A Boy Ten Feet Tall, handicapped by a title that suggests a doggedly inspirational outing for the very young, offers more enchantment per reel than most movies of twice its ambitions. This fresh, crackling and suspenseful African adventure story gives top billing to Veteran Edward G. Robinson, who bolsters the fun with his strongest performance in years.
The plot, from a lively little novel by W. H. Canaway, tells of Sammy (Fergus McClelland), a ten-year-old lad whose British parents are killed by British bombers over Port Said during the 1956 Suez crisis. Sammy sets out alone on a 5,000-mile odyssey to Durban, South Africa, to find his aunt. He joins a Syrian peddler in the desert and, when the Syrian meets disaster, takes his muiles and money and continues south. He eludes well-meaning tourists near Luxor, covers nearly 2,000 tense miles by boat, train and foot before he falls in with a grizzled old diamond poacher (Robinson) whose wilderness hideout looks like paradise enough for any boy of ten or man of 60.
Director Alexander Mackendrick keeps a tight hold on the story, smoothly matching it to the rhythm and color of strange locales—from teeming river ports to the wild game country where Sammy spends one dark African night silhouetted in a treetop, loudly and desperately singing "Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?" But young McClelland projects courage without cuteness, and he is aided by consistently pungent dialogue. Forced to cope with the adult world, Sammy grows tough and wily, even puts on a bit, as when he embroiders details of his life at Port
Said: "We had lots of servants in baggy silk trousers—one was an ex-eunuch." In the simple, gruffly tender relationship between the stray orphan and the fugitive bounder, Boy combines the charm of Huck Finn with the ruggedness of a Hemingway safari.