SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Roman Sampson One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

drystyx SUNDOWN is what you might call a minor epic. It is about the old British grandeur. Instead of Heston, we get Bruce Cabot, who still looks King Kong tall, before he was dwarfed by the duke in later films.Gene Tierney's beaut was probably the big marketing device here, and Hathaway directs to make full use of it.The story is one that some people today mistakenly think was normally acceptable as how people viewed life. Knowing people from the era, as they spoke in the sixties and seventies, it is obvious that they thought it was just as silly in 1941 as it is thought of today, the grand British presence in Africa, the "sahib", the almighty "bwana".Set during World War II, we get a look at the different countries and how their people naturally allied themselves. The Italian is a proud man, willing to live with the British, for instance.What you will probably note most about this film is that it doesn't adhere to modern acceptable story telling standards. It is expository with sudden jumps from one idea to another, particularly at the end, which seems to come out of nowhere. That doesn't mean it is bad story telling. It just isn't what we're taught today.Full of fairly common clichés, it doesn't dwell too much on any one of them, and proceeds to tell a story with believable characters.

edalweber This is a pretty good adventure tale of WWII before the US got involved.Perhaps the most interesting character is Pallini, the humane, civilized Italian gentleman who is not sorry to be a prisoner of the British rather than fighting on the side of the Axis.Maybe the most striking scene is the one in which they find the rifles that are being smuggled in to arm the natives against the British, and acid is used to raise the markings that have been ground off.When the markings indicate the Skoda Works in Czeckoslovakia(which had been occupied by Hitler several years before, so it was not the Czecks who were smuggling the guns) Pallini says with a shudder. "Its THEM!Its always THEM!".Without ever mentioning Nazis.Supposedly this was because we weren't in the war yet, but in fact it is extremely effective,like a monster whose presence is sensed, but not seen.It is as though Pallini is referring to some evil that is so terrible that he can't even bring himself to mention its name,the horror that is even more horrible because it has no name.

blanche-2 George Sanders, Bruce Cabot, Harry Carey, Reginald Gardner and Gene Tierney star in "Sundown," a 1941 film."Sundown" takes place in East Africa during World War II, but before the U.S. entered the conflict. The British, seeking to control the African colonies, find out that the Czechs are smuggling in guns to one of the tribes. An Arab merchant's daughter (Tierney) pretends to side with the German element in order to get at the truth.I have no idea why this film is on DVD except to show the ravishingly beautiful Gene Tierney. And ravishingly beautiful she was - her looks are the best thing about this film. The film itself is boring, and the script not very good. None of the characters are really fleshed out well enough so that we care about them, with the possible exception of the Italian prisoner of war, Pallini, played by Joseph Calleia. Director Henry Hathaway manages to build some excitement into the final battle scenes.Historically, the movie is interesting, with the U.S. filmmakers taking the side of the British here. Their control in Africa wouldn't always be so appreciated.

telegonus The story is nonsense, and Gene Tierney couldn't act, yet this Henry Hathaway-directed a adventure picture set in North Africa is solid entertainment thanks to Hathaway's no-nonsense handling of the material, Miklos Rozsa's stirring score, and its splendidly chosen largely no-star or near-star cast: Bruce Cabot, George Sanders, Harry Carey, Cedric Hardwicke, Marc Lawrence. Cabot is especially good in the lead, and his work here makes one wonder why he didn't become a bigger name. Walter Wanger produced this one, which was a big hit, and also somewhat of a hybrid, a mix of Korda-and-Sabu style exotica with Nazi intrigue out of Fritz Lang and Hitchcock, with Tierney in the Lamarr-Lamour exotic princess role. Ersatz, and never for a minute convincing, but hard to resist.