La tenda nera

Brian Desmond Hurst made many great films but was not much of a director. He often took care of immensely great and interesting stories with great action and fascinating intrigue and had a knack for getting outstanding music to them as well, but his films are annoyingly impersonal, as if he didn't care about the actors but just focused on getting it all done and the story told. This is one of those films, typical of him, telling a great story, featuring characters of considerable interest, but coming out with only a very conventional and almost expressionless product. He just couldn't dramatize.

There are many other assets to this film, though, like the photography with the epic and extremely romantic environment, the most romantic scenes taking place in the ruins of an ancient amphitheatre, the most spectacular part of the film, and dwelling long on a very comprehensive Libyan wedding among the bedouins. We don't have many films from Libya, this is from long before the days of Khadaffi and Isis and all that jazz, and what you are shown is a paradise among the bedouins in the shadow of the dramatic turnings of the second world war by Tobruk and El Alamein.

What especially lifts this film is the splendid music by William Alwyn adding another dimension of colours to the already resplendently colourful film, enhancing especially the romantic scenes with that extra touch which the actors and dialogue are not able to provide.

The script is by Bryan Forbes together with the author of the novel, Robin Maugham, and there is nothing wrong with the script, the saga being so humanly interesting as it is, but such a tale could have been made so much more of. It's the stuff of Lawrence of Arabia, Rudolf Valentino's sheiks and even of Charlton Heston's Moses in the desert.

Of course you come to think of Hurst's other films, like "Dangerous Moonlight" (with the Warsaw Concerto), "Simba" (of Mau-Mau in Kenya), the Malta Story with Alec Guinness, Hungry Hill and The Lion has Wings, and they all suffer from the same thing: great stories, but crippled by lack of flesh to the bones, as if the director thought the actors were of secondary importance to the epic.

Nevertheless, it's definitely worth giving a chance, for its exotic settings, its great story (with a surprisingly apt end), its splendidly coloured desert environments, its romance among the ruins, and its very vivid music, the most alive part of the film.

Everything in this film feels like a garage sale. The only actor of any note is a Brit playing an Arab, Donald Pleasance. Bob Steele was more noted for playing cowboys in B movies. The casting was more than a bit curious. They had several Brits playing Arabs, and they were not close to believable.

The Germans looked ok though. But the final battle scene is fairly atrocious. I will not mention why. The female lead was never seen or heard from again in any major film; but she was decent.

The movie seemed to have a lot of potential, but very little of that potential was realized. It falls short in production values and a few other areas. Worth viewing only as a curiousity.

Intriguing adventure/WWII yarn dealing with a wealthy heir (Donald Sinden) is worried when his eldest brother (Anthony Steel) fails to return home from North African campaign , as Rommel's Africa Korps have vanquished the British army in Tobruk . As brother Donald Sinden is packed off to discover that he's fallen for a Sheik's (Andre Morell) daughter (Anna Maria Sandri) and thrown in an adventurous life with a Bedouin tribe in the Libyan African desert.

Drama , mystery , intrigue , romance story in which the alleged heir of a fortune is worried about the eldest sibling who occupies the ancestral seat has disappeared during the African campaign and then he sets out in his quest . Well written by actor/director Bryan Forbes and Robin Maughan , based on his novel . Pleasantly filmed romantic drama , all very stiff-upper-lip , here outstanding a pretty good main and support cast . As stiff Anthony Steel gives a passable acting as the British soldier who joins the Bedouin and romances the native chief's daughter , subsequently marrying her and then he helps the tribe fight off a Nazi attack . Along with the beautiful Italian actress who had a brief career, Anna Maria Sandri , giving a below-average acting . Other actors appearing as Donald Sinden and Andre Morell provide better performances . Furthermore , prestigious British secondaries as Donald Pleasence , Ralph Truman , Anthony Bushell , Michael Craig , Anton Diffring in his usual Nazi role, Bryan Forbes himseld as a dying Soldier and Nanette Newman uncredited as Mabrouka's voice.

It packs a colorful and sunny cinematography by Desmond Dickinson , shot on location in Roman ruins, Sabratha, Libya and Pinewood Studios, Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire, Compton Wynyates, Warwickshire, England, UK . It conatins an atmospheric and evocative musical score by William Alwyn ,adding Arabian sounds . The motion picture nicely produced by Earl St. John , being professionally directed by Brian Desmond Hurst , though I has some failures . Brian arranges to flatten the interest out of potentially thrilling material . Hurst was a craftsman , probably best known to modern audiences as the director of exotic adventures , WWII , Christmas and controversial films . He made what is generally considered to be Ireland's first sound film, Irish Hearts (1934). Two years later he made a film that caused the authorities in his native Northern Ireland to forbid it from being shown there : Ourselves Alone (1936), a story of the 1921 Irish rebellion against British rule , being the English language equivalent of the name for the Irish political party "Sinn Féin", it was banned in his native Northern Ireland at the time of its release in 1936, although it has since achieved critical and is shown in museums and other public access points in Northern Ireland . And he , subsequently , went back his Irish roots in other films as Hungry Hill (1947) . Hurst ran into censorship troubles again with his adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart (1934), which was prohibited in many areas of Great Britain for being "too horrible" for public exhibition. These incidents didn't deter Hurst from making controversial films, however. He turned out the dark On the night of the fire (1939) in 1939, regarded as one of the first British "noir" films . During the war Hurst made such films as Dangerous Moonlight (1941), a well-regarded story of an American newswoman in England who falls in love with an exiled Polish pianist who wants to return to his country to fight the Nazis , this film also popularized the musical number "Warsaw Concerto". After the war he made what he regarded as his favorite film, Theirs Is the Glory (1946), about the disastrous British-American wartime operation at Arnhem in Holland, which became Britain's biggest-grossing film for almost a decade . The film he is most famous for results to be Scrooge (1951) with Alastair Sim, considered by critics and audiences alike to be the best and definitive film version of Charles Dickens' classic novel "A Christmas Carol" . He is also noted for his World War II film The lion has wings (1939) . Among his other successes was Malta story (1953), about the defiant resistance of the military and civilian populations on the island of Malta against relentless Nazi bombing during the war, and Simba (1955), about the Mau-Mau rebellion against British colonial rule in Kenya . And other movies as ¨Trottie true¨, ¨The Mark of Cain¨ , ¨Behind the mask¨, and ¨Dangerous Exile¨ about the French Revolution . He retired in 1963 after "John Millington Synge's Playboy of the Western World" which was his final picture , and died in London in 1986.

This film can be summed up as follows: sumptuous photography; turgid plot; wooden acting.

The mystery is how they could string it out for two hours. The story is that there isn't a story - it's just a travelogue across the Libyan desert. Michael Craig, who was hot property in British cinema back then, is a blacked-up Arab sheik and has no lines that I can remember. Blink and you miss him. I just couldn't work out what Anthony Steele would see in the love interest. Donald Sinden looks as though he has the mood of someone who has got out of bed the wrong side every morning of the shoot.

The only thing that must have stopped this from bombing at the box office was the novelty for the cinema-going public in grey, smog-ridden 1950s Britain of seeing 'real', 'desert' sand in colour, something they could have done on the sea front at Clacton or Bournemouth.

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.