Main Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Bruce Bennett, Lloyd Bridges, Rex Ingram, J. Carrol Naish, Dan Duryea
Release Year: 1943
Country: US
Run Time: 97 minutes
MPAA Rating: NR
Plot
Humphrey Bogart considered this World War II action epic from director Zoltan Korda one of his finest films. Sergeant Joe Gunn (Bogart) is the commander of an American M-3 tank crew allied to the British Eighth Army, which is defeated by the Germans at Tobruk. Joining the scattered retreat across the Libyan desert, Gunn and his two remaining men, Jimmy Doyle (Dan Duryea) and Waco Hoyt (Bruce Bennett) search for water. Instead the tank crew finds an international mix of stragglers, including an officer doctor (Richard Nugent) with several soldiers and a British Sudanese sergeant, Tambul (Rex Ingram), with his Italian prisoner of war (J. Carrol Naish). The rag-tag column shoots down an attacking plane and takes its German pilot (Kurt Kreuger) as a second captive, although a soldier, Fred Clarkson (Lloyd Bridges) is killed in the fighting. After one well turns out to be dry, the troupe finally reaches an abandoned mosque with a well that provides a trickle of water. Two more prisoners are taken while scouting the area and reveal that an entire German battalion is en route to the same well. Gunn misleads them into believing that there is plenty of water to go around, sets them free to report back to their superiors, and then persuades his fellow Allies to help him fight the enemy force that's en route, even though they are staggeringly outnumbered. A betrayal, an escaped prisoner, and bloody skirmishes follow in short order as Hoyt goes in search of help while Gunn and his compatriots attempt to crush the German battalion. Sahara (1943) inspired several subsequent action films, most notably Last of the Comanches (1952), and was remade as a 1995 cable television movie. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide
Review
Zoltan Korda's Sahara was one of the more exciting action movies to come out of World War II, with a brace of fine performances and a plot -- derived, in part, from The Lost Patrol as well as from a Soviet-made documentary entitled The Thirteen -- that has been reused at least a dozen times since (most directly in a solid western called Last of the Comanches). But it was also a movie that helped its director find his own "voice" as a filmmaker, and stands as a uniquely leftist (but not communistic) action film to come out of Hollywood in the middle of World War II. Director Zoltan Korda was the left-leaning brother in the filmmaking family led by Alexander Korda, and throughout the 1930s had been forced to sublimate his own ideological leanings to those of his far more conservative brother. Zoltan was an action film director without compare, but while he was working under Alex, the dramatic content of his movies always ended up pro-imperialist and little more than patronizing to Africans. (This could be seen most clearly in his Sanders of the River, a movie that Zoltan intended as sympathetic to the African people, but which Alex recut and reshot to reflect a demeaning attitude that so offended its star, Paul Robeson, that he never made another movie for the Kordas and spent years apologizing for having been in it.) Sahara, made for Columbia Pictures rather than for Alexander Korda, was the movie where Zoltan's sympathies with colonized and oppressed peoples finally broke out into the open, and his antipathy toward British imperialism finally manifested itself. The hero is American, portrayed in low-key fashion by Humphrey Bogart. He's almost an archetype, a cool, clear-thinking tactician, unencumbered by racial or class prejudice, and immediately takes charge of the contingent of British soldiers on the run from the Germans, telling them how to survive, how to fight and, in many ways, how to live. The British aren't depicted as evil so much as aloof in terms of their officer class, and motivationally out of reasons for fighting the Germans. The movie is a subtly ideological work with a heavy emphasis on action, and it gave Bogart (as well as Bruce Bennett and Dan Duryea) a chance to play uniquely clear and richly heroic roles. The filmmaker would later bring Alan Paton's Cry, The Beloved Country to the screen at a time when few people outside of South Africa knew or cared about the racial divisions in that country. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
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