Sammy, conqueror of Africa It's a really bad movie. When I first started watching it, I was looking forward to a great adventure film about Africa and the adventures of little Sammy. But soon I was very disappointed.
“Sammy Goes South” is one of those movies that should have been successful but failed. Casting is excellent, director with a big name, full-scale shooting at a height, the plot is exciting - it would seem that what else is missing from the film to become a masterpiece?
The movie is boring. The images created by the actors are stilted. The development of the plot is banal, or rather, it does not exist at all. Morality is zero. Is this not a complete failure of the film?
The image of Sammy, a boy with the face of an angel and the soul of a burned adventurer, causes questions by the middle of the film, and by the end - just rejection. The whole image of this “orphan” is characterized only by negative moments. He goes to an aunt 5,000 miles away, but, realizing that free life in an African village is good, he does not want to go anywhere and asks to leave him in the village forever. He laughs when his benefactor fails to fire a gun and injures his shoulder. He doesn’t have the courage to follow Robinson’s hero in a raid on a village, but he has the nerve to steal the diamonds he hid in a tree. And finally, when he gets to his aunt, Sammy doesn’t say, “I will find and thank the man who not only saved my life, but also left me for some reason a great wealth.” All he's saying is that when he grows up, he'll drink three bottles of whiskey in a row and hit someone on the head with a washboard. I don’t know about you, but I have the image of such an “angel” ugliness.
Alexander McKendrick, an American filmmaker of Scottish descent, shot mostly dull plotless films. “Sammy” fits exactly into his work. I’ve seen all of McKendrick’s movies, and I can say that if it weren’t for The Lady Killers and The Sea of Whiskey, for me, this director would be from a series of “looked, erased and forgotten.”
"Sammy" put
4 out of 10