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It’s tendon-biting combat, with guns, trains, planes, chainsaws, and an indestructible all-terrain vehicle (that still couldn’t stand the potholes in the street of Los Angeles)! Rod Taylor, Jim Brown and Yvette Mimieux blast their way through one of the roughest of the ’60s action spectacles, as mercenaries on a mission of mercy that’s really a venal grab to ‘rescue’ a fortune in diamonds. Director Jack Cardiff pushed the limits of acceptability on this one — legends persist about longer, more egregiously violent cuts.

Dark of the Sun

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1968 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 100 min. / The Mercenaries / Street Date December 18, 2011 / available through the Warner Archive Collection / 19.95

Starring: Rod Taylor, Yvette Mimieux, Peter Carsten, Jim Brown, Kenneth More, André Morell, Olivier Despax, Guy Deghy, Bloke Modisane, Calvin Lockhart.

Cinematography: Edward Scaife.

Film Editor: Ernest Walter

Original Music: Jacques Loussier

Written by Quentin Werty (Ranald MacDougall), Adrian Spies from the...

"The miracle of Lionel Rogosin's apartheid drama Come Back, Africa isn't that it's a solid, affecting artifact of a cruel society, but that it exists at all," begins Bill Weber in Slant. "In the wake of his debut film, the New York skid-row chronicle On the Bowery, Rogosin set out in 1957 for Johannesburg, and for months laid the groundwork for surreptitiously shooting a follow-up that would lay bare the pain and humiliations of black South Africans subjugated by the white majority, enlisting native writers Lewis Nkosi and Bloke Modisane to collaborate on the scenario. Mixing documentary-like footage with scripted scenes as he had in his first feature, the filmmaker heavily features music and dance by throngs of street performers, a diegetically captured salve for the wounds of extreme poverty and social oppression — and an ideal camouflage of his critical agenda from the South African authorities, who were persuaded that...

South African actor who helped break the taboos of apartheid

On a steamy evening in a rundown Johannesburg club in September 1961, two actors premiered The Blood Knot, a play about brothers with different fathers, both men black but one light enough to enter white society. For each of them, the black actor Zakes Mokae, who has died aged 75, and the white playwright Athol Fugard, the night launched their careers. Fugard's play toured South Africa for six months, and although he travelled first-class on the train while Mokae travelled third, the two had broken a taboo by being the first black and white actors to appear on a public stage in apartheid South Africa. The success of The Blood Knot brought Fugard to international attention and kickstarted Mokae's long and varied career in theatre, film and television.

Mokae was born and grew up in Sophiatown, Johannesburg, the son of a policeman and a housemaid.