Having previously filmed their expedition by car from the Cape to Cairo (released in 1926), Major Court Treatt, his wife Stella and her younger brother Errol Hinds travelled to the Sudan in 1928, with a view to filming two pictures for British Instructional Films. The Times explained that ‘the first picture will deal with wild animal and native life and customs, and the second will be a “story” picture based on an original scenario by Mrs Court Treatt’ (The Times, 21 March 1928, 14).

The production of Stampede is discussed in Stella Court Treatt’s account of the trip – Sudan Sands: Filming the Baggara Arabs. She suggested that a ‘story’ was ‘essential as a peg upon which to hang an “animal” picture’ (Court Treatt, 1930, 3). Yet, a number of reviews questioned the value of the staged narrative. The Times stated that Stampede ‘is to be enjoyed and remembered not as a love story or a morality play, but as a film in which animals and not men, however brilliantly and unconsciously they acted, were the real heroes’ (The Times, 25 February 1930, 12). The critical magazine Close Up, while praising the film, was also less enamoured with the ‘modicum of story’ (Close Up, December 1929, 461), while New York Times felt the film ‘lacked spontaneity and truth’ as the ‘different events strike one too forcibly as having been pre-arranged’ (NYT, 28 April 1930). Despite its scripted narrative and romantic sub plot, publicity for the film still promoted it as an ‘authentic’ document of African life, with advertisements highlighting a ‘real Sheikh in “Stampede”’, ‘A cast of 8,000’, featuring a ‘whole Tribe of the Habbania’ (Press Book, BFI). Advertisements for a novelisation of the film written by Stella Court Treatt, also entitled Stampede, further claimed that the story contained ‘no incident which is not a true picture’ (The Times, 24 June 1930, 19). Major Court Treatt defended the film’s historical veracity in a letter to Close Up magazine in January 1930, explaining that ‘it is a real story of the real things that have happened and are still happening in the lives of the tribe and the incidents are lived, rather than acted by the people to whom these things have actually happened’ (Close Up, January 1930, 84).

The casting of the local leading characters however indicates both the commercial sensibilities of the producers and the intended audience for the film. Stella Court Treatt explained that she sought to find suitable male leads ‘to thrill the hearts of a good many feminine “movie fans”’. She described one of the chosen leads as a ‘new Valentino’, clearly highlighting a desire both to target female audiences, but also to position the film as an exotic adventure in the spirit of earlier romantic ‘Arabian’ stories like Son of the Sheikh (Sandon, 2000, 116). Bioscope, in its review, noted that ‘the natives themselves are splendid specimens of virile manhood’, while Stella Court Treatt described Fatma, who played Loweno, as a ‘poem of grace and very beautiful’ (Court Treatt, 1930, 116). During a trip to New York in January 1931, Major Court Treatt stated that ‘our star was a beautiful Arab girl, daughter of a sheikh. Although she had no knowledge of the ways of civilised actresses, she developed an imperious temperament when she learned that she was the centre of attraction. She came late, complained she did not feel like acting, and tried to tell us how the picture should be made’. In response to these demands, Court Treatt explained that Fatma was sent to the King of the Tribe and after ‘twenty severe lashes’, she ‘became a very fine actress’ (Jefferson City Post Tribune, 5 January 1931, 1).

Major Court Treatt introduced Stampede at its first screening at the Hippodrome in London in January 1930 (Bioscope, 22 January 1930, 29). It played alongside the Chaplin film, The Rink, three times a day at the Polytechnic in Regent Street from 24 February until 12 April. The film was also intended for overseas exhibition. The rights to the entire 1929 programme of Pro Patria films, which included Stampede, were bought by Mr S. Hayden of Kinemas Limited, which controlled over 50 cinemas in South Africa, and by Mr Madan, who controlled the Madan theatres in India (The Times, 23 January 1929, 14, 6 March 1929, 14). The film also played in America, and was reviewed in both Variety and the New York Times.

Stampede was billed in Bioscope as an ‘antidote to the exhibitor who has lost heart with the silent picture’, but the producers nonetheless made a sound version of the picture – entitled Africa in Flames – which followed Stampede extremely closely. There is little evidence however of Africa in Flames’ distribution, although a sound film, entitled Stark Nature, which contained material from the expedition in the Sudan, was released in the summer of 1930.