Following defeat in the desert, Sgt. Joe Gunn (Humphrey Bogart) leads a group of survivors across the Sahara back toward Alexandria.
Arriving at an oasis, the survivors find themselves under siege by a larger German unit who want to secure the precious source of water for an advance on Egypt.
Can Joe and the others hold them off?
Maybe it was the bad aftertaste of Across the Pacific. Maybe it was the heavy signalling of the ideological conflicts of the WW2 epic. Whatever it was, it took awhile for me to warm up to Sahara.
It is a WW2 movie made and released during WW2, which makes it more interesting. This is made for a wartime audience as a moral booster, so there are certain elements that feel a tad obvious: the characters break down into a cross-section of different participants in the conflict. The German pilot they capture (Kurt Kreuger) is pure evil, a duplicitous killer who refuses to accept his fate. He is contrasted with the Italian prisoner, J. Carrol Naish’s Giuseppe, who is given a family, and eventually sacrifices himself for his new friends.
There is a slight melodramatic undercurrent to the character dynamics, but that is just a feature - the characters might be archetypes, but they are all solidly constructed, and well-played.
Once the film turns into a siege narrative, we have spent enough time with these characters that their actions (and deaths) carry real weight.
While Bogart is reliably taciturn as the reluctant leader, the real standout is Louis Mercier as Jean Leroux, "Frenchie". He brings a charisma and humour that - while it works for this movie - felt like a tip toward the men-on-a-mission adventure ensembles of the sixties.
The film is well-photographed by Rudolph Maté, highlighting the actors’ burned, exhausted faces.
Directed by Zoltan Korda (brother of British writer-producer Alexander Korda), Sahara is more nuanced than it initially appears - the desert is unforgiving to everyone in the movie. The Germans are the antagonists, but by the end of the film, they are presented as pitifully human - crumpled against the sand, blearily staring at our heroes’ fortifications while the cries of their wounded fill dead air.
Sahara is probably the secret gem of the festival. An effective war picture more than a Bogart showcase, it is worth a look.
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World War Two
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