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From Egypt to South Africa, a trek across the continent to combine the twilight of childhood and imperialism. Retrieving a toy saves the ten-year-old (Fergus McClelland) from a Suez Crisis bombing, the sight of his dead parents is swiftly followed by a smack from a local. "Filthy English pig!" His sole relative is the aunt in Durban, his first companion along the way is a Syrian nomad with unsavory intentions (Zia Mohyeddin), the boy helps himself to his wallet and donkey after his sudden demise. Rich tourist (Constance Cummings) scoops him up, bumbling guide (Paul Stassino) chases him, Sudanese Haji (Orlando Martins) gives him the big picture: "Man's life is a journey." Above all, Edward G. Robinson like St. Nicholas reincarnated as a weathered diamond smuggler, emerging from a mining pit to contemplate the sun-burned tyke before him. "I've seen some queer animals in the bush in my day, but I don't recollect meeting one like you." The destructive trail of innocence, a favorite Alexander Mackendrick motif in full, thorny CinemaScope flower. The tiny traveler is grave, suspicious, lost in a sustained whirl of wonder and fear, reciting rhymes at the top of his lungs to try to drown out the snarling fauna at dusk. "O youth!" as Conrad would say, beauty and peril in a procession of striking impressions: The vastness of a colonial hotel and the dread of a dentist's chair, a beige wall giving way to oceanic blues and the boy locking eyes with an orphaned leopard in the wake of his first kill. "If you wanted to be a dad, you should have tried twenty years ago," the old hunter is warned, his end a mere memory of adventure to the protagonist back in civilization. Studies flow from Roeg (Walkabout) to Boorman (Beyond Rangoon). Cinematography by Erwin Hillier. With Harry H. Corbett, John Turner, Zena Walker, Jack Gwillim, and Patricia Donahue.
--- Fernando F. Croce |