The Sandpit Generals

1971 film by Hall Bartlett

July 1971 (1971-07)

Running time

102 minutesCountryUnited StatesLanguageEnglish

The Sandpit Generals (also released as The Defiant and The Wild Pack) is a 1971 drama film directed by Hall Bartlett. Its plot is based on the novel Captains of the Sands by Jorge Amado. Melodious soundtracks were written by Dorival Caymmi.

The film was not popular in the United States due to its socialist context and was banned by Brazil's military regime for the same reason, but became an iconic film in the Soviet Union, where it took part in the 7th Moscow International Film Festival and, although did not win any prize,^[1]^[2] in a few years was widely distributed in movie theaters and was proclaimed "the best foreign film" by Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper in 1974.

In the socialist country, the movie became so well-known that it inspired theater plays, books, special reports on post-Soviet criminal youth etc.^[3]

Plot

The film features a street gang of poor homeless youth struggling for existence in Brazil. After letting a girl with her little brother settle in their beach shelter, the gang's inner spirit is gradually reformed as she brings a sense of love and family into their shabby abode. One of the local priests helps the gang at the cost of his clergy career. Police eventually capture the main characters and after their lengthy stay in prison, the girl is terminally ill. Her sudden death is a culmination of the movie, it urges the gang to fight for their rights against the government.

Cast

Juarez Santalvo
Freddie Gedeon as Almiro
Ademir da Silva as Big John
Guilherme Lamounier as The Cat
Eliana Pittman as Dalvah
Dorival Caymmi as John Adam
Peter Nielsen as Lollipop
Mark De Vries as Dry Turn
Butch Patrick as No Legs
John Rubinstein as Professor
Tisha Sterling as Dora
Kent Lane as Bullet

References

^ "Moscow International Film Festival 1971 page at imdb.com". IMDb. Retrieved 2009-06-13.
^ "7th Moscow International Film Festival (1971)". MIFF. Archived from the original on 2014-04-03. Retrieved 2012-12-23.
^ Darmaros, Marina Fonseca (2017). "Jorge Amado in the USSR: allowed printed, "dangerous" on the big screen". Brasiliana: Journal for Brazilian Studies. 6 (1): 7–27. doi:10.25160/bjbs.v6i1.98883. ISSN 2245-4373.