The Wilby Conspiracy

Sidney Poitier is Shack Twala, a political activist in 1970s apartheid-era South Africa, and Michael Caine plays Jim Keogh, a British engineer who ends up on the run with Twala after he intervenes during a brutal display of police abuse. Adapted from a 1972 novel by Peter Driscoll, this 1975 escape thriller plays like a modern version of The Defiant Ones, minus the shackles and racial animosity--at least between the two fugitives. The racism is all on the side of the white South African police led by the ruthlessly racist Afrikaner Major Horn (Nicol Williamson), who treats the manhunt like a matter of national security. The story plays like a classic chase thriller as the two strangers thrown together by circumstance work together to get across the border to safety in Zimbabwe. It is also one of the first mainstream American movies to present apartheid South Africa as a racist police state, a lesson that Keogh learns firsthand. Director Ralph Nelson doesn’t soften the portrait of the virulently bigoted cops who treat every black African as a criminal or a child. It makes for an interesting time capsule, while the banter between Poitier and Caine sustains the action through the familiar twists and turns of the plot. The great Indian actor Saeed Jaffrey plays a friend sympathetic to the black rights movement, while Rutger Hauer makes his film debut in a small role. A strong optional purchase. (S. Axmaker)