An Imperial Picture. Released through United Artists. Copyright 1959 by United Artists Corporation. No recorded New York opening. U.S. release: October 1959. U.K. release: 14 December 1958 (sic). Australian release: 21 May 1959. 8,205 feet. 91 minutes.COMPLETE SYNOPSIS: French Sudan during World War II. A seething cauldron of intrigue and violence, as nationalist natives try to wrest independence from France, prostrated under the heel of Nazi occupation. In this atmosphere, an American gun-runner (Victor Mature) acts as a go-between, the only individual acceptable at the same time to the French commandant (George Dolenz), the independence-seeking emir (John Dehner), and the great peace-loving Arab leader, Mohamet Adai (Leonard Mudie). While suspected by each side of favoring the other, the American succeeds in treading a middle road, carrying information to one side or the other as it suits his purposes. To try to keep the peace, he must unveil the plotting of the Emir, and to do this he must convince him that he is against the French. His best way of convincing the Emir is to get him to believe that the American is in love with the wife of the French commandant (Yvonne de Carlo) and thus has a personal basis for hating him, apart from considerations of gain or patriotism. The commandant and his wife lend themselves to this frame-up, and through it the local plot is foiled. But not before many of the French soldiers have been barbarically tortured, others killed in ambush, and the commandant finally fallen in battle. When peace is restored and the American and the commandant's widow ride off across the desert, it is apparent that what started as a trick to foil the native plot has blossomed into a real romance.COMMENT: Although contemporary reviewers hated it, I found this to be most entertaining, desert-adventure hokum, well up to director Jacques Tourneur's usual vigorously-paced standard. Tourneur's splendid efforts are abetted by breezy dialogue and a most agreeable cast. Victor Mature is in especially good form, and runs through his paces with a charmingly light touch. The action is well-staged, though arbitrary insertion of close-ups often detracts from the pace and atmosphere. Miss De Carlo looks attractive, but plays her role perfectly straight - as does George Dolenz. But Mature, Dehner, the villains and director Tourneur have a ball.Production values are first-class. Miss De Carlo's husband, Bob Morgan, performs some spectacular stunts including a forty-foot leap from the highest perch of a minaret, and an even lengthier fall down the staircase inside.

The first - and FATAL - mistake of this movie was the decision (I don't know whose, I suppose either the producer's or the director's) to film it in black and white. Drained of color, the deserts, skies, palaces, horses, turbans, etc. are robbed off their potential visual appeal and Sudan looks far less exotic and inviting than it could. The other problems include an uninteresting story, a thankless role for Yvonne De Carlo (although there is some heat between her and Victor Mature), and a rather disagreeable, at least for some, pro-colonial spirit. Two sequences involving "tarantula torture" are pretty much the only memorable parts of this movie. *1/2

My take on the Jacques Tourneur film "Timbuktu" is simply this ... it was not as good as I would have liked it to have been. The photography, the camera work, and the scenic movie sets deserved better. This mediocre adventure film virtually suffers from it's lack of color. Director Jacques Tourneur approach to the film seems to indicate that he chose a black and white film noir type of brush similar to the one he used with such classics such as "Out of the Past", "Cat People", and "I Walked With A Zombie" rather than use the Technicolor type of brush normally required for the usual Saturday Matinée Adventure film. It's hard for me to be critical of this film as I have always been a big fan of actor, Victor Mature, as he comes from my hometown, Louisville, Kentucky. Apparently, Victor Mature had some close ties with Director Tourneur as well as actor George Dolenz. He appeared in Tourneur's "Easy living" (1947), and with Dolenz son, Mickey, in the Monkeys movie "Head" (1968). The cast (Victor Mature, Yvonne De Carlo, George Dolenz, and John Dehner) render remarkable performances given the almost comedic dialog they were given. In one scene, Dehner tortures a Foreign Legionaire by allowing tarantulas to crawl all over him in an attempt to force a confession causing Mature to remark ... "Which one of those spiders was your mother?". In another scene when the unfaithful wife (De Carlo) realizes that the husband she believes to be a coward (Dolenz) is going to rescue her lover (Mature), she tries to tell him how ashamed she is. Her husband stops her and says, "I am sorry that I failed you. It isn't that I didn't ... don't love you ... It's just that I didn't think war was a time for love. Perhaps I was wrong." Add a holy man, Mohamet Adani, to the mix that just happens to look a lot like Woody Allen. The Mohamet, after being rescued from being kidnapped by the evil Emir (John Dehner), tells his rescuer, Mature.... "that he is anxious to return to his Mosque" Their perilous journey to safety is really hard to swallow. The final result which I found myself in ... was just trying to hold back the laughs ... when the laughs really weren't called for in the script.

This story is supposed to happen during WW2 ,but it quickly leaves this historical context for exotic horizons.The presence of a short-haired Yvonne De Carlo(in order to give her a "French" style?),a hairdo that does not become her at all,increases this feeling.The script is rather poor,every time a French soldier is introduced,be sure to hear the first bars of "La Marseillaise".There are a lot of betrayals,attacks,a big-heart raider (guess whom,De Carlo ,a French officer's wife, will fall in love with ?).Two very sadistic scenes:a baddie -Arab of course- gives French lieutenant as a snack to his lethal tarantulas,and he wants to reiterate this very bad deed with Victor Mature himself.Will he survive?Do not bother.If you want to see a good Jack (or Jacques ) Tourneur movie,do choose "cat people" instead,or, better, "out of the past"