Some subject matter is offensive in itself when it is cinematically constructed as popular entertainment, and this effort at ' dealing ' with the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya is one of them. It is sensationalist right from the start with an injured man being hacked to pieces, and to avoid an adults only certificate you do not see in closeup the death throes, but imagination is strong and in a way you have seen it. You know it is happening and this repetitive hacking of live bodies happens three times in the films running time. Of course it is the frightening Mau Mau are doing it either to the white population or to others who do not want to join them. Briefly the story is of a young man ( Dirk Bogarde ) who comes to Kenya to join his brother on running a farm, but the brother has been killed and a woman friend played extremely well by Virginia McKenna meets and falls in love with him. They have opposite opinions about the Mau Mau and love has to overcome this. Bogarde cannot ' do ' romance well as an actor, and he comes over as a rather nasty, character cold in his relation to others and distinctly racist. There is a lot of racist dialogue in the film, and one of them is ' 60 years ago they had hardly come down from the trees. ' That of course is the population in Kenya before the whites arrived. This to me is sensationalist dialogue, and very provocative in the mid-1950's. But to get away from the basic subject matter it is a brutal, cruel film and it had popular actors of the time, including Donald Sinden to get the popcorn crowd in. To sum up, relatively recent history needs clear vision, and I think this film is foggy in its approach and possibly harmful for an impressionable child to see with an adult. Maybe it had cuts to get it an ' A ' instead of an ' X ' certificate but then the English have always been easy going with violence. To verify that watch ' Camp on Blood Island ' and how it approached the Japanese. Again popcorn fodder for an audience willing to believe anything it sees as long as it is entertainment. It too was made in the mid-1950's , a period in my opinion of many prejudices that can damage a viewer for life.
Review of Simba
