Hollywood has dramatized wars all over the world, from the jungles of Vietnam to the beaches of the Pacific. Now, the crisis in the Middle East is once again focusing attention on that long-troubled area. Here are some of the movies' better meditations on desert warfare.
The Lost Patrol (1934)
Victor McLaglen commands a
motley group of World War I British non-coms, trapped at a
Mesopotamian oasis while unseen Arab tribesmen pick them off one by
one. Director John Ford lays on the White Man's Burden cliches a
little thick. Nonetheless, his evocation of sun-baked tension and
paranoia still packs a cinematic wallop, and Patrol deserves its
reputation as a pioneering all-male action film. In black and white.
B+
The Four Feathers (1939)
This second film version of
novelist A.E.W. Mason's colonial tale — a quintessentially British saga
of upper-crust twits fighting in the Sudan as the fate of the Empire
hangs in the balance — is a sort of Technicolor Kipling daydream. Much
of it may strike modern audiences as inherently ridiculous, but the
desert battle scenes are spectacular, Ralph Richardson provides
much-needed ironic relief, and the photography is strikingly
painterly. Old-fashioned, to be sure, but lots of fun. B
Beau Geste (1939)
Gary Cooper, Robert Preston, and
Ray Milland are brothers in the French Foreign Legion; Brian Donlevy
is the sadistic commander they battle when not fighting Arabs.
Spirited performances don't / quite redeem the melodramatic
contrivances of this often-filmed piece of romantic nonsense. But the
Moroccan desert (actually Arizona) looks great, and at the very
least, this Geste is leagues better than the 1966 remake with Telly
Savalas. In black and white. B
Sahara (1943)
Tank crew chief Humphrey Bogart, lost
during the Allied retreat from Tobruk, leads a hopeless battle for
water against advancing Nazis. Superficially, this looks like the
usual World War II, one- soldier-from-every-ethnic-group hokum. But
the cast (including the young Lloyd Bridges) is so good, the script
so intelligent, and the photography so gritty that Sahara anticipates
a lot of postwar neorealism. In short, it's a minor classic, perhaps
even Bogie's best picture. In black and white. A
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
David Lean's desert epic
has been so acclaimed in recent years that one forgets that most
serious critics undervalued it when it was first released — too
middlebrow in conception, they said, too predictably linear in its
narrative. Lawrence can now be seen for what it really is: a
fascinating study of one man's doomed attempt at going native, and
one of the most gorgeously pictorial movies ever made. Of course,
only some of that comes across on video. But enough survives the
translation to make Lawrence of Arabia eminently watchable at
home — particularly the eccentric but riveting performance by Peter
O'Toole in the title role. A+
