This colorful picture is set in Columbia, South America , and specifically at the treacherous jungle . There prospector Rian Mitchell (Stewart Granger) comes across what he thinks may be an important emerald site . A bit later on , emerald miner Mitchell is wounded by some bandits , however meets plantation owner named Catherine Knowland (Grace Kelly) and nursed back to health . Catherine along with her brother Donald (John Ericsun) runs a coffee plantation. Rian goes back to get his colleague Vic Leonard (Paul Douglas) to join him in his mining venture . When they come back to the location , they must deal with a nasty native , El Moro, who claims he has rights for the land the major mine is on . Meanwhile , Mitchell and Catherine fall in love and they subsequently are threatened by El Moro .
This exciting film contains adventures , thrills , a love story and colorful outdoors well photographed by cameraman Paul Vogel . Plenty of a Hollywood all-star cast as Granger, Kelly , Douglas and Ericsun ; however ordinary script complications muddle the tale . Director Andrew Marton likes lots of big , noisy explosions , especially at its finale , when he doesn't know what else to do . Heat and ills affected the crew and main actors but they surprised for her resistance . During location shooting in Columbia actors lived aboard a huge barge moored in a river , when the river suddenly into spate , the boat broke loose and was drifting at speed down the river when the natives in canoes rescued the players . Special mention to musical score by the classical Miklos Rozsa , a great composer expert on impressive atmosphere in Noir cinema and epic films .
The motion picture was professionally directed by Andrew Marton , though with no originality and some moments result to be a little boring . Marton was a specialist on Wartime movies as : ¨The thin red line¨ , ¨The longest day ¨and adventure movies as ¨African Texas style¨, ¨Around the world under the sea¨, ¨Clarence , the cross-eyed lion¨, and ¨King Salomon's mines¨(1950) co-directed by Compton Bennett and Andrew Marton directed the second unit , he then was tasked with replacing Compton Bennett as director after the latter had been taken ill . One of his more prestigious assignments came about by chance to lay in some excellent work as second-unit director , notably in charge of the chariot race for William Wyler's ¨Ben-Hur¨ (1959), as well as of the Normandy invasion sequences for the World War II . After his contract with MGM expired in 1954, Marton founded his own production company in conjunction with fellow Hungarian émigrés Ivan Tors and Laslo Benedek . He later concentrated on TV adventure series, helming the pilots, respectively for "Daktari" (1966) and "Cowboy in Africa" .
