Cy Endfield

(On TV, March 2021) Eerily similar in its first few minutes to The Flight of the Phoenix (also released that same year), Sands of the Kalahari also starts with a small passenger-plane crash in the desert, with a motley group of survivors trying to figure out what to do. But unlike the engineering-minded crew of the Phoenix, the survivors here are somewhat more vicious: One of them has clear intentions of getting rid of the other male survivors so that he can end up with the sole female. There are also killer baboons lurking around, and they add quite a bit to the film’s atmosphere of nihilistic exhaustion even when the humans are better at assaulting each other than nature is. Even couched in survival terms, this is really not an uplifting film — it manages to place a revenge climax at the end of a man-against-nature film, and the result is really not glossy nor pretty. In some ways, Sands of the Kalahari was a film slightly ahead of its time — it portends the gloominess of 1970s cinema, breaking from comforting Hollywood clichés. It’s clear from the making of the film that writer-producer-director Cy Endfield was going for a deliberately harsh and unnerving experience, blurring the lines between civilization and survival, with individual greed threatening collective survival. Even the setting is bleak, avoiding the stereotypical sand dunes for barren rocks and just enough wildlife to be even more dangerous. Even the nominal hero of the story (bringing back help after exiling himself from the group) does something terrible right before leaving the group — and such bitter ironies are part of what makes this film feel five or ten years more modern than its production date.