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Sahara Movie Review

Sahara is a 1943 action war film directed by Zoltan Korda and starring Humphrey Bogart in the main role. It’s a straightforward, but mostly effective genre flick.

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“You heard my offer.

Water for guns“

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After the fall of Tobruk in 1942, during the Allied retreat in the Libyan desert, an American tank picks-up a motley group of survivors but they face advancing Germans and a lack of water. This is one of those war movies that belong to the action instead of drama genre, which is personally the less interesting one of the two to me. You do not learn anything about this battle or the larger war watching this movie, but what you get are the thrills.

The brother of Alexander Korda, Zoltan Korda directed this film with a lot of visual flair. He apparently liked to make numerous desert movies and he employed that level of knowledge on this film to great results. While it wasn’t shot in actual Sahara, the filmmaking team did such a tremendous job with sets and sand that the photography looks very much authentic, especially amazing for its time.

The sound, score, production design and editing are all marvelously crafted with the acting being another standout aspect. The characterization left a lot to be desired, particularly for the supporting characters, but at least the performers elevated the material that they were given significantly.

While Bogart was obviously fantastic in a genre departure from him after countless gangster pictures that he’d made previously, others also deserve a lot of praise with the highlights being Rex Ingram and J. Carrol Naish, the latter receiving a very much deserved Oscar nomination in a highly emotional turn.

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Sahara also benefits from a diversity of its cast of characters, though it dealt more with archetypes in their characterization than with authentic representation. The action is also very well executed, but the movie lacked insight, the dialogue was only serviceable and there isn’t a lot of sophistication present in the script and scenarios. It’s purely an action spectacle, but it’s so well executed and so little on-the-nose propaganda was utilized that the end result is an above-average war flick of the time.