Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

People are voting emotionally.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Rope of Sand suffers from a surfeit of additional dialogue. The scenes are often so verbose, Dieterle has to break them up, giving them some sort of pace by filming in very short takes from a large variety of camera angles, as in the card game sequence. On occasion he combines these effects with unobtrusive camera movement. Unfortunately, it doesn't really work. There's just too much dialogue to overcome. The movie is all but buried under its weight. Still, some of the players do manage to come across effectively, particularly Claude Rains as a Machiavellian mining magnate and lovely Corinne Calvet, making an impressive Hollywood debut as the seductive Suzanne. (Although she receives "introducing" billing, she had in fact already appeared in three French films. Her husband John Bromfield has three small but important scenes as a tempted guard).Lancaster is somewhat stiff as the hero, but Henreid plays the sadistic commandant with unaccustomed gusto. On the other hand, Peter Lorre's part seems to have been conceived as an afterthought. Though mumbling his way through several scenes, he has really very little to do, his one big scene - an account of Lancaster's misfortunes - being made completely redundant by its repetition in a more vital flashback form later on in the picture... In the censored print under review, there's no climactic fight between Lancaster and Henreid at all. The former simply pushes his opponent out of the jeep, thus destroying the whole point of the film and denying the audience the all-action climax that all the elaborate groundwork has led us to expect. Instead we have a rather tame confrontation scene with Rains repeating the kind of ambivalent characterization that made him so unforgettable in Casablanca. (He has some typically bitter sarcastic humor too, which he delivers with his usual relish). Despite his prominence in the billing, Mike Mazurki has only a small bit. But Kenny Washington impresses, whilst Sam Jaffe plies his somewhat stereotyped stethoscope with his customary reliability. As expected, producer Wallis has dressed up this re-union with first-class production values, including Lang's moodily atmospheric black-and-white lighting, striking art direction and attractive costumes.

Rope of Sand, an adventure thriller supposedly set in post-WW II South Africa, certainly receives the vote of "classic" in my book. Far away places, a romance triangle, suspense, even a bit of humor at times...it's all there in a neatly executed, well-acted plot that makes you wish YOU could have been there and tried just what Burt Lancaster did. I have watched this movie more than half a dozen times over the years and still get that sense of intrigue and mystery and fascination with the setting and story that I got on the first occasion, as a child. The film noir era was coming to a close when this movie was created in 1949 but most of the crucial elements are there including use of the black and white, music score, contrasting dialog and action scenes, and so on, right up to the final scene. Perhaps the screenplay might have gotten a little more mileage out of Corrine Calvet and Burt but we need to remember that we're judging films of this era against a different yardstick. I seriously don't think that this movie would have come together at all using actors working today because they would all be hungering for a bigger piece of the movie than anyone got here or typically does get in film noir. This is not to mention what current directors typically do as a substitute for what film noir did with the camera and timing of scene combinations. So I disagree with the previous reviewer. Watch this if you can and enjoy!

The cast makes this one worth watching: Burt Lancaster, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains (at his silkiest), Peter Lorre, Sam Jaffe. The character Corinne Calvet plays is a screenwriter's dream since she's likely to spark unexpected changes in each of the male characters, but as an earlier contributor pointed out, Calvet isn't up to the part. It's hard to believe that a man such as Burt Lancaster's character could become so smitten with her.The South Africa setting adds interest to the proceedings and the plot uncoils in skillful fashion until the last reel or so when the rush toward climax becomes somewhat delayed and diffused.Burt Lancaster's whipping at the hands of Paul Henreid no longer includes details mentioned in the book "Sadism in the Cinema," which implies that some footage has been cut from prints. Even in abbreviated form, however, the scene conveys the hint that the real emotional bond in the movie is not between Lancaster and Calvet but between Lancaster and Henreid. Henreid's brutally sublimated desire for Lancaster is certainly understandable since Burt never looked better than he does here.

After seeing this film, you get the feeling of what it could have been with a stellar cast such as this. It turns out to be a somewhat engaging film about an independent (Burt Lancaster) who comes back to South Africa only to be harassed by the local police chief (Paul Henried) for a secret discovery of diamonds. Best sequence is when Henried attempts to kill Lancaster in the desert. The film is uneven, and the excellent supporting cast has little to do in this film.