This Morocco-set whodunit is based on the 1948 novel by Dr. Bernard Victor Dryer, whose career path was diverted temporarily by a 1937 playwriting scholarship to the Yale School of Drama, where he studied alongside fellow recipient Arthur Miller. John Garfield was the first to see the cinematic potential in Dryer's novel but the actor's sudden death in 1952 put the project into turnaround. Passed on to Columbia Pictures, Port Afrique (1956) got underway with Philip Carey in the Garfield role of a crippled American war hero who returns to his Moroccan plantation to find his wife has been murdered in his absence. Shot in Technicolor on location in Teutan and the port of Ceuta, Port Afrique (1956) was directed by Rudolph Maté, the acclaimed Hungarian cinematographer (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Stella Dallas, Gilda) who had a decade earlier turned to directing with such worthwhile titles as D.O.A. (1950) and When Worlds Collide (1951) to his credit. Filming interiors at Shepperton Studios in the United Kingdom, Maté was able to call upon a wealth of new British talent to fill out his supporting cast and Port Afrique benefits from the participation of rising stars Anthony Newley and Christopher Lee. Lee's dark complexion and sinister aspect had in earlier films restricted him to playing ethnics but all that would change when the independent Hammer Film Productions cast him as the creature in Curse of Frankenstein (1957) the following year.

By Richard Harland Smith