It is a performances centric movie

Am I Missing Something?

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

But I'm just being facetious! Brian Desmond Hurst directs, Anthony Steel and André Morell star, Bryan Forbes and Robin Maugham write, William Alwyn scores the music and Desmond Dickinson photographs in VistaVision Technicolor.It looks lovely, the Libya locations amazing, yet it's a dull and uneventful movie. Story concerns Capt. David Holland (Steel), who during WWII in the North African campaign gets injured and winds up being nursed by some Bedouin natives. He promptly becomes part of the crowd, falls in love with the Sheik's daughter and instigates a repel the Nazis front with the natives. But what happened next? Holland's brother, Col. Sir Charles (Donald Sinden), travels to Libya to find out.What he finds is obviously what we find out, that there's an inter racial romance at the heart of the story, some mistrust, loyalties born, a small scale battle and a double edged sword of a finale. It's all very contrived and mismatched, while some of the acting comes dangerously close to being parody supreme. Not good really and the tech guys deserve a better movie, and so do we. Oh well, if nothing else it obviously inspired Lawrence of Arabia. Hee hee hee. 5/10

Comparisons have been made between this film and Lawrence of Arabia; a rather unfair comparison in my view. Lawrence of Arabia is based on the actual life and exploits of T. E. Lawrence, set in the First World War. This is a war film in the mould of Tobruk, set in WWII, where it does fall down is in the long drawn out romance scenes which are something of a distraction. The script rather reflects the attitudes of the time, and you do have to suspend disbelief a few times, especially as Donald Sinden's character crosses the desert by camel dressed in city clothes, yet remains immaculate throughout. The nomads all speak perfect English, they can even rustle up a German interpreter when needed, yet have remained entirely unaffected by the outside world. There really isn't much plot to speak of, yet the cinematography lends the story some distinction. Average and inoffensive.

This film can be summed up as follows: sumptuous photography; turgid plot; wooden acting.The mystery is how they could string it out for two hours. The story is that there isn't a story - it's just a travelogue across the Libyan desert. Michael Craig, who was hot property in British cinema back then, is a blacked-up Arab sheik and has no lines that I can remember. Blink and you miss him. I just couldn't work out what Anthony Steele would see in the love interest. Donald Sinden looks as though he has the mood of someone who has got out of bed the wrong side every morning of the shoot.The only thing that must have stopped this from bombing at the box office was the novelty for the cinema-going public in grey, smog-ridden 1950s Britain of seeing 'real', 'desert' sand in colour, something they could have done on the sea front at Clacton or Bournemouth.

Even as a fan of Donald Sinden, this is only an OK offering. The most enjoyable part has to be the amazing locations, set in Libya. The original story was obviously a long novel that was a real struggle to compress into a script