Lost in the Desert 1969
Dirkie (original title)
G | 1h 21min | Adventure, Drama, Thriller | May 1975 (USA)
Storyline:
After a plane crash a young boy and his dog wander through the Kalahari desert.
User review:
I saw this film as a double bill with ‘The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad’ back in 1974, with my father when I was growing up in Sutton Surrey. As an 8 year old it had an enduring impact on me. I then remember seeing it again in 1980 one Monday afternoon on TV – which confirms it was broadcast on British television at least once. I’m still searching for a copy on DVD which I believe is available now after all these years. It’s a shame that this film of a boys survival & a fathers determination to find him has been largely forgotten now. It was powerful as a children’s film, but certainly rises above a lot of the pointless movies made for children these days. I’m looking forward to finding a copy very soon.
Director: Jamie Uys (as Jamie Hayes)
Writer: Jamie Uys (as Jamie Hayes)
Stars: Wynand Uys, Jamie Uys, Lady Frolic of Belvedale
Country: South Africa
Language: Afrikaans | English
Release Date: May 1975 (USA)
Also Known As: Adventure in the Red Desert
Filming Locations: Africa
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151392/
Format : Matroska
Format version : Version 4
File size : 1.26 GiB
Duration : 1 h 21 min
Overall bit rate : 2 226 kb/s
This South African Techniscope and Technicolor adventure film was aimed at children without anyone realising just how unbelievably traumatic it would be for its target audience. Even today, people are complaining about how it upset them and scared the life out of them when they were children in the 1970s. How it got passed by the British Board of Film Censors with a ‘U’ certificate is a mystery to me. It would have been better passed with an ‘AA’ certificate, which would have prevented anyone under the age of 14 years from seeing it in a cinema.
Little Dirkie (Wynand Uys), the eight years old asthmatic son of a concert pianist, together with his little Skye terrier, Lolly, are the sole survivors of a light plane crash in the Kalahari desert and he quickly has to learn how to survive in the vast, hostile wilderness. Preyed upon by villainous hyenas, rampaging elephants, spitting vipers, and deadly scorpions, it’s boy versus nature as this city kid and his faithful doggy companion attempt to navigate their way out of the desert, while being searched for with helicopters and planes. His trials and tribulations are downright Biblical as everything that could go wrong, does go wrong.
The adults in the picture are all strictly cardboard characters (with the exception of a Kalahari bushman and his son) but little Wynand Uys is absolutely superb and gives a heart-rending performance as Dirkie…a tour-de-force in acting that is so very moving. As an audience, we really feel for this little boy and his dog, although I, like many others, found it more than a bit disturbing. It was actually filmed in 1968, but was not released in the UK until 1974, when it went out as the lower half of a Columbia Pictures double bill with “The Golden Voyage of Sinbad”. So far, it has not had a commercial DVD release in the UK or USA and DVDs of it seem only to originate in South Africa, with the original 2.35:1 aspect ratio cropped at the sides to 1.85:1. It has been shown quite a few times in the past two years on the Talking Pictures TV channel in the UK, but only in now obsolete pan and scan format, which horizontally crops off half of the image.