The Adventurers (1951)

It's post-Boer War South Africa, and former Boer commando, Pieter Brandt (Jack Hawkins) heads into the Veldt to retrieve 'a fortune in diamonds' (the film's alternative title) and he's buried deep within bush country. With him are: expat English weasel, Clive Hunter (Dennis Price) who's stolen Brandt's girl Anne (Siobhan McKenna); slime-ball saloon owner, Dominic (Gregoire Aslan), to whom Hunter owes heavy drinking and gambling debts; and Pieter's former army colleague, Hendrik van Thaal (Peter Hammond), whose father (Ronald Adam) has funded the trip.

There's no love lost between the four adventurers, and the tension heightens into a biting drama of death and deceit as the unforgiving landscape and the quartet's open distrust of one another take their toll.

Making the most of the expansive Veldt and Drakenburg mountain range was Oswald 'Ossie' Morris, the great British cameraman who went on to win an Oscar for the cinematography of Fiddler On The Roof.

Director, David MacDonald always handled action well (see The Moonraker), and in The Adventurers, as Variety commented, he conjures a "rugged realism," getting, "every possible advantage of talent, location and dramatic story."