Fortune in Diamonds (1951)

This is a really plodding British western set at the time of the Boer war.Very little action occurs and when it does it is too little and too late and set in an extremely dark mine shaft.Dennis Price features but is murdered off screen half way through.Bernard Lee is the policeman to whom Peter Hammond slowly recounts the story in flashback.

THE ADVENTURERS is a low budget British adventure film set in South Africa, which is about the only appealing quality it has. Otherwise the film uses dated film stock and a predictable storyline that lacks life and motive despite the exotic locales. Jack Hawkins has the best role in it, playing a bearded, hulking brute of a man who hides a fortune in diamonds while abroad and later assembles a team of ne'er-do-wells to go back and retrieve it. Dennis Price has one of those scummy roles that he always used to play so well and Hawkins is reliably entertaining, but the film as a whole has a slow pace and a predictable outcome that makes it a struggle to sit through.

A poor - quality print shown on FilmFour the other night did this movie no good at all.Even in it's pristine 1951 form it was not much more than a"programmer" although Ossie Morris's photography lifted it slightly out of the rut.Jack Hawkins played a decent chap(although a Boer) and Dennis Price a cad.Gregoire Aslan - born to play bartenders, suspicious foreigners or club owners in British'B' pictures right up to the late 60s - has a decent sized part as a suspicious foreign bar tender/club owner. Blacks - -where they appear at all - are shown as idle,subservient and feckless.There is no sense that the movie is in fact set in their country. In other words,"The Adventurers"(a misnomer if there ever was one)is a product of its time.Think Festival of Britain,the death of King George VIth,the Korean War.All events receding into history along with the attitudes expressed in this movie set at the turn of the 20th Century but made fifty years later at a time when in fact very little had changed in South Africa since the time of the Boers. A sub Graham Greene tale of thwarted love creates little of a stir.Dennis Price looks bored with the whole thing and Jack Hawkins has "The Cruel Sea" just around the corner. It is to be hoped that a few weeks away from the gloom and austerity of post - war Britain gave the cast heart for better things to come. Certainly "The Adventurers " was a nadir that most of them happily escaped from.

Fred Harvey's comments says it all really. It's a bit of a film noir, given that three of the four main protagonists are unlikeable, up against it and with little future (and this includes Jack Hawkins, who at least starts the film off with a stiff upper lip but then degenerates). The feeling of pessimism was accentuated by the photography itself appearing dark, and seeing it on TV didn't do justice to some of the panoramic outside shots.It wasn't all that clear what distance Hawkins had to travel at the beginning of the film to escape the British, but despite looking very tired he made it to civilisation; so it wasn't entirely convincing that he needed to mount an expedition costing more than £200 and necessitating an ox-drawn wagon to retrieve the diamonds; one would have thought that having made it one way in a distressed condition he could have made it back by himself, with just a couple of pack mules for his provisions - but then he wouldn't have needed to recruit his disparate accomplices to fall out with, so there would have been less of a plot.