King Solomon's Mines (1950)

Directed by Compton Bennett and Andrew Marton; produced by Sam Zimbalist

It’s 1897, and much of the interior of Africa is still unknown to Europeans. Jaded hunter Allan Quartermain (Stewart Granger) is hired by an Englishwoman (Deborah Kerr) and her brother (Richard Carlson) to find the former’s husband, who disappeared on a journey to find the fabled mines of the King of Israel. Quartermain believes the expedition’s chances of survival are nil, but agrees to lead it for a huge sum of money, providing his son with a decent future. Their adventures lead them to deserts and mountains, kings and cannibals, and not everyone who goes will return.

This is probably the best of the several film versions of Rider Haggard’s popular adventure novel. Though it departs from the original story in a variety of ways, it is exciting and interesting on its own merits. One of the attractions is its presentation not just of Africa, but of unknown Africa, as it might have been in the 1890s. Though a rudimentary map used by Quartermain’s party shows the ultimate destination to be somewhere in the modern Republic of the Congo, the film wisely uses the incomplete knowledge of the times. Thus, the party struggles through wastelands like Death Valley and over ridges as high as the Rockies.

The African villages through which they pass are not the generic type we see too often in lower-grade movies of the genre. Quartermain is based in a large town, the region’s metropolis, with its crowds, a market and a district headquarters, and eventually visits communities advanced and noble, primitive and decrepit, meeting people friendly, wary, hostile and indifferent.

The direction and writing are good, as well. Several scenes are outstanding, such as the stampede, which must have been a bit nerve-wracking to film, never mind for the characters to endure, and a sequence in which Quartermain and a village chieftain bargain for the use of the latter’s boats, arguing and shouting as if at a political debate, with all settled amicably afterward.

The use of scenery is well-handled, complimenting the changes in native lifestyle and habitation, an indication of new and contrasting countries.

Only three characters are developed to any extent, and of these, Quartermain’s is the most interesting. It’s surprising how well, even in this 1950 incarnation, he could fit into the twenty-first century; it would not be difficult to see him at the forefront of environmentalism.

Though he made his reputation in fifteen years as a hunter, by the start of the film, he is guiding amateur hunters in their coddled quests for big-game trophies, and he’s thoroughly sick of it. He states that he sometimes prefers animals to humans (one gathers that ‘almost always’ would be the more accurate words) and doesn’t shoot them anymore except in self-defence.

Interestingly, while many stories of Europeans or North Americans in the Third World have the environment uplifting the individual, Quartermain has, he believes, learned from the continent the pointlessness of life, yet he still sees how, within that pointlessness, everyone can achieve much of what they want. When his personality is considered as a whole, it is surprisingly complex.

With its successful treatment of its setting’s mystery, its various situations and intelligent script (by Helen Deutsch, who also wrote the screenplay for the excellent Kim, produced the same year), King Solomon’s Mines will satisfy most viewers’ needs for a fun yet thoughtful adventure.