1st of a new series 

MOVIES I ENJOYED FROM THE FAR PAST

THE 7TH DAWN

1964 

Directed by Lewis Gilbert

An overlooked William Holden film, I first viewed this political adventure back in the middle 1960’s when it first came to Oklahoma City as a first-run at the Plaza Theater.  Even as a 12-year-old, I got the gist of the film, based on the 1960 novel The Durian Tree by Michael Keon.  The film, set during the Malayan Emergency, was made in Malaysia eleven years after the conflict.  

Director Louis Gilbert gives the viewer a sense of place and time, and the film is beautifully shot.  It is like taking a trip to Malaysia in the 1950s, a world you know little about.  Holden, along with the beautiful Susanna York and the more mature but just as hot Capucine, gives the story a romantic edge with danger and death just hanging around.  It is as if director Gilbert cut his teeth on this film, preparing him for his later James Bond-directed movies.  We also get a sense of a country in turmoil, a few years after World War 2, as Southeast Asia was still coping with foreign countries meddling in its politics and ruling its prized possessions as colonial powers.  Revolutionaries were the name of violence, and it was not a time of peace.  It was a bloody and political world that gave the film its drama. 

I have revisited the movie many times and, again, am looking for a future viewing soon.  

I have rated the film 3.5 stars out of 5 in my short Letterboxd review.  With that, I highly recommend it for a different look at this part of the world and its history.