Le secret des tentes noires

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

There really isn't much positive to say about the film other than that it uses a lot of location shots and is colourful.

The main actors, most of whom had their moments of stardom at different times had difficulty making much of their parts, even Andre Morrell. Anton Differing and Frederick Jaeger were believable as both were German speakers and seemed to have a whale of a time without the constraints of acting in their second language, English.

The film is worth a watch but not one that I'd make an effort to see again.

"The Black Tent" begins with a man in Britain being told that his brother, the heir to the family fortune, MIGHT still be alive in North Africa--over a decade after he was assumed to have died fighting in WWII. However, when he tracks down the Bedoins who sheltered and healed him during the war, they deny having any other knowledge of him. After he leaves, however, he finds his brother's diary--someone had stuck it in his belongings in order to let him know the truth. Most of what follows is a flashback--flashbacks where you learn that the brother was like a son to the Chief and that he even eventually married the man's daughter! But the story goes beyond that--he even organized the locals into a small guerrilla army which attacked Axis troops! What happened next? See the film.

By far the best thing about this movie is the location shooting. The amazing ruins at Sabratha, Libya serve as a backdrop as is the nearby desert. However beautiful this is, however, the story itself isn't that captivating. Now it isn't because the idea is bad--it's not. But he execution seemed very plodding and flat. The writing could have been better and the actors a bit more charismatic. Still, a watchable adventure tale that is reasonably watchable.

One of the final films from Donald Sinden's days as a dashing young officer partnered him with a blonde Anthony Steel as siblings in this adaptation of Robin Maugham's story filmed in the Libyan desert in VistaVision and Technicolor.

Brian Desmond Hurst directs with his usual bloodless competence; while it provides a rare opportunity to see Andre Morell and Michael Craig as Libyan chieftains, Donald Pleasance in a fez, and Anton Diffring and Frederick Jäeger speaking their original language as a pair of sightseeing Germans.

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