Fortune in Diamonds

On returning from the Boer war Jack Hawkins finds a body holding a cash of diamonds. With a few dodgy characters along - Price etc heads back to find them, with the group all getting a touch of the Sierra Madres with each other.

Quite interesting piece focussing at its best on the double dealing going on between the characters. Hawkins is as solid as ever and Price his usual sneaky self.

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 :)

What a good surprise, this adventure flick, which looks like a western, and produced by the UK film industry, in a period, before the mid sixties, when the British dared to provide many adventure films, most of the time as good as the US ones. The same concerning the war films. Because after the late sixties, they totally abandonned the genre to focus only on social and - from time to time - crime features. Back to this one, Jack Hawkins is perfect in this role, as also is Dennis Price. Splendid settings and solid script enhance the efficiency of this David Mc Donald's film. Notice that this director also made another adventure film taking also place in South Africa : DIAMOND CITY, also spaking of diamonds. I don't remember if those two features are alike or not, I will review this latest in a few weeks. This movie maybe lacks of action scenes but prefers focusing on characters. Good climax. Ald David Mc Donald's most known film will remain CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS.

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.

A bleak cross between 'Treasure of the Sierra Madre' and 'Scott of the Antarctic' enhanced by superb location work by veteran cameraman Ossie Morris; combining the inhospitable terrain of the latter (oppressively hot rather than bitterly cold) with the squabbling amongst a small, ill-matched group searching for treasure of the former.