Sahara (1943) (UK Import) (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Jan 20, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Zoltán KordaRelease Date(s)
1943 (January 20, 2025)Studio(s)
Columbia Pictures (Indicator/Powerhouse Films)- Film/Program Grade: A
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: A
Review
[Editor’s Note: This is a Region B-locked British Blu-ray import.]
Of Hollywood war movies made during the Second World War, Sahara (1943) is one of the very best, falling somewhere within the Top Ten, maybe even the Top Five. It’s a taut, impressively suspenseful action film while mostly avoiding war movie clichés and wartime propaganda. It’s much more realistic, even brutal, and unpredictable and surprising. How many Hollywood studio movies from the 1940s, for example, can you name that feature a black character who not only is treated as an equal but does the single most heroic act in the picture. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Much of the film’s unusual degree of humanism and empathy can be traced to writers John Howard Lawson and director Zoltán Korda. Playwright Lawson was a member of the Communist Party (CPUSA) and later one of the Hollywood Ten who served prison time and was blacklisted. Following Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman (1947) his career in Hollywood was effectively over, though he did co-write The Careless Years (1957), without credit, for Kirk Douglas’s Bryna Productions.
In the African desert, Master Sgt. Joe Gunn (Humphrey Bogart) commands the Lulubelle, a U.S. Army M3 Lee tank attached to the British Eighth Army, separated from their unit while retreating during the fall of Tobruk. Boxed in, Gunn leads his surviving crew—Doyle (Dan Duryea) and “Waco” (Bruce Bennett)—south where they pick up a handful of survivors: British medical officer Capt. Halliday (Richard Aherne), four Commonwealth soldiers (one played by Lloyd Bridges), and Free French corporal “Frenchie” Leroux (Louis Mercier). Soon after they are joined by Sudan Defence Force Sgt. Maj. Tambul (Rex Ingram) and his Italian prisoner, Giuseppe (J. Carrol Naish), Gunn initially refuses to take the POW aboard given their limited water and food supply.
Tambul leads the party to a well at Hassan Barani, but it turns out to be dry and, en route, they’re strafed by Luftwaffe pilot Capt. Von Schletow (Kurt Kreuger), whom they shoot down and also take prisoner. The German claims to be unable to speak or understand English, but it’s clear to the movie audience that he, in fact, does and waiting for his chance to strike back. At Bir Acroma they locate a well slowly dripping water, necessitating a long stay there but Germans, also desperately short of water, are coming up fast from the rear...
The 97-minute Sahara is compact with an underlying tension it maintains from beginning to end. That the film more closely resembles British wartime films than Hollywood ones can partly be traced to Hungarian director Zoltán Korda, who up until then had worked in the British film industry with his brother, the producer Alexander Korda. The picture eschews Hollywood-style heroics, propagandistic speechifying (for the most part), is more brutally honest about warfare, and strenuously avoids war movie stereotypes. The theme of international cooperation doesn’t need speechifying, because it’s so clear to them (and us) that their only hope of getting out alive is to work together as a team.
Bogie, for instance, here plays an everyman tank commander faced with tough choices and few options, a sharp contrast to, say, his almost superhuman character in Across the Pacific, machinegunning Japs and shooting down a bomber at the climax. He and the others are constantly tinkering with Lulubelle, yet give the impression they really understand what makes her tick. Gunn makes the difficult decision to leave Giuseppe behind while taking Tambul aboard his tank, because the latter knows how to reach the nearest wells; the Italian is just dead weight.
Italy had not yet surrendered when Sahara was in production, yet the film depicts Giuseppe as human and sympathetic as the Allied soldiers, thanks partly to Irishman Naish’s convincing non-stereotypical portrayal. Kurt Kreuger’s von Schletow is a true believer Nazi, but most of the German infantry attack the Bir Acroma ruins simply because they’re on the verge of dying of thirst.
Particularly impressive is the depiction of the Sudanese Tambul, wonderfully played by Rex Ingram. At no time do the others ever regard him as anything but an equal, nor is he given subservient, demeaning tasks. (Indeed, Gunn puts him in charge of gathering the precious drip-dropping water.) When von Schletow refuses to be searched by Tambul, a black man, Gunn and the others come to his defense, Tambul searching the racist Nazi anyway.
The very effective musical score by Miklós Rózsa mostly consists of a single theme, heard over and over, yet it’s perfect for the story, expressing the relentless drive of the men to survive the desert, the Germans on their tail, and to reach the safety of their larger unit.
Because Sahara was made at Columbia, Bogie on a rare loan-out from his home studio, Warner Bros., the picture has generally been less accessible than his Warner titles from the period, even the much lesser ones. Indicator/Powerhouse Films’ Region “B” disc, limited to 3,000 copies, is a very good encoding, billed as a high-definition remaster, the black-and-white, 1.37:1 standard frame presentation impressively sharp with strong blacks, though minor damage does appear here and there. It’s comparable to Indicator’s recent Columbia noir and horror films boxed sets. The LPCM 2.0 mono is also very good, and supported by optional English subtitles.
The extras, way above average, consist of a new audio commentary track by C. Courtney Joyner; Small Miracles, a 13-minute video essay by Ehsan Khoshbakht; a trailer and image gallery, and two well-chosen short subjects: Building a Tank (1942, running 20 minutes) and The Siege at Tobruk (also 1942, running 17 minutes). The latter, British-made and presented in high-def, is especially good.
Alas, The Digital Bits was sent only a check disc, and did not receive the 40-page booklet accompanying final product. That reportedly features a new essay by Imogen Sara Smith, an archival on-set profile of Bogart, an archival interview with actor Kurt Kreuger, essays on the two shorts, and other material.
One of the best Blu-ray releases of 2025 so far, of one of Hollywood’s best-ever World War II films, Sahara is not to be missed.
- Stuart Galbraith IV