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The title is the frosty lager waiting on the other side of the wasteland, a punchline derived from Ford's Three Godfathers. From Tobruk to Alexandria ca. 1942, a Royal Army field ambulance driven by the "pretty well pooped out" captain (John Mills). He and the sergeant major (Harry Andrews) are joined by a pair of nurses (Sylvia Syms, Diane Clare) and a South African officer (Anthony Quayle) in a trek through German gunfire and minefields. "Broads and mines. Lovely party." The pack of gin bottles is specially precious cargo under sweltering skies, a brush with the Afrika Korps leaves a makeshift grave stenciled in lipstick, a hidden transmitter radio posits a spy in their midst. Hitchcock's Lifeboat is the basis, though J. Lee Thompson's camera exudes its own particular physicality in forceful arrangements of sand and sweat and sinew. "Well, let's take a little exercise, shall we?" The veteran feels the weight of war and medicates himself with alcohol, his tenacious urge pushes Mills' slender frame onward, "a personal thing." (Quayle's cagy Afrikaner confronts his own test of endurance, using his burly back to hold a couple of tons of metal from a collapsing chassis.) Tour of the Qattara Depression, unexpectedly chummy chaps at the oasis, a bomb rising out of the ground like an iron turtle inches from the vehicle's wheels. Clouzot's The Wages of Fear is brought to bear on the quicksand pit illuminated by headlights in the gloom, a little invocation of Sisyphus up and down a dune is rewarded with a reflection of the sea in the distant horizon. A drop of solidarity in the beer at the close, "all against the desert. The greater enemy." Aldrich follows suit with Flight of the Phoenix. With Richard Leech, Liam Redmond, Allan Cuthbertson, Michael Nightingale, Basil Hoskins, Peter Arne, and Paul Stassino. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |