Bogie and Sahara

I watched Sahara with Humphrey Bogart Friday evening while waiting for one the boys to get home from a date. Wikipedia has a good summary. A bit of a fusion of Beau Geste, Flight of the Phoenix, Rorke's Drift, and Saving Private Ryan.

A World War II movie set in the Sahara in North Africa between the fall of Tobruk and the First Battle of El Alamein in July 1942. Several things were striking to me.

El Alamein ended in July 1942 and the movie was released in November 1943. In the midst of a worldwide war, they had the capacity to write a screenplay based on a just completed battle, recruit the actors, produce, rehearse, film, edit and release in sixteen months. Things moved faster then. Similarly, the entire Pentagon building was constructed from groundbreaking to ribbon cutting in fifteen months.

The plot is relatively straightforward and the dialogue sparse. The entire set construction consisted of a desert, a half-track, an M2 tank, a couple of hundred uniforms, and a mud-brick building.

One of the supporting roles was played, briefly (an early casualty), by a very young Lloyd Bridges who I more associate with Airplane, Men in Tights and other such humor classics.

We tend to think of diversity and multiculturalism as products of the 1960s and 1970s. I think the watershed civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s tend to blind us to the fact that that was a culmination of a long simmering national conversation, not something that sprang Athena-like from Zeus's head. In this movie from 1943 there are substantive roles played by a Free French soldier, an English officer, a lower class English Tommy, a fence-sitting Italian, a British Sudanese sergeant, a German fighter pilot Prisoner of War, etc. Diversity by language, ethnicity, culture, rank, class, race; personality, all in a lean film. There is a particular scene where the Sudanese sergeant and an American soldier from Waco, Texas find common ground around thoughts about religion and marriage.

The plot is basically a lean morality tale about war, humanity, and humanism. Nothing unexpected but still engaging in its familiarity.

The battle scenes are nothing to a Saving Private Ryan in terms of effects or realism, but they are more than adequate.

Its simplicity lends itself to a wider audience. Young children can watch it without worrying about traumatization or jaundice and because there are straightforward morality lines in the plot, much easier to discuss with them as well. In fact, simple as the movie was, it had me reflecting on details longer than most modern movies do.

A refreshing feeling of less is more. Less dialogue, fewer props and effects, fewer sub-plots, fewer actors, and yet clearer morality and greater substance.