The gamble of size

A movie that recently showed up in the FXM rotation is one that was completely new to me: The Big Gamble. It's going to be on again tomorrow, at 3:00 AM and 1:15 PM.

The first thing we see is that, sadly, the movie is panned and scanned. Then we see that this is a film from Darryl F. Zanuck Productions, for distribution by Fox, having been made during the time that the Taylor/Burton Cleopatra was being made back in the States.

The background under the credits is the docks of Dublin, Ireland, and into the scene comes one Vic Brennan (Stephen Boyd), who is with his bride Marie (Juliette Greco) in order to meet his family again for the first time in years. In that interim, Vic spent his life in the merchant marine sailing the seas, which is why he has a Corsican wife and not a good Irish lass.

Anyhow, his family knows that if he wants to see all of them it can only mean one thing: one family member is asking the others for money. Indeed, Vic learned of an interesting business proposal from one of the friends he made on one of the ships of which he was a crew member. Africa is being decolonized (the movie was released in 1961, just after the great wave of decolonization in 1960), and there's going to be a need for goods transport. Vic thinks he can make a killing driving a truck in Côte d'Ivoire. But there's one catch: he doesn't have a truck, and needs £4,000 capital to buy one.

The rest of the family is understandably skeptical, and you get the impression that the family has had a lot of bitter internal squabbles in the past and dislike Vic in part for getting away from the family. At least Aunt Cathleen (Dame Sybil Thorndike in a more or less cameo role) likes Marie, so she might be able to get the other family members to agree to fund Vic's idea.

Eventually, they do in fact agree, but under one condition. They want to make certain their investment doesn't just disappear a continent away, so they plan to send Vic's cousin Sam (David Wayne) along as a business partner to make certain there's no funny business. Sam is the one member of the family other than Vic who has any business sense, but unlike Vic he doesn't have the initiative and is definitely unsuited for going off to Africa. But go off he does.

At this point, the action shifts to Africa and we get all the tropes you can expect in a Hollywood (or at least in this case, a Hollywood man basing himself in Europe) movie. Sam drops the briefcase with the import documents into the ocean, making it a question of whether the truck will be released from its impoundment at all. But it does, and the three set off with a couple hundred cases of beer for the town of Jubenda in the north.

You'd think these brilliant people would have a compass with them, and maybe even a sextant to determine latitude or something. But they don't. And the roads are bad, since there's almost nothing paved. (I'm amazed they didn't run out of gas). At least on the occasion they reach a big tree blocking the road they run into a group of happy natives willing to help move the tree for a price. There's also another expat (Gregory Ratoff) who turns out to be a thief, and so on.

The Big Gamble isn't exactly a bad movie, but it's also not particularly good. It's the sort of story we've seen before, told in a very pedestrian manner. There are also all of those tropes about the locals in a distant land (Africa in this case, although a fair number of other movies have India for this), and the colonial administration (former, I think; the movie doesn't explicitly state when it was set). Being panned and scanned also takes away the best thing the movie would have going for it, which is the scenery that would probably look quite nice in wide screen as it was intended.

The TCM shop claims that The Big Gamble did get a DVD release courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme, but that the DVD is now on backorder (I don't know exactly what happened to their MOD scheme after Disney took over parts of Fox). So you'll have to catch the FXM showings.