Timbuktu

One of the poorest areas on the globe yet its very name conjures up exotic places of the past, Timbuktu the city serves as the title for a routine action/adventure film starring Victor Mature. Interesting that it came out when it did as the French were busy grappling with losing their colonial empire of which Timbuktu was a part. At that time it was a part of French West Africa though the name Soudan for the region is used and correctly.

Victor Mature plays a smuggler of no particular loyalties who is doing business with whomever in the region as a new commander of the garrison at Timbuktu comes to take over. George Dolenz is unhappy with being sent out of France during the hour of her greatest peril in 1940, but somebody's needed to keep the Tuareg tribes in line.

Who are threatening a revolt under the leadership of Emir John Dehner and who has a local mullah in Leonard Mudie held captive and under his thumb. Dehner wants to use the mullah's influence to incite a revolt. Sounds very familiar for today's audience.

While all the politics is going on Mature is also checking out Yvonne DeCarlo and who could blame him. However Timbuktu comes nowhere near as good as that other wartime classic with the name of a city set in French colonial Africa, Casablanca. No one will ever mistake Mature and DeCarlo for Bogey and Bergman.

Still the film should please fans of Victor Mature although his work declined after he left 20th Century Fox.