'DARK OF THE SUN'.......APOCALYPSE THEN........

Dark Of The Sun (1968)    The admiration for this movie by Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino is well documented.......Tarantino, in particular, paid great homage to the film in "Inglorious Basterds", casting its star, Rod Taylor, in a small role of Winston Churchill  (his last before his passing) and borrowing parts of the ominous, haunting score written for it by Jacques Loussier

            Robert Aldrich's 1967 summer blockbuster "The Dirty Dozen" broke ground in depicting warfare as amoral savagery best practiced by depraved psychotics (see our previous post on this)...,but in the great tradition of the phrase "You ain't seen nothin' yet", MGM's next annual summertime bloodbath not only pushed the envelope, it set the damn envelope on fire.....

           For 1968, anyway, the brutal Congo mercenaries of "Dark Of The Sun" made the Dirty Dozen look like Sesame Street characters.....

           And what a fitting year for this movie to arrive.......with Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy freshly buried, their brains blown out by assassins, the Vietnam War raging on, and more horrors still yet to come....the Chicago riots amid the Democratic convention.....and the ghastly climax to the traumatic year, the election of Richard Nixon as President,

          Audiences who roared with approval at the rollicking humor of "The Dirty Dozen" got something way more than they bargained for here. What master cinematographer turned director Jack Cardiff crafted was more akin to  Conrad's "Heart Of Darkness" than any previous war film......ending with its lead character's descent into unspeakable, inhuman rage and atrocity. Designed as a popcorn crown-pleaser, "Dark Of The Sun" established over the decades, a reputation as a pre-cursor to "Apocalypse Now".

            But instead of an obese, balding, mumbling Brando, the film centers around the muscular, battle-hardened mercenary Curry (Rod Taylor) a hot-tempered commando-for-pay given the task of rescuing a town of French colonists from rampaging Simba rebels in the 1960's war torn Congo.

           The true purpose of Curry's mission, given the film's bleak view of humanity, has nothing to do with extracting innocent people from their remote jungle outpost......it's to retrieve a mining company's stash of 50 millions dollars worth of uncut diamonds. The lure of the stones attracts the attention of the worst of Curry's fellow mercenaries, Henlein (Peter Carsten), an unrepentant ex-Nazi thug who proudly sports a swastika on his uniform.  (Carsten's a villain for the ages, but unfortunately, for many of his scenes, he's redubbed by veteran voice artist Paul Frees, making him sound at times like Boris Badenov from "Rocky And Bullwinkle".)

             As the mercenaries travel through the Congo via a commandeered train, the practical, benevolent,  even-tempered Sgt. Ruffo (Jim Brown) functions as Curry's conscience, moral compass, wrangler of Curry's volcanic nature and the closest thing he has to a best friend.  It's a thankless, unbelievable role for Brown, only his second acting attempt after "The Dirty Dozen", but he acquits himself with as much dignity as his stilted dialogue allows him....(obviously written by white guys who conceived Ruffo as even more angelic than some of Sidney's Poitier's characters)

             Murphy's Law, in which everything goes wrong, fully applies to Curry's mission and the film barrels ahead from one hellish scene to another......Henlein slaughters two innocent children, claiming they're Simba spies and later unwisely provokes a chainsaw brawl with Curry, who responds by almost beheading Henlein under the wheels of the train.

             All of this leads up the movie's signature, unforgettable set piece......in which the Simbas, after seizing a trainload of the oupost whites, conduct an all night orgy of rape (of both sexes), torture and murder. Even after obvious, heavy editing of this sequence by MGM, nobody had ever seen anything so unrelentingly horrific and brutal in a major studio film.  It made you cringe at the thought of what they might have left on the cutting room floor......

            Even sliced and diced, Jack Cardiff's imagery here burns into your eyes forever......and MGM couldn't take much more of it,  further editing out much of Curry's final reckoning with Henlein, which you can only imagine from the sound of Henlein's pleading and agonized screams.

            We'll finish up with the highest praise for the film's MVPs......the criminally under-appreciated Rod Taylor whose character here may well be the most dangerous, most conflicted, yet most ultimately vulnerable action-adventure hero ever seen in cinema.....you didn't normally see bravura acting of this caliber in a 1960's studio genre offering.....Taylor grabs you by the neck, takes you on his dark journey and dares you to look away......and that stunning Loussier music score, spooky and strangely beautiful all at once.....with a special shout-out to his music for
the sequence where Curry and Ruffo assemble the mercenary train, scored with screaming horns and pounding piano....welded to Cardiff's stunning montage of grinding wheels and enraged, impatient men, it's a perfect visual harbinger of all the terrible events that lay ahead...

             The BQ stands right along side our pals Marty and Quentin (in our dreams, we do lunch all the time....)in declaring this movie a true cinema touchstone.....even with its flaws and MGM's largely futile efforts to dilute its power, we still give it 5 blood-soaked stars (*****), a FIND OF FINDS.....if you haven't found it yet, start that train rollin'........