Sahara

News of the Allied retreat in the Libyan Desert reach the Yanks via British airwaves: "In your own language—scram!" Lulubelle the tank stalled amid explosions is the jumping-off image, the sergeant (Humphrey Bogart) gets it going with a gentle touch in a striking vista (rocky dunes, smoke and fire in the distance). The trajectory is from the fall of Tobruk to the last stand at El Alamein, with a multinational cluster gathered in the "tin hearse" along the way: English officer (Richard Aherne), French corporal (Louis Mercier), Sudanese sergeant (Rex Ingram), Italian prisoner (J. Carrol Naish), German pilot (Kurt Kreuger). Sudden attacks and home remembrances pave the way to the half-bombed mosque, water drops at the bottom of the dry well are a key commodity when encircled by a battalion of thirsty Nazis. "I ain't no general, but it seems to me that's one way to win," Bogie tells the men, laying the ground for the climactic "miracle" (cp. Peckinpah's The Ballad of Cable Hogue). Zoltan Korda's wartime coalition, closer to Air Force muscularity than to In Which We Serve gentility thanks to Warner Bros.-style bits of business like the bill passed back and forth between a pair of grunts (Bruce Bennett and Dan Duryea) or the American cigarettes that become the legionnaire's shrugging excuse for sticking with the group. A tactile feeling for sun-blasted, sand-crusted terrain mingles with a disarming didacticism, so that a Texan and an African can bond chummily over polygamy ("We both have much to learn") and the eloquently garbled Naish can elucidate his country's involvement with fascism ("only the body wears the uniform, not the soul"). Hitchcock's Lifeboat the following year expands on much of this. Cinematography by Rudolph Maté. With Carl Harbord, Lloyd Bridges, Patrick O'Moore, Guy Kingsford, and John Wengraf. In black and white.