King Solomon's Mines (1950) (2024)

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• Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★½ 9

  That dance off/battle towards the end was kinda dope, ngl.

  The film as a whole was also really entertaining. Whether it was the case or it was pure coincidence, you can see how it may have gone to influence other movies in the genre, from Indy to Romancing the Stone and even The Mummy films with Fraser. Not only in its style and sense of adventure, but Granger’s entire personality, with his wry, witty, and somewhat sarcastic personality, reminded me a lot of Ford, especially. Either way, he was great, and Kerr was also really good and fun as the high-class, refined lady who needs to get used to this new land and costumes and get her feet from whatever…

• Review by Lise ★★★★ 3

  Well this turned out to be a pleasant surprise.

  I knew that it was an adventure set in Africa, and with that came a lot of expectations, none of them good. I imagined that the Africans would be portrayed as foreign and dangerous. I imagined that there was going to be plenty of shooting at wild animals, and I knew that the woman going on the safari was going to be a love interest who would be patronized at every turn, and of course she would fall every few minutes on the expedition and scream a lot at anything that moved.

  The very first scene was not encouraging. Seeing silly men shoot at elephants for bragging rights repulsed me. (I…

• Review by Jeremy Hall 🟠🟢🔵 ★★★★ 4

  I'll be honest with you, I wasn't sure that I was going to like this one after the movie opened up on our hero and a group of big game hunters shooting and killing an elephant. Another elephant kills an African man as revenge, and our protagonist Allen Quartermain makes some pretty sexist statements early on. This is just within the first few minutes of the film and I had a feeling then that we were in for a long ride. While this is clearly a dated film, I will say that I ended up being pleasantly surprised. My only other experience of watching the character of Allen Quartermain was in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen where Sean Connery played…

• Review by Schratzi ★★★★½ 10

  There are no souls in the jungle, very little justice and no ethics. And in the end, you begin to accept it all. You watch things hunting and being hunted. Reproducing, killing and dying. It’s all endless and pointless. Except, in the end, one small pattern emerges from it all. The only certainty. One is born, one lives for a time and one dies. That’s all.

  The massively popular 1885 pulp novel King Solomon‘s Mines by H. Rider Haggard introduced Africa-based British adventurer Allan Quatermain. He became not only the template for the Indiana Jones character, but also the subject of a number of his own movie adaptations, none of which can hold a candle to this 1950 classic.
  The…

• Review by Blair Russell 🎃👻🦇🕸️🪦 ★★★½ 8

  A movie for Mom. That’s as in my late mother, who passed away on July 25, 2020. I don’t even know how many hundreds of users have followed me since that date, so I’ll be brief: she was sick for all of 2020 due to an illness I won’t mention, except that it was NOT COVID; there wasn’t a worse time for such an illness than a pandemic that hadn’t occurred in a century. That anniversary was why I didn’t see anything on Tuesday; those were bad memories of what she went through the last months of her life.

  This version of King Solomon’s Mines was a favorite of hers; more than once I caught her viewing it on TCM.…

• Review by Andy Summers 🤠 ★★★½ 3

  The amount of good films that were released in 1950 continues to amaze me, even outside of my Western comfort zone? An epic looking MGM spectacular filmed in various African locations, this film stars Stewart Granger, Deborah Kerr, and Richard Carlson, and uses the stunning scenery of Kenya, Uganda, and The Belgian Congo as a backdrop for an adventure film with bite.

  This film begins with what can only be described as the horrific slaughter of an elephant at the hands of a big game hunter under the supervision of Granger's Allan Quatermain, a British Safari guide. It looked very real, possibly archive footage of a real hunt, but still a despicable act of cruelty, and one that shapes my…

• Review by Taylor Leverage ★★½

  Solomon ruled over Biblical Israel, but his diamond mines were 2,500 miles away in the center of Africa. That seems like an awfully long way to go, but then I remembered I can buy Himalayan rock salt at the grocery store. The future is now, old man.

  An ambitious and spectacle-heavy early adventure film that brings the exotic promise of the fictional Victorian adventurer Allan Quatermain to the masses in full Technicolor. The story itself is an important one; as a novel, King Solomon's Mines helped to establish the idea of the 'lost world' in print, which in turn dictated the direction of popular adventure fiction and later, ideas in science fiction. While it's not really possible to adapt most…

• Review by AndrewC 🎃👻 ★★★ 4

  By today's standards, the 1950 version of King Solomon's Mines probably isn't a particularly thrilling adventure film but it is still a pretty entertaining watch that has some admirable location shooting and use of its African settings. It definitely feels a lot more expansive than many other adventure movies of its time as it was clearly shot on location in Africa and thus takes advantage of that with sweeping shots of the landscape and lots of wildlife incorporated into the film (including, unfortunately, what appears to be an actual elephant being shot in an opening scene). Those things really work to the movie's benefit and are really the reason to watch it, even though the rest of it is mostly…

• Review by Todd Hill ★★★½ 1

  I'm giving this African safari adventure pic a relatively decent review because, frankly, I expected it to be much worse. Fresh in my mind is another, similarly themed Best Picture nominee, 1931's "Trader Horn," one of the worst movies I've ever seen. But this is not that at all. Yes, it opens with the killing of an elephant, but thereafter animals are only killed when the characters need to eat. And although Deborah Kerr does fall down a lot, she always gets back up, and her character is ultimately a strong one. Stewart Granger also makes a solid Allan Quartermain.

  The biggest improvement though is in the depiction of the various African tribes. We're left with the sense that these…

• Review by Mark Kaiserman ★★½

  Yet another example (maybe one of the first) where a character perfectly cuts and styles their own hair with only a hunting knife.

  Really hard to believe this was nominated for best picture. Last 1/3 of the movie is considerably better (as in SOMETHING happens) than the first 2/3.

• Review by Christopher Moore ★★★★ 3

  While getting past the atrocious opening scene where an elephant gets shot isn't easy, I do think King Solomon's Mines is one of the best adventure flicks of the 1950s.

  Stewart Granger plays a red-blooded safari guide who must journey through Africa's only unexplored region. Accompanying him is Deborah Kerr who is in search of her husband believed to have been lost in the area. Apparently, he was after the fabled mines of King Solomon.

  MGM did not spare any expense in the making of the film. It features some lovingly rendered on-location Technicolor vistas of the African wilderness, which must have been quite some feat in 1950. Treatment of the African tribes used for the film was sensitively done,…

• Review by Dale Nauertz ★★★ 1

  Stewart Granger is Allan Quatermain, a safari guide who generally leads rich jerks into the heart of Africa to shoot elephants. He's understandably grown sick of doing this and wishes to retire to England to spend time with his son. Just as he's about to do that, however, a woman and her brother approach Allan and ask him to lead them on a trek through unexplored (by white people) country to find the woman's husband, who went searching for the diamond mines of King Solomon and hasn't been seen since. Allan initially refuses, but when the woman offers him a ridiculous sum of money, he begrudgingly agrees, even though he has no illusions that he will ever return from this…