King Solomon’s Mines

Bennett & Marton have directly before them Howard Hawks’ To Have and Have Not. The filming is realistic on location variously in Africa, as Variety noted. The artistic placement of the pivot at a point five-sevenths of the way into the film, after only the first stage of the journey has been reached, permits such telescoping of the rest as obtains.

The central metaphor is named in the title, two main strands are a woman’s love and a usurped throne.

A major work, an ideal masterpiece. Several key themes and a mode of working recur in Marton’s later films (The Wild North, Green Fire, The Thin Red Line) importantly, the critical response is also typical, “largely travelogue with the merest trimmings of story” (Halliwell’s Film Guide, cp. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, “a hot adventure story that is loaded with standard perils and thrills”).