Rhodes of Africa

90 minutes is hardly long enough time to tell the story of a most complex man. Cecil Rhodes was a combination robber baron and adventurer who amassed a fortune by being the last man standing in a war to control the diamond mining industry in South Africa. But Rhodes was a guy who dreamed big and wanted nothing less than control of sub Sahara Africa and if he had lived another two decades he might have had it.

Walter Huston was imported from America to play Rhodes who never married. So single minded and intense was he in pursuit of his goals he didn't make time or wasn't interested in a family. If he had done that the immense fortune that he acquired would never have gone to Rhodes scholarships for instance.

Obviously Gaumont British films wanted him to be a hero, but there just was too much bad in what he did to create his fortune to make Huston as Rhodes a sympathetic figure. His great adversary Paul Kruger leader of the Transvaal Republic of the Boers played here by Oscar Homolka comes off as more sympathetic. By accident Gaumont British did what UFA Studios in Nazi Germany did on purpose in their film Ohm Kruger where the same story is told from the Boer and hence anti-British point of view.

With an independent and majority black led South Africa now, the Cecil Rhodes if filmed today would be markedly different. Probably a whole lot better as well.