directed by Zoltan Korda
97 minutes
A rag tag group of Allied soldiers in the Libyan desert in June 1942 attempts to escape back to friendly lines after most of their units have been wiped out. They are led by Sgt Joe Gunn (Humphrey Bogart), the commander of an three-man American M3 tank crew. The group includes three English, one Irish, one French, one Sudanese, one South African. They also have two prisoners, one German and the other Italian.
The first half of the movie is about the search for water and the gradual accumulation of characters who make up the makeshift unit of Allied soldiers and their prisoners. The second half is about their efforts to defend the well at Hassan Barani. Things get progressively worse as things don't go exactly as they hoped they would. A battalion of German soldiers attempt to take the well. One by one the Allied troops are picked off.
Lloyd Bridges plays Clarkson, a British soldier who isn't in the movie for very long. I know him best from Airplane and Hot Shots. He was also in Last of the Comanches (1953) which had a similar sort of story to this one although in wasn't set in North Africa.
Dan Duryea plays Jimmy Doyle, one of the Americans. He was also in Too Late for Tears, another movie that I saw recently, where he played a very different sort of character.
J. Carrol Naish plays Giuseppe, the Italian prisoner. He was nominated for but did not win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Sahara. His career started in the silent era and he has over 220 credits according to IMDB. He was of Irish descent but quite often played characters of various ethnicities that were not Irish or Irish-American. He also played Charlie Chan in The New Adventures of Charlie Chan which ran for 39 episodes in the late 1950s.
I first saw Sahara in the 1980s on television. I have probably seen it at least once since then. I enjoyed it then and I enjoyed it this time around. I can see now that it is a flag waving piece of propaganda. It was made while World War II was still ongoing and the end was not in sight. It isn't great cinema but I enjoyed it.
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