After reading "Kim" not long ago, I determined that I really ought to read some of the other classic adventure literature I own. Of course, then life intervened and I've barely had time to keep up with my magazines. However, I did have the mental wherewithal to set the DVR for "King Solomon's Mines" when it came up on TCM, and when we finally sat down to watch it I also opened the book by H. Rider Haggard.
Often films made in the 1950s seem horribly dated, but this one held up pretty darn well. It won two Academy Awards, and lost out as Best Picture to "All About Eve," which was probably the best movie of any given five years let alone one. Stewart Granger (rather fine!) apparently got the lead role of Allan Quartermain (in the book it's "Quatermain") because Errol Flynn didn't want to go to Africa. Instead, Flynn took a role in ... "Kim"!
The story involves a trek into deepest, uncharted Africa in 1897. The film diverges from the book in its setup; in the film, it's a guilty widow searching for her lost husband who hires Quartermain for the safari; in the book, it's a guilty brother. The film's setup provides a role for Deborah Kerr and some romance, which was probably considered necessary; in the book, the only romance is between one of the trekkers and a native woman.
The book is considerably more violent and, as books tend to be, more detailed. It is not as tightly written as "Kim" but quite entertaining; the narrator is Quatermain himself and he is not the heroic manly man of the film, but a late-middle-aged, selectively educated, self-deprecating true lover of Africa and its wonders. Given the time the book was written and the time the movie was made, both are remarkably free of racism. Many of the major set pieces were taken directly from the book.
There's always a lot of chat, during the summer, about the decline and fall of filmmaking, recycled stories, etc. I suspect many people in the movie business may not read very much, but there are a lot of great stories, where stuff actually happens (don't get me started on "book club" style literary fiction), that people used to read in school. Many of these are ideally suited to film.
And here's another point - if it seems a bit creatively bankrupt to revive an action franchise in the 2000s that last hit the screen in the early 1990s, perhaps we might reach back a bit. There is plenty of great material that's only been recycled once in a hundred years!
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