Campbell's Kingdom (1960)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

CAMPBELL'S KINGDOM is a solid, mid budget British adventure film and one of the rare big-screen adaptations of a Hammond Innes novel. The underrated Dirk Bogarde plays a young man, dying from a terminal illness, who inherits his grandfather's land in Canada. He arrives only to discover that bad guy Stanley Baker is in the middle of building a dam intending to flood said land, unless Bogarde can prove that there's oil hidden beneath the ground. What follows is a mildly enjoyable little tale, peppered by strong cast members including James Robertson Justice, Robert Brown, Michael Craig, and Sid James. It's not as exciting as something like THE WAGES OF FEAR but it has some good moments here and there and Baker is a fine villain.

A potboiler for highly talented Dirk Bogarde who succeeds in making his character endearing though.A "terminally-ill" man ,who,except for one sequence in which he faints ,may seem debatable for he leads a very active (and even dangerous in the last part) life;it's all clear in the end but this ending is a bit far-fetched! Stanley Baker is cast again as the villain (because he looks so much the part?).The word "kingdom" is justified ,for it's is located in an isolated place ,where Bogarde 's granddaddy was deceived ;the villains want to buy Bogarde's heritage,but the young man wants to try and find black gold on his hermitage ,helped by an old Scottish pal,a girl and her friend .To make the matters worse ,there is a dam and the movie ,ahead of its time ,ends as a disaster movie .Not a great role for Bogarde ,but watchable all the same.

I remember the praise being heaped on this film as well as on Dirk Bogard when it was first released. I was about nine years old, and never got to see this spectacle at that time. I saw it for the first time on Film 4 recently, and was quite impressed with the cinematography (It was 1957 British of course), but the casting I felt left a lot to be desired. Plenty of English (and Welsh) actors, with corny Canadian accents (Syd James, who was actually South African), and a terrible accent from one I thought could deliver. James Robertson Justice's effort was terrible. In fact, at an exciting part of the plot when my old hero was barking instructions to a beleaguered cast of mis-fits, his almost falsetto pitched voice reminded me of the Goon Show Bluebottle just before he was blown up! A typical British effort of that time.

This film scores best in it's fine sense of location, which is to be applauded as the post war industry made the effort to escape from Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire.Where it falls down is the residual ambiance, among the actors, that they are still in 'Titfield Thunderbolt' country.(OK. So that was filmed in Somerset). Nice in light comedy, Bogarde never really convinced in action roles and though Baker may have convinced some (Himself maybe) that he was tough, one feels that a Broderick Crawford or Richard Boone, possibly even James Mason, (if thinly sliced) would have eaten them both on toast, . Watch for the 'two shot' when Bogarde confronts Baker in the saloon and the bottle of 'Canada Club' whisky on the table jumps on and off its tray.