HotToastyRag It's the age-old "children are color-blind, adults are racist" theme in Something of Value. Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier grew up together as children, and now in their young adulthood, they're still incredibly close. They laugh, play, hunt, and talk together, even though Rock's family doesn't really think it's right. One day, while hunting for sport, Sidney gets a little miffed that he's not allowed to shoot the gun. Rock tries to explain that it's just the way things are, but Robert Beatty, the mean brother-in-law, intervenes. He slaps Sidney's face and orders him to never argue with his superiors again. Rock is heartbroken and Sidney bursts into tears—I actually turned the movie off during that scene, I was so upset.After having a glass of water, taking a walk outside, and giving myself a talking-to, I decided to turn the movie back on and continue watching it. After all, the actors' heart-wrenching performances were benefits of the film, right? If I was so shaken up by that horrible scene, that meant the film was well written and crafted, right? So, I dried my tears and pressed play.The rest of the film follows Sidney as he runs away from home and joins a rebellious group who fight back against their British captors. Rock just wants his friend back, but Sidney is too far gone, and has become angry and full of hate. It's a pretty violent, upsetting film, showing both the creation and sustention of deep-seeded racism on both sides. If that's the type of movie you like, go ahead and watch this, but I wish I'd never given it a second chance. I don't like movies like this; my heart is far too sensitive.Kiddy Warning: Obviously, you have control over your own children. However, due to racially upsetting scenes and violence, I wouldn't let my kids watch it.

t_atzmueller Having spent a good part of my childhood in East-Africa, I read Robert Ruarks novel „Something of Value" (and the semi-follow-up „Uhuru") numerous times while living in Tanzania and for a while it was among my favorite novels. It had elements of Hemingway, Mitchell, being adventurous at times, historically interesting and during many parts extremely violent and shocking. The movie I saw only a few years later and was not too impressed.The story is relatively straight-forward and simple: two African boys, Peter (son of a white settler) and Kimani, a native Kikuyu have grown up together almost like brothers. As time goes back, the friends drift apart. Peter becomes a safari-guide and Kimani, disillusioned by the white rule of Kenya and still bearing a grudge against Peters brother-in-law Jeff joins the Mau-Mau movement, who seek to take control over the country and eject / butcher the Whites. Soon the former best friends become each others mortal enemies and will have to face off in a fight to the death.Some people claimed, that the book is oversimplified and much of the cruelty (generally committed by the Mau-Mau, which are portrayed as a form of terrorist guerrillas, who soon didn't distinguish any longer between butchering their enemies, the Whites, or Kikuyu who opposed to disagreed with their methods. Be that as it may, there has been enough violence and brutalities in more recent years, in Liberia, Somalia, Rwanda etc, should be telling that the Mau-Mau uprising was probably by no means a gentle affair. Quiet the opposite.As for the movie: for the time it must have been slightly more violent than most pictures, but doesn't even get close to the horrors of the book (and reality). Compare to contemporary films, for example, "Blood Diamond", "Something of Value" still feels like it has been produced in a Hollywood studio, despite having been filmed in Africa. Furthermore I was not at all comfortable with the actors, despite me appreciating both Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier. Especially Hudson is way too squeaky clean for the role, the American accent is atrocious (again, it point to "Blood Diamond" and the excellent job Leonardo DiCaprio did with imitating a Rhodesian accent), not for one moment could one imagine Hudson being anything but an American actor put into a safari-suit. Sure, Poitier does a far more convincing job (especially the accent) but again, looks nothing like an African from this part of the continent.It would also be unfair to say that the rest of a crew did a bad job, but one would really wish for a remake (this coming from somebody who has a general dislike for the concept of remakes, reboots, etc), something grittier, more realistic and it's not that there is a shortage of capable African actors of all colors these days. After all, it's not that the novel has lost anything of value and isn't as contemporary as when it was written.6/10

bkoganbing Thoughtful people around the world have despaired for Africa, the most abused and exploited continent on our globe. The year that the film version of Robert Ruark's novel Something Of Value came out, the first colony of British Africa, the Gold Coast became the independent Republic of Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah. When we see film like Leonardo DiCpario's Blood Diamond come out fifty years later, you have to wonder whether Africa's many problems will ever be solved in the lifetime of most of us.Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier play childhood friends who grew up side by side in Kenya colony. But race and racial politics have driven them apart as Poitier has joined the nascent Mau Mau movement whose mission it was to kill all the white settlers and drive them from their part of the continent. Hudson who believes the races can peaceful exist together in the Kenya colony and soon to be independent country wants to reconcile with Poitier. The film concerns his attempts to do so.Some very good supporting performances by Dana Wynter, Wendy Hiller, Ivan Dixon, and William Marshall are in Something Of Value. Best scene in the film other than the final confrontation with Hudson and Poitier is Hudson's father played by Robert Beatty successfully breaking down Mau Mau leader Juano Hernandez into giving up his cohorts. Beatty's knowledge of the Kikuyu tribe culture comes into play here.The white racist attitudes are exemplified by Michael Pate whose Australian accent makes him sound the most authentically African or the closest to it among the white cast members.Sad to say this most authentic of African stories is still very relevant today as seen by the critical and popular acclaim that Blood Diamond received in 2006. Hudson, Poitier, and the rest of the cast do some of their best work in Something Of Value.

carvalheiro "Something of Value" (1957) directed by Richard Brooks like that in itself it's a segregated specimen as genre in extinction of ancient black humor now as well told as positive discrimination, which means that memory and perception view from liberal democratic from the past itself is always old and not in mood. Even though when it was the rehearsal of the movie about Mau Mau incident, in 1952 and unrest that arose in the African continent, in which alarming peasants in a suddenly butchery contributes for that it finally aliments revenge from colons. The scene of the mentor chief in sermon of life, with some of the first group of insurgents, is still of master in black and white screening and screaming.There are some characters of hunters with bwana's spirits and in itself this movie has scenes that by its crudity shocking a while inside the home of a given farmer, constructed as a resort near a kind of precarious compound for natives a half there in unrest, which took the viewers for the tragedy and switched targets during the fighting, but its melodramatic realism surpasses the confusion by the clarification of the strengths in presence and that holds the concerned characters of the colonization in its diversified reaction, before the lack of local institutions to compromise with the unlocked way of the people, by whom had taking as peasants and servants the way of uncontrolled answer to the oppression. This movie is a failed compromise between father and son at the pace for substituting oppression by religion and civilized youth by owners against employees of the soil without changing costumes nor structure of the soil, with a local chief and a young Mau Mau in enraged and prolonged injustice, deep both in violence that caught this specific colonial situation at the brink of irrationality and army genocide by lack of comprehension for the standing that the African continent meant against European presence before independence. Except more patient compromising with religious differences and beginning of separatist mind for calming interests. As if things were like that in Kenya at the same time, that others out of this territoriality were also thinking less in such a dramatic structure, without enough presence to understand that phase of the fighting, without rules than terror and unrest out of democratic values of the colonists at the time. No way out at this stage of the movie, only waiting for the grow up of the black baby belonging to the killed young revolutionary - in 1954, Dedan Kimathi from Aberdare forest guerrilla whose evocation is made here in this movie three years after - at the time of awakening, as premonitory it was the book from where Brooks took his screenplay.