Six for Survival

Sands of the Kalahari. A hired plane crashes and burns in the wastes of South-West Africa. Out of the flaming wreckage crawl six survivors: five men and a woman. Their plight unknown, they face an ordeal by sun, sand, hunger, thirst and, as it turns out, sexual desire. Who will live? Who will die? Who will prove his strength, or weakness? And who will get the girl?

All such questions were answered satisfyingly in William Mulvihill's novel. Here they are spelled out according to the conventions of steam-heated movie melodrama, but the film still turns the guesswork into good grim fun. Competition within the group begins in earnest after they find refuge in a hillside cave. While a herd of baboons observes the vagaries of humankind, the six rapidly dwindle. The hardy pilot (Nigel Davenport) sets off to seek help. An old German (Harry Andrews) and a professorial type (Theodore Bikel) are eliminated one way or another by the fittest male, Stuart Whitman, who is left to look out for his rifle, his woman (Susannah York) and his injured rival (Stanley Baker).

The drama remains doggedly minor because Writer-Director Cy Endfield too often concentrates on the man-womanman conflict, which is sexier but not so interesting finally as the elemental battle for survival. In Actor Whitman's display of beefcake villainy, muscles are defined more clearly than motivation or character. The threat of death from heat and starvation seems remote when Susannah lazes by a fresh-water pool while Whitman strides forth fully armed, bagging big and small game with reassuring regularity. Kalahari is most effective when it shows men pushed to the last extremity, as in the brutal spectacle of a wounded gemsbok being slaughtered for food, or in Whitman's climactic hand-to-hand combat with the baboons' snarling leader. Though ferociously exciting in itself, this bout between man and beast in the wilderness only points up the failings of a movie that hasn't yet gone primitive when it suddenly goes ape.

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