Word: sahara
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...melodiously on from the days (1926-27) when it was a Broadway operetta and the fractious Riffs were all that most people knew about in North Africa. It tries hard to be immediately prewar, with cracks about Vichy and a Nazi plot to put a rail road across the Sahara to Dakar. But it remains an amusingly archaic, Technicolored story about an indolent U.S. café-pianist (Dennis Morgan) and a Riffhounding French officer (Bruce Cabot), who are rivals for a French songstress (Irene Manning). This triangle is menaced by El Khobar, masked leader of the intransigent Riffs...
...enemy. Here are presented carefully and convincingly the dilemma of the Italian fighter with nothing to fight for, the unflinching arrogant faith of the Nazi mind, and more powerful than all this, the intense humanness persisting somehow even amidst the mechanical brutality of modern war. For this alone, "Sahara" is well worth seeing, and, incidentally, worth suffering through the other half of the bill...
Humphrey Bogart's box-office appeal may be what Columbia depended on in making "Sahara," but they have put him into an exciting and quite credible picture. Bogart, himself, doesn't stand out as he did in "Casablanca." A tough story, it uses the old desert themes (we had to go out for a drink twice) with a Rommel-El Alamein background...
...Sahara (Columbia) is a preposterous melodrama about Humphrey Bogart, nine other heroes and a derelict tank; it is also a triumphant combination of first-rate entertainment, intelligent cinematics, and an unusual amount of honesty about war. It mixes these ingredients in a much-used shaker, according to the old Lost Patrol formula...
...approximates hard and honest facts about war and about people. In the routine war melodrama it is always an American prisoner who, faint with thirst, scornfully refuses to yield information while an enemy officer drinks his fill and tosses the surplus into the sand. Here, the situation is reversed. Sahara rings dozens of such changes on old formulas, and in their simple way they make more hard sense pictorially than most documentaries...