Trader Horn

Jonathon Dabell (barnabyrudge@hotmail.com) wrote on IMDB:

Trader Horn was first made in 1931. I haven't seen the original, but the critics and audiences seemed to like it, perhaps because it was one of the earliest talkies. This remake is an embarrassment, a 1970s production which feels like it was made before 1931, so simple and idiotic is its storyline. The back projection shots are pitifully obvious and make it all too clear that this production never got anywhere near Africa. There are plenty of cliches that you would associate with jungle adventures (a steamy love triangle, natural hazards, villainous colonial Germans, stampedes, quicksand, etc), but none of them count for very much since the performances are so indifferent and the script just ambles by in search of a moment of interest. I kept expecting Tarazan to leap out from behind a bush at any moment but he didn't..... he was the only thing missing from this jungle fiasco.

vandino1 wrote on IMDB:

When a film credits the novel and its writer but then gives a totally different writer a "Story by" credit (in this case co-scripter Edward Harper) you know the original source has been junked. Indeed, there is almost no correlation between this film and the 1931 original or the novel. In fact, the filmmakers have simply taken the title and its main character and grafted him onto the H. Rider Haggard story of 'King Solomon's Mines.' As for the film itself, it boasts in its end credits that plenty of African locations were used... but that's mostly, if not all, Second Unit material. The actors seem to have been filmed on stage sets or at Southern California locations (wild animal park/nearby desert dunes). Lots of process screen work and indoor settings, although the African footage is good. And Rod Taylor is perfect casting as Trader Horn. You can believe him as a rough-hewn, know-it-all, wheeler-dealer and reluctant guide. Less believable is his romance with Heywood. And Don Knight, as the British commander ceaselessly hunting for Horn, whom he's branded a "traitor to England in a time of war" (it's 1916), is almost buffoonish, as if channeling Malcolm McDowell through a 'Carry On' film. The African natives are a mix of obvious Hollywood actor types and real natives (many just stock footage or Second Unit). Much of the scenic stuff doesn't match up with the actors, and the plodding story never catches fire. Why MGM felt this would be a success at the box office is hard to fathom.

Penfold-13 wrote on IMDB:

I suspect that this is one of those films which isn't very faithful to the original novel.

Possible spoiler: There are some British soldiers and some German soldiers dotted about the place, which just seem like a half-hearted attempt to update the well-known tale of King Solomon's Mines - which is what this really is, down to the hairstyles of the mysterious natives familiar from the Granger/Kerr version.

Taylor and Heywood creak through the motions with all the verve of wombats, intercut with stock footage of herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plains - clumsily enough to remind one of the great Edward D Wood.

Well worth missing.