Timbuktu

Plot synopsis:
The city of Timbuktu is under the occupation of extremist Islamists bearing a jihadist black flag. Kidane is a cattle herder who lives outside of the city. One day, one of his cows accidentally damages the net of a fisherman. The enraged fisherman kills the cow. Kidane confronts the fisherman and accidentally shoots him dead. The jihadists arrest Kidane and, per sharia law, demand a blood money payment of 40 cattle to the fisherman's family. As Kidane has only seven cattle, he is sentenced to death. His wife shows up at his execution with a pistol, and as they run to each other the husband attempts to stop her. The executioners gun them both down.
Throughout the film there are subsidiary scenes showing the reaction of the population to the jihadists' rule, which are portrayed as absurd. A female fishmonger must wear gloves even when selling fish. Music is banned; a woman is sentenced to 40 lashes for singing, and 40 lashes for being in the same room as a man not of her family. A couple are buried up to their necks in sand and stoned to death for adultery. Young men play football with an imaginary ball as sports are banned. A local imam tries to curb the jihadists' excesses with sermons.
The failure of the occupiers to live up to their own rules is hinted at, for instance when one of them is seen smoking a cigarette. Another group of jihadists from France spend their days talking about their favorite football teams.
Characters speak in Tamasheq, Bambara, Arabic, French, and on a few occasions English. The mobile phone is an important means of communication.

Tags: cult, murder, violence

Review:
From Vancouver to Timbuktu..
Unofficial sequel (methinks so, anyway) to Yvonne De Carlo's Fort Algiers, this hot and heavy desert drama arrives at the end of Miss De Carlo's initial leap into a Hollywood film career, 1945-59, just before her semi-retirement, and prior to her reemergence as "Lilly Munster," the antithesis of Donna Reed's more perfectly molded vision of motherhood.
In this one, American Mature is running guns to the Tuareg tribes, while a French garrison, led by Dolenz, tries their very best to thwart the rebellion and any colonial retribution residue to follow.
A love triangle soon erects itself between De Carlo, Dolenz and Mature.
It's all very civilized and modern.
Dolenz doesn't put up much of a fight.
De Carlo is definitely worth fighting for.
John Dehner, who played a good guy in Fort Algiers, turns around and becomes the demented, evil Emir in this one.
Another sadistic rebel has a scar running down the entire length of his face.
Dehner tests one of Mature's automatic weapons on the fellow with the hideous scar.
He dies.
He later will turn up planted in the Emir's vegetable garden.
Nice one.
Green thumb?
Spiders are cleverly enlisted to torture and kill the French.
An Iman is rescued, secreted and forgotten along the way.
Strange stuff: a long trek across the sands reveals some legionnaires impaled on spears, like shish-kabobs at an oasis barbecue.
It's all a bit convoluted and thematically tangled.
But, for the most part, highly recommended for folks who enjoy a few Camels with their Tuareg coffee..
Timbuktu is no Casablanca.
One of the poorest areas on the globe yet its very name conjures up exotic places of the past, Timbuktu the city serves as the title for a routine action/adventure film starring Victor Mature.
Interesting that it came out when it did as the French were busy grappling with losing their colonial empire of which Timbuktu was a part.
At that time it was a part of French West Africa though the name Soudan for the region is used and correctly.Victor Mature plays a smuggler of no particular loyalties who is doing business with whomever in the region as a new commander of the garrison at Timbuktu comes to take over.
George Dolenz is unhappy with being sent out of France during the hour of her greatest peril in 1940, but somebody's needed to keep the Tuareg tribes in line.Who are threatening a revolt under the leadership of Emir John Dehner and who has a local mullah in Leonard Mudie held captive and under his thumb.
Dehner wants to use the mullah's influence to incite a revolt.
Sounds very familiar for today's audience.While all the politics is going on Mature is also checking out Yvonne DeCarlo and who could blame him.
However Timbuktu comes nowhere near as good as that other wartime classic with the name of a city set in French colonial Africa, Casablanca.
No one will ever mistake Mature and DeCarlo for Bogey and Bergman.Still the film should please fans of Victor Mature although his work declined after he left 20th Century Fox..
Not as much fun as it should have been.
The early 50s saw the release of such colorful and entertaining "French Foreign Legion" movies as Burt Lancaster's "Ten Tall Men" and Alan Ladd's "Desert Legion." By the late 50s, however, the genre had lost its zest as evidenced by the glum, black-and-white "Timbuktu" which makes the mistake of taking seriously a second-rate script that moves sketchily-drawn characters through a somewhat muddled story.Two key miscastings further weaken the effort.
In no way does Yvonne De Carlo seem like the French wife of a World War II military officer, and while John Dehner makes an amusingly-cynical villain, his voice and manner are far too American to make him seem anything more than a Hollywood actor in a costume.Another fault lies in the romance which suddenly blossoms between Yvonne De Carlo and Victor Mature.
Having these two "fall" for each other at first sight simply caters to the notion that audiences expect a romance between a movie's leading man and leading lady.Victor Mature's character doesn't make much sense.
On one hand he seems to be an amoral adventurer interested only in making money while on the other he's a courageous hero who risks his life in a noble cause.
The movie can't have it both ways and its efforts to do so result in a central character who never fully engages our interest.Finally, there's something a bit troubling about that "holy man." He speaks favorably of France bringing doctors and teachers into the backward regions of the Sahara, and while one might applaud this sentiment, it doesn't seem like the sort of thing such a man would be saying and it borders on being a defense of colonialism."Timbuktu" does have moments of interest, most notably in its two torture scenes.
The first involves a sweaty, bare-chested French lieutenant who's staked out, spreadeagle style, in the Emir's tent.
As six poisonous tarantulas crawl hungrily toward him, the Emir questions the lieutenant about the number of French troops left in Timbuktu.
The second torture scene puts Victor Mature in the same position, only this time there's just one tarantula and it's not crawling on the ground but rather suspended on a thread about Mature's face.
As the tarantula struggles, it unravels the spool of thread and so lowers itself slowly toward its victim.
This scene marks the fourth time in ten years that Mature was stripped to the waist -- thus displaying his famously-muscled chest -- put into bondage, and subjected to torture on the silver screen.
(In 1949's "Samson and Delilah" he was blinded by a red-hot sword and chained to a grindstone; in 1953's "The Robe" he was stretched out on a table inside Caligula's torture chamber; in 1956's "Zarak" he was flogged in the first reel and again in the last reel -- fatally so.) No wonder Mature earned the title of being "The Most Tortured Torso in the Movies!"And yes, this movie does contain that notoriously "campy" line which Mature says to Yvonne De Carlo: "I've got the holy man stashed.".
A mediocre adventure yarn..
This story is supposed to happen during WW2 ,but it quickly leaves this historical context for exotic horizons.The presence of a short-haired Yvonne De Carlo(in order to give her a "French" style?),a hairdo that does not become her at all,increases this feeling.The script is rather poor,every time a French soldier is introduced,be sure to hear the first bars of "La Marseillaise".There are a lot of betrayals,attacks,a big-heart raider (guess whom,De Carlo ,a French officer's wife, will fall in love with ?).Two very sadistic scenes:a baddie -Arab of course- gives French lieutenant as a snack to his lethal tarantulas,and he wants to reiterate this very bad deed with Victor Mature himself.Will he survive?Do not bother.If you want to see a good Jack (or Jacques ) Tourneur movie,do choose "cat people" instead,or, better, "out of the past".
World War II in the Sahara desert without Germans but against internal enemies and spiders.
For once it's not the Foreign Legion dashing off against villains in the Saharas, but Victor Mature courting the wife of the French officer in charge, who doesn't seem to mind much.
It's always a pleasure to see Victor Mature on the screen, there is no one like him for imposing stature and a kind of brutal but benevolent charm, and Yvonne de Carlo is just the girl for him.
It's not a great film, but the tempo is swift, there is nothing wrong with the action and the story, and it even amounts to some suspense towards the end, but it is not a very deep investigation of Muslim mentality and mystery but just another account of another power-crazy local gangster, a beduin speaking perfect English, with some intrigue concerning sewing machines.
A decent beefy entertainment with a lot of shooting ambushes, crawling in the sand, running for life on horses and without, great risking in disguises and many casualties, most of them anonymous.
Jacques Tourneur has made the best of it backed by decent enough music..
Unengaging adventure.
The first - and FATAL - mistake of this movie was the decision (I don't know whose, I suppose either the producer's or the director's) to film it in black and white.
Drained of color, the deserts, skies, palaces, horses, turbans, etc.
are robbed off their potential visual appeal and Sudan looks far less exotic and inviting than it could.
The other problems include an uninteresting story, a thankless role for Yvonne De Carlo (although there is some heat between her and Victor Mature), and a rather disagreeable, at least for some, pro-colonial spirit.
Two sequences involving "tarantula torture" are pretty much the only memorable parts of this movie.
My take on the Jacques Tourneur film "Timbuktu" is simply this ...
it was not as good as I would have liked it to have been.
it was not as good as I would have liked it to have been.
The photography, the camera work, and the scenic movie sets deserved better.
This mediocre adventure film virtually suffers from it's lack of color.
Director Jacques Tourneur approach to the film seems to indicate that he chose a black and white film noir type of brush similar to the one he used with such classics such as "Out of the Past", "Cat People", and "I Walked With A Zombie" rather than use the Technicolor type of brush normally required for the usual Saturday Matinée Adventure film.
It's hard for me to be critical of this film as I have always been a big fan of actor, Victor Mature, as he comes from my hometown, Louisville, Kentucky.
Apparently, Victor Mature had some close ties with Director Tourneur as well as actor George Dolenz.
He appeared in Tourneur's "Easy living" (1947), and with Dolenz son, Mickey, in the Monkeys movie "Head" (1968).
The cast (Victor Mature, Yvonne De Carlo, George Dolenz, and John Dehner) render remarkable performances given the almost comedic dialog they were given.
In one scene, Dehner tortures a Foreign Legionaire by allowing tarantulas to crawl all over him in an attempt to force a confession causing Mature to remark ...
"Which one of those spiders was your mother?".
In another scene when the unfaithful wife (De Carlo) realizes that the husband she believes to be a coward (Dolenz) is going to rescue her lover (Mature), she tries to tell him how ashamed she is.
Her husband stops her and says, "I am sorry that I failed you.
It isn't that I didn't ...
don't love you ...
It's just that I didn't think war was a time for love.
Perhaps I was wrong." Add a holy man, Mohamet Adani, to the mix that just happens to look a lot like Woody Allen.
The Mohamet, after being rescued from being kidnapped by the evil Emir (John Dehner), tells his rescuer, Mature....
"that he is anxious to return to his Mosque" Their perilous journey to safety is really hard to swallow.
The final result which I found myself in ...
was just trying to hold back the laughs ...
when the laughs really weren't called for in the script..
Most entertaining, desert-adventure hokum!.
An Imperial Picture.
Released through United Artists.
Copyright 1959 by United Artists Corporation.
No recorded New York opening.
U.S. release: October 1959.
U.K. release: 14 December 1958 (sic).
Australian release: 21 May 1959.
8,205 feet.
91 minutes.COMPLETE SYNOPSIS: French Sudan during World War II.
A seething cauldron of intrigue and violence, as nationalist natives try to wrest independence from France, prostrated under the heel of Nazi occupation.
In this atmosphere, an American gun-runner (Victor Mature) acts as a go-between, the only individual acceptable at the same time to the French commandant (George Dolenz), the independence-seeking emir (John Dehner), and the great peace-loving Arab leader, Mohamet Adai (Leonard Mudie).
While suspected by each side of favoring the other, the American succeeds in treading a middle road, carrying information to one side or the other as it suits his purposes.
To try to keep the peace, he must unveil the plotting of the Emir, and to do this he must convince him that he is against the French.
His best way of convincing the Emir is to get him to believe that the American is in love with the wife of the French commandant (Yvonne de Carlo) and thus has a personal basis for hating him, apart from considerations of gain or patriotism.
The commandant and his wife lend themselves to this frame-up, and through it the local plot is foiled.
But not before many of the French soldiers have been barbarically tortured, others killed in ambush, and the commandant finally fallen in battle.
When peace is restored and the American and the commandant's widow ride off across the desert, it is apparent that what started as a trick to foil the native plot has blossomed into a real romance.COMMENT: Although contemporary reviewers hated it, I found this to be most entertaining, desert-adventure hokum, well up to director Jacques Tourneur's usual vigorously-paced standard.
Tourneur's splendid efforts are abetted by breezy dialogue and a most agreeable cast.
Victor Mature is in especially good form, and runs through his paces with a charmingly light touch.
The action is well-staged, though arbitrary insertion of close-ups often detracts from the pace and atmosphere.
Miss De Carlo looks attractive, but plays her role perfectly straight - as does George Dolenz.
But Mature, Dehner, the villains and director Tourneur have a ball.Production values are first-class.
Miss De Carlo's husband, Bob Morgan, performs some spectacular stunts including a forty-foot leap from the highest perch of a minaret, and an even lengthier fall down the staircase inside.