Action is the real hero
By Ervell E.Menezes

AFRICA, that dark continent, has always been choice material for celluloid. It is a land of wild animals and an abundance of nature plus those enigmatic tribes. They all add up to that aura of mystique. My initiation to that dark continent came with King Solomon’s Mines, and what a whopper of a film it was ! Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr were the lead pair in that 1950-made film. I was less than 10 and virtually "lived" that adventure and when the hero and heroine managed to crawl to safety we felt as much relief as them.

Then came Hatari with John Wayne as the white hunter but this was a sort of docudrama, more a touristy film on what to expect in Africa. It had that ever so catchy tune in it Baby Elephant Walk and Elsa Martinelli was cute as the heroine. Then came African Safari which was purely documentary as it captured the escapades of animal collector Ron Shanin. The film was written, directed and partly shot by Shanin himself and what a wealth of staggering footage it caught.

Beautiful People was another kind of African Safari but it ran into trouble because at that time we had no cultural or political relations with South Africa. As a film it was brilliant as most films set in Africa are, whether they come under the adventure or documentary genre.

So when Lost in Africa was released I at first mixed it with an early-1970s film Lost in the Desert. With the Cricket World Cup on, the regular American companies are going slow with their releases. Hence there are a number of independents exhibiting their films and D.N.N. is the company distributing Lost in Africa.

As a film it is somewhat crude, the storyline is weak and some of the situations clearly contrived but then one sees so little of Africa that one tends to overlook these blemishes. There is also a scene in which a lion mauls a man and this should have been clipped for Universal audiences. One doesn’t want to expose children to such gory scenes. But otherwise Lost in Africa has its better moments.

What these two groups of tourists aim to do in Africa is never clear but before one can try to explain that they get into trouble with the natives. One of them kills a tribal chief and you have his son (Mohammed Nangurai) stalking the white group for the rest of the film, put together by director-script-writer Stewart Rafill.

Micheal (Timothy Ackroyd) and Elizabeth (Jennifer McComb) are the two people whom fate brings together. They virtually go through hell and high water as they combat all the vicissitudes of nature, like a lion charging them, or a tusker on the warpath, they’d be standing on crocodiles, unknowingly and have a host of scorpions crawling on them, but the scorpions seem to have lost their sting.

Naturally, the story is low on credibility and understandably a good deal of stock shots have been used but cinematographer Roger Olkowski does an excellent job but he is no doubt inspired by the beauty of the land. Both Jennifer McComb and Timothy Ackroyd are very amateurish and it is the action that is the hero.

And while on the subject of poor films and releases, last week I came across two excellent oldies and when I mean oldies it is not the 1950s vintage I’m talking about. I mean Network (1976) and Cocktail (1988), both very entertaining even today.

Peter Finch won a posthumous Oscar for his performance in Network, a deadly satire on the TV media and how it stops at nothing to get its ratings. Even to the extent of having a person shot dead on the show. Finch plays anchorman Howard Beale who is on the decline with Faye Dunaway as his tough and uncompromising boss. That was the time Dunaway was in almost every good film and in the latter half of her career she took to playing the "bitchy parts. "William Holden plays her ageing lover and he does tell her some choice home truths. The brilliant screenplay is by Paddy Chavesky.

Cocktail is also a great film in which the young and upcoming Tom Cruise is an excellent bartender coached by his guru Flannigan played to perfection by Bryan Brown. The female lead is Elizabeth Shue but it is Bryan Brown who steals the show with some delightful one-liners known as Flannigan’s laws. The screenplay is by Heywood Gould and director Roger Donaldson really goes to town on the action to make it one of the most entertaining films of the 1980s. It also had that Don’t Worry, Be Happy tune in it to cap it all. Can one ask for more?