MovieChat Forums > Sands of the Kalahari (1965) Discussion > Movie Versus Book

Movie Versus Book

posted 14 years ago by fortyseven14
2 replies | jump to latest

I do not see Professor Jefferson Smith listed in the cast. I am currently reading the book which I purchased several years ago at a used book store. It was published 50 years ago...in 1960. The male characters O'Brien, Bain and Jefferson Smith are all Americans. Jefferson Smith is African American. A professor at Harvard. Honestly, I have not seen the movie (or maybe I have forgotten it in all these years) but it does not sound like great casting or faithful to the book as someone else said it was, somewhere on this sight. Why should they have left out the character who was writing a journal...the character O'Brien chose to take out into the wilderness and threaten to kill if he (Jefferson) didn't start walking away...because there were too many people for the food supply? I'll have to see the movie, to see what they did to the story but it sounds as though they could have done a much better job. Stuart Whitman as O'Brien??? Weird choice. I notice they cast the character of Detjens who is already dead when the book starts....OH WELL....

[–] solex10 11 years ago

And yet, people say that this movie is great (with one reviewer here saying that it's better than the 2001 Spider-Man movie!) What we have here in the not casting of the African-American character is 'white-washing' in which a non-white character is changed into a white one simply because the makers of the film feel that a black character wouldn't sell tickets like a white one would.

So, I guess that this movie isn't as great as people say that it is.

[–] hiccough 10 years ago

> Why should they have left out the character ... O'Brien chose to take out into the wilderness and threaten to kill if he (Jefferson) didn't start walking away ... because there were too many people for the food supply?

That character being black might have gotten everyone thinking, 'Sure, it's the token black guy who's expendable and gets kicked out'. Which might have been a distraction from the main point of O'Brien's ruthlessness.