The mercenary position

Best known as a master cinematographer — you can see some of his finest imagery in Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948) — but Jack Cardiff’s career as a director is a very different kettle of fish. He made a respectable version of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1960), a serviceable Shirley MacLaine comedy in My Geisha (1962), and worked with John Ford on Young Cassidy (1965), a biopic about playwright Sean O’Casey. Then there’s the other side of Jack Cardiff, where a proclivity for cheap dime store novels and Saturday matinees may preclude serious academic consideration: Scent of Mystery (1960), the first and only picture ever shown in Smell-O-Vision; the kitschy Viking warrior epic The Long Ships (1964), complete with Sidney Poitier in pointy, upturned genie shoes; The Liquidator (1965), a humdrum faux-Bond affair; Alain Delon wooing Marianne Faithfull with deep purple prose in Naked Under Leather (1968); and the ripe mad scientist shenanigans of The Mutations (1974).

    Falling somewhere in the middle of all this, and now available on DVD-R from Warner Archive, is Dark of the Sun (1968), wherein Cardiff takes off like Sam Fuller on steroids. Following a band of mercenaries led by Rod Taylor and Jim Brown, hired by Calvin Lockhart to retrieve a gaggle of whites under attack and millions in diamonds deep in the Congo, the picture plays like a two-fisted, barrel-chested homage to the tawdry men’s adventure magazines of the day: Stag, True Men, Argosy, etc. — a popular genre which died sometime in the 1970s with the softening of earlier definitions of masculinity.

    Based on a novel I haven’t read by Wilbur Smith, Cardiff and screenwriters Ranald MacDougall and Adrien Spies sidestep standard movie conventions. They plow through the scenario’s three-day mission with verve, pausing the action only long enough for intelligent banter about duty and honor versus whoring one’s soul in the midst of a country’s political freefall. (Taylor’s bead on the trickle-down effect of globalization corrupting the Congo’s warring factions is a progressive observation for the time.) When the action resumes, it’s often brutal and pulverizing: the rape and slaughter of innocents, fistfights fortified with machetes, chainsaws and bayonets, sweaty, rootless men driven beyond the breaking point. During two scenes in which Rod flips out on a neo-Nazi opportunist played by Peter Carsten, the actor seems moments away from having a nervous breakdown.

    There’s reason to believe the new video is missing a few scenes, notably between Taylor and Yvette Mimieux, whom he rescues along the way; promotional stills suggest a brief romantic subplot that’s not onscreen. (If you’ll recall, Yvette played Rod’s Weena in The Time Machine in 1960.) Remastered from a print and not the negative, the new DVD looks acceptable but has a slight audio fade that’s sporadically detectable. Despite these misgivings, however, any opportunity to see Dark of the Sun is well advised.

Update: On their Twitter page, Warners claims the DVD-R is uncut and not mastered from a print.

Above and below, original ads and art details by Frank McCarthy; click images to enlarge