I love this movie so much

best movie i've ever seen.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

I must have seen this one before because there were a couple scenes that seemed familiar. But going into it I would have sworn it was new to me.This rare gem is not one that usually comes to mind when one thinks of John Wayne movies and it's unfortunate because it's a good one.There were parts, to be sure, that just didn't work. For example, there's just no way I'm going to buy any red blooded man being such an asshole to the likes of Sofia Loren, as Joe January was throughout most of the film.Also, Paul Bonnard's character arc was just too quick and sudden. But over all I enjoyed the film. Fans of either John Wayne or Sofia Loren will probably like it also.I do think it was pointless to shoot on location in Lybia, of all places, since all the exterior shots could just as effectively been done in the deserts of the South West, like Glamis, or Death Valley.

Duke is wastrel Joe January, ensconced in the jail of a desert outpost. Sophia Loren is Dita, a "dance hall girl." Enter the gentlemanly Rossano Brazzi, who springs Duke and hires him as a guide to a destination in the far desert, and who converts Loren from her thieving ways into a good Christian. Brazzi is in suit and tie, pith helmet, and fancy leggings. He tells the roughly clad Duke that he's never been to the desert but has "read about it." He speaks with a foreign accent -- he's supposed to be French, the accent is Italian, but to Hollywood he was just a "continental," rather like the menu of a restaurant specializing in continental food. He speaks of finding a treasure with which he will build "a refuge for the needy." Here is the first exchange between him and Loren, who has just stolen something from him."Why did you steal it?" "Because I wanted it." "If you wanted it, why didn't you just ask for it?" (He gives the item back to her.) It's only a few minutes into the picture and already we know that Brazzi is a sissy, that he will not get the babe, and that he will run up against the Duke's solid bulk sooner or later.Duke sums him up very well, in his peerless Dukese phraseology. "I've met these do-gooders before. Mostly they want to do good for themselves."Actually, the film's plot is a torpid mixture of "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," in which one of the trio goes paranoid, "Rain," in which the Reverend Davidson converts a whore and then floods out and attacks her, and "The African Queen," in which a mismatched couple travel alone through dangerous territory and come to love each other just as they think they're about to yield to the fathomless, cool, enwinding arms of death.The photography by Jack Cardiff is splendid. This is no "Lawrence of Arabia" but it makes good use of the Libyan desert and its vast, majestic expanses.In many ways it's the best thing about the movie. Certainly the role of the anti-feminist, hard drinking, plain spoken, practical, but not unperceptive man of the earth gave the Duke no trouble. He could have wired in his part by Western Union. He even wears that cavalry hat with the brim turned up in front, left over from previous movies. Sophia Loren is cute when she's mad. She's cute when she's NOT mad. But she's only in it because movies like this must have a beautiful woman for the men to come to blows over. And this IS one of those echt-Hollywood movies where the low-life Gypsy hookers have hair by Mister Kenneth, make up by Max Factor, and choreography by Agnes DeMille. A couple of the Arab gypsy girls are blond and blue-eyed but does it matter? Well, it matters not at all, any more than Loren's Italian accent matters.Loren to Brazzi: "Yew could leave the drims yewr fodder drimt." The film's most impressive feature: Some great photography of a Roman city in ruins in the middle of nowhere. The kind of place you want to settle down in and call home. It's here we learn that the Duke can read Latin. That's about the only thing that's liable to surprise you.

Colorless title for a dishwater-dull adventure saga starring John Wayne, Sophia Loren, and Rossano Brazzi, three disparate characters crossing the Sahara desert in the same direction as Brazzi's ill-fated father, who went missing ten years prior after finding a lost city stocked with rubies and emeralds. Wayne, playing a desert guide/troublemaker down on his luck in Timbuktu, drawls like he's still back on the range, while Loren has little to do but tease the two men unconsciously; apparently she isn't aware of her amply carnal charms--and though she's playing a streetwise prostitute, whenever the two men get randy around her, she pulls away screaming, "No! Don't touch me!" Brazzi has it the worst however, initially preaching enlightenment to Sophia in a brotherly way, later forcing himself upon her, but just as quickly turning on both his companions like a dirty dog. It's a hopeless role, and indicative of the patchy, puzzling screenplay. This movie has enough peaks and valleys to redesign any desert, and the final crawl isn't dramatic or gripping or emotional--just wasted time on the clock. ** from ****

Legend of the Lost paired John Wayne and Sophia Loren for their one and only teaming on the silver screen. Too bad it wasn't in a much better film than this barely disguised rip off of Rain.The setting for this film is French West Africa as it was then known in 1957 before it became several new African countries in a few years. The Duke is Joe January, a freebooting American expatriate who hires out as a guide on the desert.Rossano Brazzi wants to hire Wayne as a guide to take him to a fabled lost city that he swears his father found out in the middle of the Sahara. The father disappeared on a return trip and Brazzi is also looking to find out what happened to him.In Timbucktu both of them encounter Sophia Loren who's a working girl. She's got the both men going, but it's Brazzi she really loves. Brazzi's a spiritual sort of fellow, talking about doing some good for the native population. When they go out in the desert, she trails after them.They find the ruins of what was an old Roman city, bet you didn't know the Romans got that far south. Brazzi also learns what happened to his father with a letter found on his remains and two other human remains and some forensic conclusions. For the rest of the story if you've seen any adaption of Somerset Maugham's Rain you know what's going to happen.I have to say that on the plus side Jack Cardiff's color cinematography of the Libyan desert because that's where the film was shot is breathtakingly beautiful. The rest of it is kind of silly. Forgetting the fact that Sophia with two men on the desert is going to lead to obvious complications, I cannot believe that Wayne was taking booze on the trip. In his role here and in real life Wayne was a prodigious drinker. But alcohol except some small amount for medicinal emergencies is an outright hazard on the desert. The sun will dehydrate you that much quicker if you keep drinking alcohol as well as water. Not to mention traveling by day instead of by night. My conclusion is that since this was a Batjac production, John Wayne wanted to do something that could be classified as arty. Since he had already done well in The Long Voyage Home, I'm not sure what he felt he had to prove. I do wonder what Somerset Maugham must have thought when he saw this film though.