Fort Algiers

Hang on to your turban and ride your magic carpet to North Africa in search of camels, cabaret and oil. Set in 1953, the English and French already have their spigots in the "open" position. Sultry Yvonne Decarlo has been recruited to spy on an Arab rebel leader who has slaughtered hundreds of French Foreign Legionnairs at a place called Fort Algiers. The shot of numerous soldiers lying motionless on the grounds is shocking. The production values are so good, I thought they might have been lifted from another film. Oddly, the set dresser leaves the walls of the cabaret and palace bare--no art or detail. Ms. Decarlo has a role that is ahead of its time. She knows how to read and send codes, ride horses, fire weapons, and detonate explosives. She can also sing and speak Arabic. She is in high demand. The writers give her a neat spy kit to employ against the mean "Amir" and his palace guards. Carlos Thompson plays the love interest of Miss Decarlo. He looks and sounds a little bit like Danny Kaye--with an accent. They make a good team. One strange angle: there appears to be very little discipline in the outfit. The men talk back to their superiors, drink and play cards much too often, and are lacking in spit and polish. On the other hand, Miss Decarlo's shirts are always crisp and clean. She should lead the charge.

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.

Low grade, low budget junk on the same level as 1955's Escape to Burma, although that film was actually better. There's hardly a believable moment in the whole script, the best parts the African desert, the actual tribesman extras, and Raymond Burr and Yvonne DeCarlo. Potential viewers other than RB and YD completists can skip it.

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.

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.