Fort Algiers

There's murky and nasty goings-on in French Africa, stirred up by tuxedo-and-turban-wearing Raymond Burr. Yvonne De Carlo is blackmailed into going undercover there, and she soon has Burr greatly interested. What -- or rather, whom -- Miss De Carlo is being blackmailed over is former Signal Corps officer Carlos Thompson, who nearly killed a superior officer, presumably over Miss De Carlo. Now he is a private in the French Foreign Legion.

Miss De Carlo is top-billed, and she gets more screen time than anyone else. She also sings a song as part of her cover. It's the sort of engaging nonsense that still filled the movie screens at this point. Supposedly this UA release was filmed in Morocco. If so, they took pains to find geographical features that are exact duplicates to those around Lone Pine, Mount Whitney, and other sites in California that any fan of cheap B westerns would recognize, as well as a derelict wooden structure that looks like something out of those same oaters. Still, it's fun to find such typical Bedouins and Rif riff-raff as John Dehner, Leif Erickson, and Robert Warwick.

For a plot, "Fort Algiers" leaves nothing to the imagination. And very little hidden. Right away, we know who the bad guy is, so there's no intrigue at all to this film. It's not very well directed or edited, and the acting is just so-so. One reason to watch it is to see Raymond Burr before he became Perry Mason and found his niche on TV. Another reviewer commented that he or she could see why he left Hollywood. Yes, it's obvious that he wasn't much of an actor. Even in these early films of his – I've watched a couple lately, his weight must be over 300 pounds.

The romance and spying in this are just plain hokey. It's not even a very good picture of life in the Foreign Legion. Yvonne de Carlo has one of her roles as a foreigner, and she probably does the best acting job for the whole film. The battle scene provides a little action but even that seems awfully stagy. The tribes must have been a few miles away when the oil field workers spotted them approaching. Once they charged at full gallop, it took forever for them to cover the ground to the oil wells. While the film quality is very good, the production values are clearly second-rate.

This just isn't a film I can recommend.

A female secret agent is sent to French North Africa posing as a night club singer to investigate the massacre of a French Foreign Legion outpost. She discovers a treacherous leader planning an attack on strategic oil fields.

Yvonne DeCarlo as a Mata Hari spy amidst the exotic locales is pure eye candy and Raymond Burr makes a great villain, charming yet slimy with grand schemes, they both make this film watchable- however the lead actor -Carlos Thompson is quite stiff and his character lacks colour. There's some good action (albeit stock footage), nice desert locales and set pieces, but it doesn't rise above routine. It's just a passable affair, which is efficiently made. It needed much more spice, less stodginess, the lack of Technicolor doesn't help. Lesley Selander does his best to keep things going despite the setbacks. He usually directs westerns and really good ones like Panhandle.

This adventure movie proves that Lesley Selander was not only a western film maker. Ok, this movie is told, written and acted as a western; just replace Arabs by Indians and Foreign Legion by the US Cavalry. Remember Selander's DESERT SANDS, another French Foreign Legion film. The exotic part is present, despite a black and white photography, such a shame, especially with a superb Yvonne De Carlo in a Mata Hari like character. Raymond Burr is outstanding as the evil guy; how could it be else? This movie belongs to the French Foreign legion ones and that makes me think one more time of my grief concerning DESERT HELL, from director Charles Marquis Warren. A so rare film that no one seems to have ever seen it. The review on Imdb looks very like the copycat of a dictionnary comment.

Imagine the tired excitement of those fleapit cinemas in back streets all over the UK watching this dross and having to have paid money for the experience. Did it ever open in cinemas in the centre of cities ? I wonder. Films like this were churned out, with bad acting, bad cinematography with appalling regularity and this one epitomises all of them. Yvonne de Carlo was never that good; here she is appalling and opposite her is Carlos Thompson, a handsome actor who had nothing to offer on screen except his looks. I am perhaps one of the few who saw him in the now lost ' The Flame and the Flesh ' with Lana Turner and there by the sheer force of gravity of Turner's performance he adequately responded. Here Yvonne de Carlo does not give him the same rope of rescue, and he flounders in limp gestures and clichés. Thanks to the ' Talking Pictures ' channel we the public are often allowed to return to these fleapit films and I guess for some there is a sentimental value in watching these primitive films. One star for their strange fascination. The depressed, the lonely and the young lovers would go to see them and tawdry films like these would replace their different realities with double bills of cynically made inadequacy.