Tanganyika is a 1954 American Technicolor action adventure film directed by Andre de Toth and starring Van Heflin, Ruth Roman and Howard Duff.Posters, lobby cards and film stills associated with TanganyikaMovieman. Tanganyika write-up and collection of lobby cards (Films of the Fifties, January 25, 2013) It was produced and distributed by Universal Pictures.
Plot In 1903 in the British colonial region adjoining German East Africa (a portion of which was referenced as Tanganyika), tough American colonist John Gale is leading a safari to capture escaped murderer Abel McCracken, who is inciting the Nukumbi tribe and endangering Gale's holdings.Sculthorpe, Derek. Van Heflin: A Life in Film, pages 113–14. McFarland, 2016
En route, Gale rescues four survivors of a Nukumbi raid: Dan Harder (who is secretly McCracken's brother), former teacher Peggy and the two orphaned children of her brother who was killed in the raid. Gale hopes to stake a claim on a valuable piece of land. The Nukumbi are lying in wait and eventually Gale and McCracken meet in man-to-man combat.Additional posters, lobby cards and film stills associated with Tanganyika
Cast Van Heflin as John Gale Ruth Roman as Peggy Howard Duff as Dan Harder McCracken Jeff Morrow as Abel McCracken Joe Comadore as Andolo Noreen Corcoran as Sally Gregory Marshall as Andy Naaman Brown as Nukumbi Prisoner Edward C. Short as Head Porter Murray Alper as Paul Duffy Jester Hairston as Singer
Reception In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic Howard Thompson called Tanganyika a "standard safari exercise" and wrote: "These glimpses of animal and tribal behavior and the lush horizons superimposed on the Universal back lot only stress the cardboard nature of the scenario credited to William Sackheim and Richard Alan Simmons, and a story which William R. Cox obviously didn't get from Dr. Livingstone. The savage-beast encounters occur right on schedule, and in the absurd climax, dynamite, no less, saves the day. And director Andre de Toth, usually alert, allows the pace to lag continually."
References
External links
Tanganyika at TV Guide (1987 write-up was originally published in The Motion Picture Guide)