Guns at Batasi (1964)

Directors

John Guillermin

Cast

Richard Attenborough, Jack Hawkins, Flora Robson, John Leyton, Mia Farrow, Cecil Parker

The story

Guns of Batasi depicts an erupting world where newly empowered forces, both black and white, embrace the realpolitik of a post-colonial world. A group of veteran British NCOs, headed by martinet Regimental Sergeant Major Lauderdale, becomes entangled with a coup in an unnamed African state, recently-independent and dogged by political intrigue. The unnamed country is evocative of Kenya in East Africa: RSM Lauderdale mentions the Turkana peoples (who live in Kenya), native soldiers speak in Kiswahili, the lingua franca of the Kenyan region, and aspects of the story echo Kenya's troubled post-independence era, including the 1957 Mau Mau…

Genres

Film metadata comes from the open sources listed in Credits & Contact. Catalogue details may be incomplete.

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