SUNDOWN is what you might call a minor epic. It is about the old British grandeur. Instead of Heston, we get Bruce Cabot, who still looks King Kong tall, before he was dwarfed by the duke in later films.
Gene Tierney's beaut was probably the big marketing device here, and Hathaway directs to make full use of it.
The story is one that some people today mistakenly think was normally acceptable as how people viewed life. Knowing people from the era, as they spoke in the sixties and seventies, it is obvious that they thought it was just as silly in 1941 as it is thought of today, the grand British presence in Africa, the "sahib", the almighty "bwana".
Set during World War II, we get a look at the different countries and how their people naturally allied themselves. The Italian is a proud man, willing to live with the British, for instance.
What you will probably note most about this film is that it doesn't adhere to modern acceptable story telling standards. It is expository with sudden jumps from one idea to another, particularly at the end, which seems to come out of nowhere. That doesn't mean it is bad story telling. It just isn't what we're taught today.
Full of fairly common clichés, it doesn't dwell too much on any one of them, and proceeds to tell a story with believable characters.
Gene Tierney's beaut was probably the big marketing device here, and Hathaway directs to make full use of it.
The story is one that some people today mistakenly think was normally acceptable as how people viewed life. Knowing people from the era, as they spoke in the sixties and seventies, it is obvious that they thought it was just as silly in 1941 as it is thought of today, the grand British presence in Africa, the "sahib", the almighty "bwana".
Set during World War II, we get a look at the different countries and how their people naturally allied themselves. The Italian is a proud man, willing to live with the British, for instance.
What you will probably note most about this film is that it doesn't adhere to modern acceptable story telling standards. It is expository with sudden jumps from one idea to another, particularly at the end, which seems to come out of nowhere. That doesn't mean it is bad story telling. It just isn't what we're taught today.
Full of fairly common clichés, it doesn't dwell too much on any one of them, and proceeds to tell a story with believable characters.