Ronald Neame was at the start of his long directing career when he made this thriller, an entertaining but flawed tale of gunrunning and corruption.

Trevor Howard is David Redfern, who we first see held up by a landslide in a torrential storm. Redfern looks like he’s up to something, and when he finds an abandoned lorry full of guns – helping himself to one and then hiding in the shadows when two men arrive to salvage it – you imagine he must be some sort of secret agent or shady criminal. In fact, he turns out to be an archaeologist, who has been sent to a small Tunisian town to sort through artefacts that had been rescued from some unspecified disaster by the wealthy and powerful Serafis (Walter Rilla).

Stopping at the local inn, Redfern is soon engaged in a somewhat unlikely romance with owner Anna (Anouk Aimee) and trying to help her brother Max (Jacques Sernas) extricate himself from the gun-running ring that both he and Rankl (Herbert Lom – so you know he’ll be a bad sort…) are involved in. But the tentacles of the ring reach all the way to Serafis, and Redfern soon finds that he is in over his head, as his plans to expose them are uncovered, and more and more of the locals prove to be untrustworthy.

Golden Salamander (the title comes from one of the artefacts that have been salvaged, and which features a message that makes up Redfern’s mind to take action rather than ignoring the issue) is a rather mixed bag. The opening scenes are rather murky – it’s quite hard to see what exactly is happening – but suggest a certain atmosphere that the rest of the film fails to deliver. The tension of not knowing who can be trusted, and the dramatic escape / chase scene at the film’s conclusion are gripping enough, but the middle of the film is rather ponderous. However, the Tunisian locations give the film a sense of realism often missing from movies of the period.

The performances are variable too – Howard is far too stiff, like he hadn’t moved on from Brief Encounter, and his romance with sexy, lively Anouk Aimee really stretches credibility – Howard was in his late thirties (but looks a good fifteen years older) while Aimee was still in her teens, and while age-gap relationships are not that much of a strain on credibility, the idea of this young French girl falling for anyone as thoroughly cold, stiff-lipped and clipped-voiced as Howard is hard to swallow. Herbert Lom is suitably slimy as the villain, Rilla makes a solid gangster and Wilfred Hyde-White – already looking an old man in 1950, but with decades of work ahead of him – is a reassuringly familiar face as a piano-playing barfly who may or may not be on the side of virtue. Accents, of course, slide all over the place, suggesting that either this part of French Tunisia was a haven for Brits or simply that the filmmakers didn’t much care.

With fifteen minutes or so chopped from the middle, Golden Salamander would be a cracking thriller. As it is, it’s an interesting curio, but one that ultimately fails to live up to its potential.

DAVID FLINT

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