I have a reasonably clear memory of watching a film as a child. Not a well-known film, as this story will demonstrate, probably on Turner Classic Movies or some similar satellite channel. I can recollect some key details about the film, enough to know I wasn’t imagining it, but try as I might I have never been able to work out what the film was.
The film was one of those period action-adventure numbers, with an Anglo-American hero, some German (or other European colonial) troops, and a native tribe (I think the film was set in Africa). It is very like an Allan Quartermain type storyline, but I have seen quite a few Quartermain films and read the plots of others, leaving me fairly certainly that it didn’t feature that character, rather someone similar. The very distinctive part of the film which I remember is that the German bad guys were on a monitor-style gunboat which was involved in a climatic battle scene, in which the commander was controlling the boat looking through a periscope, as he distinctly makes reference to being able to see using the periscope in one scene.
I have tried looking for the film on the Internet over the years, occasionally reattempting my search in the hope that more information has become available or search engines have become more capable. For my most recent attempt I turned to ChatGPT 4.0 to see if it had a clue. Alas, to no avail.
I don’t even remember whether the film was any good or not, and the difficulty in tracking it down suggests it is hardly a classic. My infrequently repeated efforts to track the film down have largely become about the search, rather than watching the film if I find it. The search continues…
Commonplace 