Where No Vultures Fly

Yet another bizarre time capsule (from 1951), this Ealing production casts Anthony Steel as a crusading game warden determined to rescue African wildlife from western poachers. That’s about all that can be said for the plot, which meanders from one episode to the next without developing characters or any kind of cohesive narrative. The film’s original marketing campaign promised “Terrifying Adventure! Actually Filmed in the Heart of Darkest Africa...The World's Most Dangerous and Unknown Land!”, summing up everything a modern audience needs to know. While there are some stand-out moments (a rhino attack on a jeep, a very protective lioness and an elephant’s POV shot) the film is every inch a colonialist fantasy (including such jaw-dropping lines as “Nobody likes foreigners!”), although its politics are in the end more progressive than other works of its kind. A fate more terrifying than this awaited Steel: he would appear in both Let’s Get Laid and The Story of O.