1963 Directed by Alexander Mackendrick
After he is orphaned by an air raid on Port Said during the Suez Crisis, a young boy attempts to go by himself from the Suez Canal to Durban in South Africa where his nearest relative, Aunt Jane, lives. On the way he meets a variety of different people who help or hinder his journey - including an ageing diamond smuggler.
A Boy Ten Feet Tall, Mein Freund, der Diamanten Joe
The more I watch Alexander Mackendrick's films, the more impressed I get with the amount of quality and poetry that comes - almost unnoticeably consciously - from his efficiency. Actually the word here might even be "proficiency". Mackendrick is a master. The best kind of teacher. Someone who knows exactly what he's dealing with.
I'm impressed with how clear it all is. He is no man for innovations, he has no thirst for the new for the sake of it alone. No pretension of being a novelty act, a modern up-to-date kind of man. He's interested in much more real things (as much as every great filmmaker is one way or the other, be it through plastic reality, states of…
An outstanding, devastating, violent coming-of-age yarn by Alexander Mackendrick (1963). A boy's (Fergus McClelland's) parents are brutally and swiftly killed in a Port Said air raid (in the first 10 minutes!), and he must journey through Africa to reunite with his aunt, who owns a hotel in South Africa. He learns to slowly dissolve all the colonial pretense and propriety his parents bequeathed him—and it especially dissolves when he falls into the company of a rogue hunter named Cocky Wainwright (Edward G. Robinson, in a bitter, brilliant late-career performance that has the aging dignity of Burt Lancaster in his Italian epics with Visconti and Bertolucci).
Mackendrick, seemingly without trying, paints these lived-in, gorgeous compositions of the boy out of his…
This is the second of three films Alexander Mackendrick made about children in tough situations, and on the whole it's probably more effective than the somewhat Disney-fied A High Wind in Jamaica. Skewing more towards a David Lean aesthetic, DP Erwin Hillier had great locations at his disposal all over Africa. The opening scenes during the Suez Crisis are visually reminiscent of Empire of the Sun. The first hour of Sammy's 5,000-mile journey is great, dark, and full of incident, but it does stall a bit in the second half during his time with Edward G. Robinson.
Excellent coming of age adventure about a boy travelling through Africa. Along the way he meets grizzled old prospector and diamond smuggler Edward G. Robinson who teaches him how to kill animals and exploit the natives.
A great looking and rather intriguing adventure filmed across Africa. The young lead delivered a fine performance. Although I felt the pacing of the story slowed a lot in the second half of the film and my interested faded a little.
Watching it now, questions about the medium film become quite urgent with this for me. How film conserves worlds, realities, that change and with it world views. How our positions work viewing (maybe even judging) different view from another time. How generations change and do not change at the same time, or how they try to give something of what they had thought important to the younger ones.
ways of living, ways of thinking, ways of moving through the world: vanished. For better and for worse, but still vanished.
Although top-billed Edward G. Robinson doesn't show up until 64 minutes into this adventure film, which has been perfectly entertaining until then, it is he who gives the picture some real spark. Based on a popular novel, Sammy Going South (or A Boy Ten Feet Tall, as it was called in America because, according to distributors, they were afraid U.S. audiences would stay away thinking it was about a Black child) is the involving tale of a ten-year-old English boy whose parents are killed during the Suez crisis and who decides to walk to his aunt's home in Durban, South Africa from Port Said in Egypt -- a distance of nearly 5,500 miles. Needless to say he has numerous adventures,…
Alexander Mackendrick’s adventure in which a young boy travels across the desert alone to find his only relative. Starring Edward G. Robinson, Fergus McClelland and Harry H. Corbett.
When he is orphaned by an air attack throughout the Suez Crisis, a young boy tries to go on his own from the Suez Canal to Durban in South Africa, where his closest relative exists, in this adaptation of the novel of the same name by W. H. Canaway, which was published two years earlier.
Fergus McClelland gives a good performance in his role as the title character Sammy Hartland, the young boy who is determined to find his aunt following disaster, while Edward G. Robinson is respectable as Cocky Wainwright, the…
Contrary to Dave Kehr et al, I find Alexander Mackendrick hit-or-miss as an auteur; for every genuine masterpiece (Mandy, The Sweet Smell of Success), he could also be pretty shrill and obvious (Don't Make Waves, Whisky Galore!). This adventure yarn, made in the later stage of Mackendrick's career, has the director's unevenness built into the very plot, as an orphan boy (Fergus McClelland) wanders Africa in search of his aunt and runs into a scattered collection of character types, settling temporarily with diamond smuggler Edward G. Robinson—gruff and teddy-bearish, he's clearly the film's highlight yet doesn't appear until the runtime's already half over. Mackendrick is never subtle with his themes (this is the kind of movie where McClelland shoots a…
Sammy Going South is a rare bird, a film which is unquestionably a children's film, but is in no way comedy, and doesn't patronize its audience, the nearest film I can think of in terms of tone, and, for that matter, situation, is Walkabout.
Sammy is a ten-year-old boy living in Port Said, when his parents are killed in a bombing which results from the British 'protecting their interests', at the time of the Suez Crisis. Suddenly all alone in the world, Sammy determines to make his way to the only relative he knows of, his Aunt who lives in South Africa, about which he knows only her first name, and the fact that she owns a hotel in Durban.…
The protagonist is such a little twerp who barely progresses in the film that it makes it really hard to enjoy. This movie is for people who like to go "What? Why?" a lot when they watch films.
•A road movie with a difference since the road young Sammy must travel runs all the way from Port Said in Egypt, where his parents have been killed in an air-raid, all the way to Durban in South Africa where his Aunt Jane lives. This is something of a late classic from Alexander MacKendrick, a movie in which the central character is a child but which isn't really a children's film, (though children will relate to it), and it's utterly devoid of sentimentality. On route he meets a number of people who both help him and hinter him on his journey and he learns to 'grow up' very quickly. One of the people he meets is Edward G Robinson's old…
