Sands of the Kalahari

A small plane comes down over the Kalahari Desert. Six people survive: a hunter, a doctor, an engineer, a German, the pilot and a woman. They find water, settle on a rocky hill, and have to share the area with baboons. The first days pass in solidarity. Then one of them does the arithmetic: the fewer people are left, the better the chances of whoever remains. Cy Endfield directed; he had made Zulu the year before and Stanley Baker is in the cast again. Stuart Whitman plays the hunter and he is the character at the centre. The mould is the survival adventure, but the film puts the human next to the animal and measures them the same way; the baboons are not scenery but another society facing the characters. It was shot in South West Africa. The ending does not land where the genre has trained you to expect, and that is why it is remembered.