant characters doing terrible things. It seems to occupy an odd universe that is an approximation of our reality, with characters saying things like, “I’m going to cut him to hell!” And, even in a movie where a bunch of nuns, and at least one guy, are raped, the closest thing to profanity are two instances of “Son of a…” This is a movie which is too cowardly to even use the word “bitch”.
Dir: Jack Cardiff
Starring Rod Taylor, Yvette Mimieux, Jim Brown
Watched on Warner Archive blu-ray