Customer Reviews
The Pits - By: Jl Adcock, 23 Jun 2008 
This could be Roger Moore's worst film, if not it's certainly one of them. Steeped in the macho world of Seventies gold mining in South Africa, big Rog plays Rod Slater - a womanising, ambitious shift manager who likes big cigars & wearing his safari jacket open to the navel as often as possible. Down the mine, he fights truculent workers & uncovers a fiendish plot hatched by Bradford Dillman & John Gielgud that is so daft that even The Persuaders would have rejected it for a storyline.
Add an aged Ray Milland stomping about, gooey-eyed Suzanna York, & the most unlikely ending featuring a Rolls Royce swerving around in some gravel while a gold mine floods, & you have a perfect example of just what audiences in the 1970's had to endure as top class entertainment.
When men were men and only the villains didn't smoke - By: Trevor Willsmer, 12 Dec 2007 
Gold certainly comes over better in widescreen than it does in the cropped & edited TV & Public Domain prints that have been floating around for years. The first of Roger Moore's trio of South African shot adventures (along with Shout at the Devil & The Wild Geese), it's very much of its time: this being the mid-70s, the villains are easy to spot - they're the ones who wash their hands, don't smoke & aren't any good in the sack - while the good guys aren't afraid of a little dirt or sleeping with the boss's wife. Along with Moore the credits are littered with many of the regular Bond team most of whom would go through the same flooding-the-mine routine again in A View To a Kill - but then, since the film's hiking-up-the-price-of-gold premise is borrowed from Goldfinger (albeit a tad more credible than setting off a nuclear bomb in Fort Knox), there's no real cause for complaint. Like Elmer Bernstein & Jimmy Helms' title song, it's not subtle but it's an entertaining two hours if it catches you in the right mood.
Finallly available in its original widescreen ratio after years of terrible fullframe releases, there are no extras apart from a poorly reproduced stills galllery.
Widescreen at last! - By: A.Viewer, 04 Jun 2007 At last this 1970's adventure film, from Wilbur Smith's novel "Gold Mine", gets a widescreen release, with only poor quality, full screen releases being previously available, including several different but equallly poor US versions.
The film is now in its original 2.35:1 ratio, anamorphicallly enhanced & with a pretty decent transfer. It has 20 chapter stops, but no extras other than a rather pointless ten picture "image galllery".
Elmer Bernstein's score is particularly note-worthy & would well deserve a CD release.
