Killers of Kilimanjaro

Robert Taylor is in Africa to build a railroad to Lake Tanganyika. Problems arise when a group of Germans also arrive to build a railroad and a local baddie decides to do what he can to sabotage Taylor's efforts.

"Killers of Kilamanjaro" is not a bad film at all. It has some handsome cinematography that is far better than the average Tarzan film. However, it also is amazingly ordinary despite this--and features characters that are pretty bland and one-dimensional.

You know the film will have problems when you see that Robert Taylor is cast in the lead. Now he was a fine actor and I like his films (that's why I watched it) BUT it's all about him trying to build a railroad for the British in Africa and Taylor is about as British as Bratwurst! This casting just didn't make sense to me--and I am sure the audiences felt the same. As for the rest, they weren't bad but had an amazing capacity for ordinariness--most likely because the script was just okay. Films like "King Solomon's Mines" (not the abomination with Richard Chamberlain) make this look pretty dull by comparison.

Robert Taylor arrives in Africa to survey a route from Mombasa to Lake Victoria for a railroad. Of course British policy against the slave trade has some of the locals up in arms and the fact that Taylor makes it clear his company will not be permitting the transport of slaves makes him a few enemies, chiefly Gregoire Aslan the big honcho among Arab slave traders.

Taylor's got a friend in the enemy camp though. Young John Dimech came over on the boat with Taylor and he's Aslan's son, recently educated in an English prep school where he's taken in some western ideas. He hitches a ride with Taylor, Anthony Newley and Anne Aubrey on the surveying expedition. Aubrey is along to locate her father and fiancé who've disappeared into the interior.

One of the previous reviewers remarked about the good location photography in East Africa that highlights Killers of Kilimanjaro. It's my contention, expressed elsewhere in other reviews that ever since King Solomon's Mines and The African Queen, phony backlot jungles were just not going to do for the movie going public.

The story is not as good as either of those other films, but Killers of Kilimanjaro is good routine action adventure film and the cast give a good account of themselves. Anthony Newley has some funny moments as Taylor's tenderfoot assistant and Allan Cuthbertson for me stands out in the cast as Aubrey's dissolute fiancé.

This British-made safari adventure is yet another outing from Warwick Films (which would eventually evolve into Eon Productions with the James Bond series); although the title itself is meaningless, the plot awfully thin and the budget evidently restrained, the end results are quite pleasant and handsome to look at (despite the panning-and-scanning from the original 'Scope ratio). American Robert Taylor fills in the required "fading Hollywood star" spot for added marquee' value, while fetching redhead Anne Aubrey and amiably clumsy Anthony Newley – both reunited from the same team's THE BANDIT OF ZHOBE (1959; a screening of which, coincidentally, also came about for me on the same day I acquired this one!) are the proverbial young up-and-coming stars. While Taylor is ostensibly a railroad engineer accompanying Aubrey to seek out her long-lost father and fiancée (Allan Cuthbertson) in dangerous Warusha country, there is hardly a train in sight throughout the film but instead as much actual animal footage as their (limited) resources could buy. The cast is rounded-up by a would-be villainous Gregoire Aslan, his spunky son played by our very own John Dimech, (who joins Taylor's expedition and, bizarrely, orders the African porters around in his native Maltese tongue for a while but then swaps for what sounds like gibberish passing for authentic Swahili!), Martin Benson (as a treacherous head porter), Martin Boddey (as a rival German railroad engineer) and, very early on, Donald Pleasence as a ship's captain. It was amusing for me to watch Dimech sharing scenes with Newley and Pleasence since both these two stalwarts would themselves come to Malta – in the late 1960s (controversially) and early 1980s (obscurely, although I did manage to catch a glimpse of him drinking at the bar of a local Band Club) respectively!

Rather than the misleading title, the name on the credits as director of the reliably uninspired Richard Thorpe warns you what to expect from this lacklustre copy of 'King Solomon's Mines' with regular cuts away to travelogue shots of zebras, giraffes, crocodiles and so on.

Poor Earl Cameron is required to wear feathers and bones as a witch doctor. But Anthony Newley's 'funny' Englishman is if anything equally demeaning, and Robert Taylor's condescending treatment of him endears you to neither.

It's an hybrid of many things, this - and all set in the not very politically correct scenario of late 19th century colonial Africa. Robert Taylor is "Adamson" - a railway engineer tasked with completing a dangerous stretch of track between Mombasa and Lake Victoria. No mean feat as he must face duplicity from some, slave-trading, locals with vested interests and some hostility from the natives whose land he must cross. Adding to his difficulties, he is engaged by "Jane" (a pretty unremarkable Anne Aubrey) to try to track down her engineer brother - a man charged with the same task earlier, but who has disappeared. It's a solid boy's own adventure story this with plenty of stereotypes of the time peppering a tale that has little jeopardy but just enough action and beasties to sustain it for ninety minutes. The one thing I did struggle with was the curious casting of Anthony Newley as his assistant "Hooky" but otherwise this is just a sort of "King Solomon's Mines" meets "Northwest Frontier" type of film that lauded the pioneering spirit of empire at a time when that's what cinema audiences wanted. It's entirely forgettable fayre, and very much of a time long gone - in just about every fashion.