HotToastyRag While King Solomon's Mines is a pretty famous movie, and arguably the inspiration for the Indiana Jones franchise, it's not really favorites of mine. Still, someone else might like it, so I'll try to be unbiased. H. Rider Haggard's famous novel has seen several film adaptations, but the 1950 version is the most famous. Sorry, Richard Chamberlain. In it, the adventurous hero Allan Quartermain, played by Stewart Granger, is hired to find a man who's gone missing while searching for the legendary mines in Africa. The man's wife and brother-in-law, played by Deborah Kerr and Richard Carlson, accompany the search party, and all three find an abundance of adventures along the way.If you like adventure movies, and don't mind if they're a touch slower than they were in the 1980s and 1990s, you can rent this one and see the inspiration behind your modern favorites. If you're just looking for a good Deborah Kerr movie, you can try From Here to Eternity or The Grass is Greener instead.

seanmoliver64 This 1950's version of King Solomon's Mines is unusual in a couple ways. First, there's no symphonic music score whatsoever. Film music is typically used to tell us what we as the audience should feel about activity on screen, and also tell us what the characters themselves are supposedly feeling. In this way both audience and characters share the same emotional reactions. Music on film is such a common and natural expectation (or substitute?) for an audience's emotions, that some reviewers here think the movie was bland and boring!Secondly, the MGM crew of about 30 people and 7 cargo trucks spent months in 1949 filming this on the Dark Continent itself, at locations hundreds of miles from civilization in eastern Africa instead of the usual Hollywood lots. They enlisted the inhabitants of remote villages as actors, asked them to perform communal dances, and took many close-up shots of their faces, hair, headgear, jewelry and body paint. This amounts to some of the most magnificent - and rare - color and sound footage of "old" untouched African culture I've seen. Not long after this, during the 1950's-1960's these villages gradually became part of the modern world, and by the 1980's, remote tribesmen were filmed as they hunted with spears - wearing "Michael Jackson" t- shirts.The movie is generally pretty good, but the Africans steal the show.

vostf This is a run-of-the-mill Hollywood production where the emphasis is on the colourful trip to inner Africa. The most interesting parts are clearly the tribes choreographies and the safari shots, which makes King Solomon's Mines OK as family entertainment, but makes the movie dull on the action side.With the difficulty to shoot on location most of the scenes it was a real challenge to do better than this flat continuity of talky scenes interspersed with beautiful shots of the African wildlife and local people. The story results quite boring: being a family movie it can't stem away from its clean line and thus you are only waiting for the prize in the title to materialise. And even then it is far from climactic since most of the movie has long before been let to tell a African story of its own.

tom-456 This movie is a bad remake of a very good movie that was made in 1937. The only advantage of this particular version is that it avoids the silly, comical aspects of the later versions. Most people who recommend this movie are comparing it to the more recent remakes, and most likely have never seen the 1937 version. The 1937 version tells an exciting story, and the acting is good. In this 1950 version, the plot is downplayed and becomes secondary to the romantic goings-on. Basically, it has been turned into a sort of soap opera set in Africa. Yeah, a lot of the scenery is good, but the special effects are not even as good as they are in the 1937 version, and the acting is deplorable. It is decidedly inferior to the 1937 version.