Best movie of this year hands down!

Admirable film.

It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

I didn't know this Bogart film existed. He called it himself "a stinker", and it's certainly one of his very darkest dramas, if not the very darkest. He plays an unusually unsympathetic character, an American business man selling weapons to rebels against the French, especially grenades, which the rebels use to (not yet suicide) bombings of innocents, especially joyful tavern guests. He is totally immoral while equally totally unpolitical, he is only there to serve himself and no one else, but his acting was almost never better.His counterpart is Lee J. Cobb, who plays an unusually honest character, we are more used to seeing him as an overbearing villain, he is here a very straight French officer in the intelligence, who immediately sees Bogart for what he is and can but despise him, wishing to have as little to do with him as possible, which intention unfortunately is thwarted by the case of his wife, the beautiful Märta Torén, whom Hollywood planned to make a second Ingrid Bergman after Ingrid's fall from Hollywood, (unfortunately Märta Torén died very young at 30 from brain hemorrhage) who is bored by Cobb's uncompromising correctness and wants to run away with Bogart.The main theme of the film however is the war, the terrible civil war, which is such a cruel reality in Syria even today - this makes this film sensationally actual - we have the same problems in Syria today, bombs and grenades constantly exploding and killing innocents. There is hardly one scene in the film without the war noise of bombs exploding, and such is reality in Syria even today.The script is a marvel of complicated intelligent and interesting intrigue and quite logical all the way in all its surprising turnings. This is the main asset of the film, which is a bleak and dark nightmare journey into constantly more hopeless caverns of no escape except into deeper chaos and death. At the same time, it's a very moral film and story, honesty and good will ultimately coming through by its sheer foolish obstinacy. A film of 1951 about 1925 miraculously proves totally modern in its presentation of political problems in an Arab state, and it has been shamefully underrated and ignored. On top of that, in spite of his unattractive character, it's one of Bogart's best films and performances.

Released in 1951, we have a very formulaic Bogart movie that was shamelessly ripped-off from his 1940's classic 'Casablanca'.Here we have Bogey once again involved in questionable shennanigans somewhere down amongst the Arabs. This time it's Damascus. Again, he's an American on the edge who has been hardened by past adversity. He has no national allegiance, no political ties, no loyalties but himself and no beliefs but money. The French are also, once again, the erstwhile authorities, but this time they're in conflict with the indigenous population rather than the Bosch.There's a femme fatale and a fractured love triangle as in 'Casablanca'. There's a comradeship of convenience between Bogey and a senior authority figure, just like 'Casablanca'.It's a very noirishly lit and filmed piece which seemed to suit the character Bogey so often played. Yet something is missing.This movie could almost be a sequel to Casablanca. For those who wondered what became of his character after the tearful separation from Ingrid Bergman; here it is. With the assistance of the police chief, he fled to Damascus, and a decade later was making his way running guns to the rebels.The ending, however, is a little more down-beat.It's well worth a watch - what movie with Bogart isn't? He always gave a fascinating screen persona that made up for a lot of other inferior elements. But one star doesn't make a classic, and this piece will never match his best.

Even the biggest stars and finest actors are entitled to the occasional turkey and Thanksgiving came early in 1951 for Bogie, Lee Cobb and Everett Sloane. To watch him here virtually phoning it in it seems barely credible that a scant two years earlier Lee Cobb had galvanized Broadway when he created the role of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death Of A Salesman, nor does Sloane retain anything of his outstanding performances in Citizen Kane, The Lady From Shanghai, The Enforcer nor does his lacklustre performance give any hint of what's to come - his brilliant Hollywood agent in The Big Knife, Graziano's manager in Somebody Up There Likes Me, for example. Marta Toren died tragically just months short of her thirty first birthday but she died metaphorically every time she tried to act - and perversely for a Swede had a filmic penchant for the middle East having 'starred' previously opposite Tony Martin in Casbah, the third and by far worst remake of Pepe Le Moko. In truth there's not a lot to praise here, Joseph Kessel was a fine novelist whose L'Armee des ombres became the basis of what is arguably the finest film about the Resistance ever made, yet what they did to his novel Coup de Grace here doesn't bear thinking about. Bogie is, of course, always worth watching and Bogie completists should and will see it but that's about the best you can give it.

Just finished watching this movie after seeing the 2003 PBS documentary "Lawrence of Arabia: Battle for the Arab World," which adroitly lays out how in 1916 the French and British brokered a back room deal (known historically as the 'Sykes-Picot Agreement')during World War I which secretly 'decided' how ownership of the vast and varied Middle Eastern Arab ancestral homelands would be controlled by the European powers after the war. This deal was made by the British while they were simultaneously promising, thru its trusted Military Officer in Arabia, T.E. Lawrence, independence to the Arab freedom fighters after the war. The Brits promise was as reliable as those made by the US in American Indian Treaties. After the Arabs defeated the Ottoman Army and won their freedom in the Middle East, the British and French moved in and took control of Arab lands at the close of WWI. France was given "ownership'of Syria among other Arab territories at the post-WWI peace conference, setting the stage for the period of this movie in 1925, when the Syrian freedom fighters are fighting the invading French terrorists for control of its homeland and Bogart plays a Halliburton-like character (a young Dick Cheney maybe?) engaged in profiteering from the conflict.There are two major flaws in the script that have been alluded to in some of the reviews included herein. One reviewer writes that he is "impressed by the way 'Sirocco' refused to overtly side with either the French or the Syrians." Nonsense. In the film, it is the Syrians who do not honor their word and in a coy double-cross, kill our cinema hero Bogart in the end. In a previous scene, the French are portrayed as honoring their word by giving Bogart the travel Visa he was promised despite him admitting to brokering a secret and dangerous meeting between the Syrians and the head French Intelligence Officer (Lee J Cobb). This is a coy way of the movie siding with the French since the subliminal (and not so subliminal) takeaway is that the Arabs word can't be trusted. You are expected, of course, to disregard who's in whose fruggin' country anyway causing the problem.Several other reviewers here have made reference to how at the end of the film the opportunist Bogart still manages to "do the right thing" or support "the right cause." This is more nonsense. What they are referring to is Bogart's decision to lead the French to Syrian headquarters to attempt to negotiate the 'release' of the French intelligence officer who had voluntarily traveled to Syria to attempt to initiate some kinda undefined "peace talks." The question to ask yourself is how is anything Bogart's character does to support the French in this movie considered "noble" or the "right thing?" It is 1925, and the French have invaded an innocent and non-threatening foreign people and their homeland. Supporting the invader isn't "nobel," its criminal. Supporting Syria is what would be nobel. The Syrians are not at fault in this conflict for defending their homeland from invasion. Another reviewer writes "Yes, its the Syrian's home, but their 'tactics' are sickening." That's an odd statement, since they use pretty much the same 'tactics' our Revolutionary 'founding fathers' used in America, and America wasn't even the founding fathers' ancestral homeland! Besides, I'd like to see what 'tactics' that reviewer would use if a foreign terrorist group burst in his home, killed several family members, and took ownership of his assets. I doubt that his 'tactics' would consist of cordial discussions over a cup of tea.