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A "toffee-nosed bunch of gits" in the desert, the old bird grounded and risen. Down goes the airplane en route to Benghazi, a sandstorm miscalculated by the pilot (James Stewart) has the survivors stranded in the fallen fuselage, roasting under the sun. "Wait till the water runs out. Then you can really start laughing!" The old-timer's opposite number is the curt Teutonic designer (Hardy Krüger), the mediator is the co-navigator in dire need of a stiff drink (Richard Attenborough). The "excessively British" captain (Peter Finch) plans to march into the Sahara, his "boy soldier" underling (Ronald Fraser) wants no part of it, the driller in the wings (Ian Bannen) supplies Scottish razzing. Hallucinating worker (Ernest Borgnine), overworked medic (Christian Marquand), timorous accountant (Dan Duryea)... "What this country needs is a few more pubs." Robert Aldrich and the sweaty batch, a reconsideration of Ford (The Lost Patrol) and Hawks (Air Force). Masculine command at a crossroads, experienced veterans against academic punks—the image is a streamlined vessel as a life-sized model. Beauty of teamwork, hammering and scraping and slicing metal amid dunes, "one chance in a thousand" is plenty. Cramped interiors and the blasting vastness outside, so claustrophobic that the appearance of a caravan of camels gives a charge of new shapes. A canzone for the dying, "fatigue mentale" courtesy of the oil company (cf. Clouzot's Le Salaire de la peur). Amid the acres of blistered skin, a rare mix of skepticism and optimism sees it through to the oasis at the end. "The little men with the slide rules and the computers are going to inherit the Earth." A whiff of Aldrich's never-made adaptation of The Sheltering Sky hovers throughout. With George Kennedy, Gabriele Tinti, Alex Montoya, Peter Bravos, William Aldrich, and Barrie Chase.
--- Fernando F. Croce |