Sahara (1943)
Synopsis
Sahara is an American war film directed by Zoltán Korda that stars Humphrey Bog-
art as an American tank commander in Libya during the Western Desert Cam-
paign of World War II. Bogart and his small tank crew dig in to defend an isolated
desert water well against an Afrika Korps battalion desperate for water.
Background
A rousing Bogart actioner that does not seem derivative, Zoltán Korda’s Sahara
(1943) actually has a long, complicated genealogy. The film’s ultimate source is
Philip MacDonald’s Patrol, a 1927 novel about a group of WWI British soldiers lost
in the desert in Mesopotamia (modern- day Iraq) and surrounded by the enemy.
British writer- director Walter Summers brought Lost Patrol, a silent film version of
Patrol, starring Cyril McLaglen, to the screen in 1929. Five years later John Ford
crafted The Lost Patrol (1934), a solid American remake starring Cyril McLaglen’s
older brother, Victor, in the lead role. Three years later Rus sian director Mikhail
Romm made a third film version entitled Trinisdat (The Thirteen) that made the sol-
diers Rus sians, transferred the setting to Central Asia during the Basmachi Revolt
(1916–1924), and substituted Afghani bandits for John Ford’s ste reo typically loath-
some Arabs. The fourth of six films to recycle MacDonald’s Alamo- like scenario
(followed by André de Toth’s Last of the Comanches in 1953 and Brian Trenchard-
Smith’s Sahara, aka Desert Storm, in 1995), Zoltán Korda’s Sahara was adapted from
its immediate pre de ces sor, Trinisdat, by Korda with the help of screenwriters James
O’Hanlon, John Howard Lawson, and Sidney Buchman. Transferring the action
from WWI- era Af ghan i stan to WWII- era Libya, Korda and his writing team set
Sahara in June 1942, after the Battle of Al Gazala, when Tobruk fell to Erwin Rom-
mel’s Afrika Korps and Allied forces were in full retreat into Egypt. Released on
11 November 1943— during the “Operation Torch” landings in Tunisia that sig-
naled the final, victorious phase of the North African Campaign— Sahara is a crafty
pro- Allied propaganda film that uses the backdrop of impending Allied victory in
North Africa to reflect on a time in the recent past when things were grim but the
requisite American grit and Allied solidarity were fully in evidence.
Production
Columbia Pictures offered the lead role in Sahara (originally titled “Somewhere in
Sahara”) to Gary Cooper, Glenn Ford, and Brian Donlevy but the role fi nally went