Sands of the Kalahari

Lord of the Baboons.

Sands of the Kalahari is directed by Cy Endfield who also adapts the screenplay from the novel of the same name written by William Mulvihill. It stars Stuart Whitman, Stanley Baker, Susannah York, Harry Andrews, Theodore Bikel and Nigel Davenport. Music is by John Dankworth and cinematography by Erwin Hillier.

A raw survivalist thriller that finds a disparate group of people crash land in the deserts of Africa and promptly start to come apart as a group. Cue arguments, attempted rape, killings, animal slaughter, alpha male posturing and Adam and Eve complexes. The allegory is obvious but handled with skill by Endfield, and it all builds with great intensity towards a truly bleak, yet delightfully ambiguous finale....

Getting back to nature in the Namibian desert

A small group of people decide to take a charter flight from Windhoek to Johannesburg but, unfortunately, find themselves stuck in the Kalahari Desert, miles from nowhere. Will any of them make it out alive?

"Sands of the Kalahari (1965) was released three weeks before Flight of the Phoenix" and could be viewed as the British version. Dont get me wrong, theyre based on two different books and so have totally different stories, but the setting is very similar. One obvious difference is that Sands includes a female in the cast, the lovely Susannah York as Grace Munkton.

Even though both movies are desert survival adventures, theyre just as much dramas since the setting is station...