Owned version: The 2009 DVD released by Sony as part of The Samuel Fuller Collection. This set, it should be noted, contains exactly two Samuel Fuller films. This one is included on the strength of his story credit, which as I understand it boiled down to a quick verbal pitch that the studio bought then changed drastically.
Acquired: March 5th, 2015 from Amazon.
Seen before?: No.
The joy of formula, pt. 1...
The title promises nothing new and delivers exactly that. There's not a bit about Adventure in Sahara that plays unfamiliar - this is the platonic ideal of the sort of film Abbott and Costello were joshing in ...in the Foreign Legion. There's square-jawed hero Jim Wilson (Paul Kelly), the cartoonishly cruel commandant Captain Savatt (C. Henry Gordon), a supporting crew of mug-faced legionnaires itching for mutiny, a sympathetic higher-up who understands the plight of the soldiers but is bound by duty to maintain order, a love interest for Wilson who literally crash-lands in the middle of the plot, war-mongering tribal Arabs just outside the fort walls and miles of hostile burning sand. A machine could have written this screenplay, lockstep and bound to its chosen path like a soldier on patrol. But I am not a man of refined or elegant tastes, and I'll fall for a chunk of formula every time if it's burnished to the right shine. So it went for Adventure in Sahara - its swiftness and economy, stripped to a fearful leanness reflecting its increasingly-aggrieved legionnaires, won me over even as I recognized that nothing new was under this particular scorching sun.
It's often as simple as finding the right people for the job - Gordon makes for a daunting villain, a hissable martinet for whom this kind of cruelty has become so commonplace that he can whip out a line like, "I shall make legionnaires out of you or crush you in the attempt," and make it sting without ruffling his aplomb, and he's constrasted nicely by Kelly's stiff-backed resolve, a determined man of action whose personal axe to grind off-handledy blooms into full heroism. Lederman's direction is robust and unfussy, burning through a full load of story in under an hour as it does. In the absence of nuance, he goes big when warranted (a desert-march montage makes especially effective use of double exposures) and moment to moment uses simple, direct images of sweating faces and torn photographs blowing away in the wind to get the impact across. There's a snappy pulp flavor to a lot of the dialogue, and I'm a pretty easy touch for that sort of thing. (My favorite: "You've made Agadez an inferno on Earth, and now you're going to boil in it.") Stir all these ingredients into the cauldron and the finished dish is one that, in retrospect, was always going to appeal to my palate. Admittedly, Fuller's original idea for the ending would have likely made a film that would been a better, more powerful and unshakable experience. But a steak-and-potato stew will still stick to the ribs.
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