While the M.G.M. safari was beating through the trackless veldts and jungles of South Africa in search of King Solomon's Mines, J. Arthur Rank was mounting forays along the northern coast in an attempt to catch a gang of gun-runners. The result of his expedition is highly unsatisfying; "The Golden Salamander," despite its title, contains no animals, and for all the good J. Arthur made of the Tunisian scenery, he might just as well have shot the picture on the Cornish coast and saved his sterling.

Trevor Howard plays an archeologist turned amateur sleuth, who meets Anonk, a French barmaid, soon after his arrival in the Tunision hamlet of Kabarta, but not too seen for him to have already stumbled onto a gun-running racket when his car was blocked by a landslide during a heavy rainstorm. Anouk's brother Max turns out to be mixed up with the gang, so the love affair between the archaeologist and the barmaid gets awfully massy.

But the payoff comes when Howard reads an inscription on a statue of a salamander which he is packing for shipment to England. The inscription is something to the effect that the way to overcome evil is not to ignore it, but to meet it. This sets him thinking, slowly at first, then with increasing speed as the enormity of the crime hits him. He eventually meets all the tribulations of the amateur detective, getting hit on the head, shot at, bawled out by his girl, and suspected by the authorities.

Trevor Howard is completely fitting as the grim pebbly faced Englishman, for whom an almost unnoticeable muscular movement is sufficient to turn a rapturous smile into a scowl of the utmost malevolence. Anouk is one of the newer French exports; her nose is larger than most, but otherwise she is cut from the whole cloth.