Where has this one been? The excellent war drama features Humphrey Bogart in one of his most satisfying roles, as a get-it-done tank commander surrounded by Germans on the African Sands. It’s solid storytelling with something of a United Nations appeal. Bogie’s tank crew is Bruce Bennett and Dan Duryea. Rex Ingram’s Sgt. is a standout, and J. Carrol Naish won a Supporting Actor nom for his soulful Italian. And the M3-Lee tank Lulubelle has great personal appeal.
Sahara
Region B Blu-ray
Powerhouse Indicator
1943 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 97 min. / Street Date January 20, 2025 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £19.00
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Bruce Bennett, J. Carrol Naish, Lloyd Bridges, Rex Ingram, Richard Aherne, Dan Duryea, Carl Harbord, Patrick O’Moore, Louis Mercier, Guy Kingsford, Kurt Kreuger, John Wengraf, Peter Lawford, Nelson Leigh, George N. Neise, Otto Reichow.
Cinematography: Rudolph Maté
Art Director: Lionel Banks
Associate Art Director: Eugène Lourié
Film Editor: Charles Nelson
Original Music: Miklós Rózsa
Screenplay by John Howard Lawson, Zoltan Korda adaptation by James O’Hanlon from a story by Philip MacDonald based on an incident in the Soviet film The Thirteen.
Produced by Harry Joe Brown
Directed by Zoltan Korda
We don’t understand why Zoltan Korda’s Sahara should have waited this long to be released on Blu-ray — and for its first appearance to be on a foreign Region B disc. The ‘lost patrol’ drama of a U.S. Army tank lost in the African desert surprises us by placing its emphasis is on camaraderie and teamwork and camaraderie under pressure. It’s one of the best war films made while the fight in North Africa was still in progress. Humphrey Bogart is at his best in this entertaining ode to allied unity, and the promise of a better world after the defeat of the Nazis.
California became the movie capital for its climate and variety of terrain. Just a couple of hours outside Los Angeles is a vast desert region. Early in the war Billy Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo kept some Army units busy down by the Salton Sea, but Columbia sent their Bogart picture to film in an area near the borders with Mexico and Arizona, in the same sand dunes that George Lucas would later exploit for The Return of the Jedi. Sahara was reportedly Bogart’s first away-from-home picture on a new Warners contract. Four solid hits had moved him to WB’s front rank. No more 2nd-string casting, or being a good sport in impossible roles.
There is no shortage of good war movies centered on tank combat. Byron Haskin made one called Armored Command that’s supposed to be good, and there’s always the Clint Eastwood romp Kelly’s Heroes, with the great Donald Sutherland’s hilarious hippie tank commander. Fans of more violent fare like Kevin Reynolds’ The Beast. David Ayer’s Fury is terrific, until its overblown, nihilistic ending. The reality of tank warfare was truly grim. My father was a WW2 flier, and he said he’d rather be on a boat that might sink. A tank is Target #1 on any battlefield. Even footsoldiers carry weapons that can knock them out.
Sahara is more about teamwork and strategy than direct tank warfare, but it’s still the most inspiring thriller of the bunch.
The story was adapted from a Russian movie by Mikhail Romm, the director of Nine Days in One Year. Cut off behind enemy lines, the lone M-3 Lee Tank Lulubelle commanded by Sergeant Joe Gunn (Humphrey Bogart) picks up some British troops and an Italian deserter (J. Carrol Naish) on its retreat across the open desert. They decide to hole up at a tiny spot on the map said to be an oasis. Its underground well looks bone-dray, but the experienced desert soldier Sergeant Tambul (Rex Ingram) devises a way of capturing a tiny tap, only a few drips at a time. Gunn must contend with a vicious Nazi pilot he’s taken prisoner (Kurt Kreuger), a problem that is compounded when a large German detachment surrounds the oasis under the delusion that there’s enough water for all. The standoff forces Gunn to pull off a risky charade: he must make his ragged little international force look heavily supplied and water-rich, if he’s to keep them from being overrun by hundreds of thirsty enemy soldiers.
Sahara is an excellent example of a wartime movie that stressed international cooperation against the Axis. In 1943 our State Department made the Soviet Union into the toast of Hollywood, trying to shore up an uncomfortable alliance. The most notorious piece of propaganda ever to come from an American film studio was Warners’ 1943 Mission to Moscow, an all-star pack of lies about a Workers’ Paradise under Stalin.
The ordeal of the tank Lulubelle is frequently interrupted for well-written speeches that put forward the expected propaganda positions on Nazis, Italians, the French, and the duty of soldiers. When Sgt. Gunn proposes that they take the initiative to lay down a noble sacrifice for the war effort, the dialogue perhaps becomes a little too noble, like that of a Soviet drama about the glory of Mother Russia.
We look for such ‘messages’ because the main screenwriter John Howard Lawson was a prominent Hollywood Union organizer and active in the local Communist party. Lawson may have wished he could stack movie scripts with real pro-Soviet messages, but the politics of Hollywood pictures was enforced by the War Office and the Production Code, not some conspiracy of writers. The war effort did see a picture or two about ‘collective cooperation’, movies that only a Red-baiter would find subversive.
Lawson’s filmography is not dominated by memorable pictures, let alone classics, but Sahara is a gem, perhaps aided by the framework of the Soviet original. In any case, Zoltan Korda and a fine production crew built it into a realistic and gritty tale of action and sacrifice. The nine defenders of the Egyptian oasis are individuals first and national representatives second. Top acting honors go to J. Carrol Naish’s Italian soldier, a moving portrait of a ‘sympathetic’ Italian enemy. The somewhat demeaning image of Italians given by wartime movies was that they were under the sway of TDNs (Those Damn Nazis), and didn’t really want to fight. Naish had the habit of running away with every film scene he was in. His lost Eye-Tie here is a good-hearted sad sack trying to survive and get back to his family. The characterization allows tough-guy Bogie to show his soft side.
Also standing out is the great Rex Ingram, whose Tambul is an African soldier given full character rights. Ingram’s persona always radiated dignity. His voice is one of the best things in films of the period, instantly recognizable from The Green Pastures, The Thief of Baghdad and Cabin in the Sky. Sahara gets good moments out of simple scenes of Tambul teasing drops of water out of that old well.
With passengers to represent the Brits, the French and an Italian, the actual tank crew can avoid the cliché’ of being an ethnic cross section of Americans. Dan Duryea was enjoying a reprieve from creep roles in Ball of Fire and The Little Foxes. As Bogie’s smart-talking sidekick Jimmy Doyle, Duryea is forever making bets on the third crewman, Waco Hoyt (Bruce Bennett). Never achieving star status in bigger pictures, Bennett began as an Olympic athlete. He survived some odd career detours, including his mostly forgotten Tarzan under the name Herman Brix. He’s best remembered from Bogart’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
With its realistic setting Sahara convinces in a way that studio-set pictures didn’t. California’s low deserts can be pretty oppressive, and the cast looks genuinely dry and dusty. After a couple of thirsty hours out in the heat, it really makes one wonder how armies could fight under such conditions. Having a supply of water is more important than firepower. It is entirely convincing when our ragtag survivors accept the surrender of such a large number of enemy soldiers.
Humphrey Bogart must have gotten along with the mogul Harry Cohn, for when his second Warners contract finished, he set up his production company Santana at Columbia. His unshaven, unwashed appearance here trumps even his prison haircut as Roy Earle in High Sierra. Sgt. Gunn’s grinning mug reminds me of the real airmen I saw as a kid — skilled and dependable, but oftentimes real jokers.
And it must have been a real picnic out there in the desert for a group of émigré filmmakers: the Hungarian Zoltan Korda, Austria-born cinematographer Rudolph Maté, Ukranian-born associate art director Eugène Lourié. We assume that the Austrian-born composer Miklós Rózsa wasn’t needed on location.
Sahara has some decent combat scenes, but what we remember most is the camaraderie of the little band of defenders. The script offers one or two bloodthirsty German ideologues, but the enemy is mostly thirsty, out of luck and losing thanks to good old sneaky American know-how. The show’s morale boost doesn’t insult the audience … that knew that the enemy could have won in North Africa. Sahara is recommended as a very satisfying entertainment.
Powerhouse Indicator’s Region B Blu-ray of Sahara is a big improvement over Columbia-Tristar’s old DVD from 2001, which was a good transfer of an element with plenty of speckles and blemishes. Subsequent DVDs may have used an improved master, but I’m not aware of a previous (authorized) Blu-ray from anywhere… or any reason why such a potentially marketable title wouldn’t have made it to Blu-ray ten years ago.
The HD remaster is not touted as new, but it is sharp and clear. It looks very good for a vintage show not given a full digital worker. There are still a few white specks here and there, and some light scratches on some shots that could have come that way out of the camera. The encoding is excellent overall. The earlier part of the film has a remarkable texture heightened by a natural grain that gives objects extra shape and solidity. To me it looked as if the last couple of reels might have been dupe material — it plays extremely well, but the surface texture isn’t as rich.
Of special note is the powerful music score by Miklós Rózsa, with his familiar dum-ta-dum-dum chords.
The English company has assembled interesting extras, the kind that persuade U.S. collectors to go Region-Free, even when a domestic disc might show up a year or two later. C. Courtney Joyner’s audio commentary has plenty of information and detail, as does an illustrated talk by Ehsan Khoshbakht, the author of a history of Columbia Pictures.
A forty-page insert booklet has an essay by Imogen Sara Smith, an interview with Kurt Kreuger, and other articles.
We always enjoy Indicator’s selection of short subjects; this release rates a pair of two-reelers. The M-3 Lee tank is lauded in a short subject about a factory converted to produce the tanks. A docu on the fighting in North Africa shows the combat background to Sahara. The English seized the port of Tobruk, only to suffer a very strong counterattack.
It is well known that Steven Spielberg’s 1941 ‘borrows’ Sahara’s tank Lulubelle for a wild comedy night on Hollywood Blvd. The tank crew is a stunning collection of talent: Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Treat Williams, Frank McRae and Mickey Rourke. The promotional Making of 1941 book only got to touch on the tank for a few paragraphs. We screened a print of Sahara in the first months of pre-production.
Obtaining an M-3 Lee tank to double for Lulubelle was not easy. Few were in existence, and bringing in some wreck from a foreign country involved too much red tape. A Pentagon-sanctioned film might have gotten more cooperation, but not a screenplay that John Wayne had turned down for being too un-patriotic.
Production manager Chuck Myers and Teamster Pat Carmen found a workaround that required some ‘interesting’ nighttime activities. On a practice gunnery range on a Nevada military base was a mostly intact ‘Priest’ tank, a mobile howitzer that from the waist down was essentially an M-3 Lee. The base officals allowed Pat to examine it, and he determined that he could work with it — the basic shell was intact, along with the axles and wheels. Pat would need several months to rebuild it, and the Army said it might take that long just to get official permission to hand it over to the film company.
But the officers liked Pat so much — everybody did — that a deal was worked out. Base security looked the other way while Pat and a few helpers (including assistant miniature supervisor Ken Swenson) drove an appropriate vehicle carrier onto the gunnery range in the middle of the night, winched the Priest hulk aboard and hauled it all the way back to the hangar at the Burbank airport, the headquarters of all the special effects for 1941.
Pat was amazingly skillful. He cleaned up the hulk and did the research to find a compatible diesel engine. Even harder was finding tank treads that would fit. He came up with a perfect set with rock-hard rubber pads — no tearing up the streets on Hollywood Blvd. The top of the tank was recreated in aluminum, plywood and Fiberglass by the artisans of A.D. Flowers’ special effects team — possibly Bill Myatt, who was fabricating the P-40 fighter (for the crash scene) the same way he made scores of fake P-40s for Tora, Tora, Tora!, the movie on which A.D. won his Oscar.
The tank was completed just in time for filming. I accompanied Pat with it to Indian Dunes, out by the Magic Mountain theme park. The original M-3 had apparently been converted from some kind of tractor. Pat drove it for the movie like an old-fashioned Caterpillar tractor, operating joysticks for the left and right treads. There was zero room inside; somebody could stand in the top port but that was it. Pat spent a day driving it all over the dry washes at Indian Dunes, getting the feel for the tank. He was amazing. Several picture cars on 1941 broke down repeatedly, causing much consternation with a huge crew and cast standing by. But the tank never stopped working and never slowed down a scene. Pat never needed a take two, even when using it to tip over a truck, or to crush automobiles (that were tethered to the ground so they’d stay in place).
Pat could really get some fast starts with the tank, possibly because his drive linkage was an improvement on the original. The most amazing, and dangerous feat in the movie is the tank’s entrance onto Hollywood Blvd. (The TBS studio’s New York Street). In one shot, Pat accelerated from around a corner, flattened a sedan, and rushed to a near-skidding stop in the middle of a crowd of rioting extras. It’s all there in the movie — Pat was in no way reckless, so it must have been safer than it looked.
That’s the problem with movie physical effects — everything looks murderous, but the stunt people act like it’s business as usual. There were lots of injuries reported on the film. You can see a stunt man crack his head on a curb tumbling out of a car of Zoot Suiters .. it went into the report. But this potentially dangerous tank never harmed anyone.
We learned that the original M-3 Lee, although it looked cool, was considered a death trap. Nobody lauds its exploits in battle. Its armor is just a number of welded (iron?) plates — an enemy shell exploding outside the hull would send welded rivets caroming around the inside, wiping out the crew. The improved Sherman tanks had better luck against the superior German war machines.
The full-scale Lulubelle is seen leaving the barracks and causing havoc on the New York street set, and on the CBS Studio Center lot (the old Republic Lot), where Bobby Di Cicco sends Dick Miller’s ‘Officer Miller’ diving for cover over a park bench. When the tank arrives at Ocean Park, it’s almost completely the radio controlled miniature built and operated by Ken Swenson, of Gregory Jein’s miniature effects crew.
On the set of 1941 we heard John Candy and Dan Aykroyd drum up ideas for a follow-up movie, or maybe a TV show, possibly to be called ‘1942.’ It would re-unite some of the tank crew for a comedy quasi-remake of Sahara. Is that even a good idea? If 1941 had landed with better press and a better reputation — it apparently did not bomb at the box office — anything would have been possible.
Photos copyright Glenn Erickson.
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Sahara
Region B Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
New audio commentary with C Courtney Joyner
Video appreciation by author Ehsan Khoshbakht
1942 short subject Building a Tank
1943 short subject The Siege of Tobruk produced by the UK’s Army Film Unit
Original theatrical trailer
Image gallery
40-page insert booklet with an essay by Imogen Sara Smith, an archival interview with actor Kurt Kreuger, an archival on-set profile of Humphrey Bogart, and other articles.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Region B Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: December 28, 2024
(7252saha)
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