La corda di sabbia

Rope of Sand, an adventure thriller supposedly set in post-WW II South Africa, certainly receives the vote of "classic" in my book. Far away places, a romance triangle, suspense, even a bit of humor at times...it's all there in a neatly executed, well-acted plot that makes you wish YOU could have been there and tried just what Burt Lancaster did. I have watched this movie more than half a dozen times over the years and still get that sense of intrigue and mystery and fascination with the setting and story that I got on the first occasion, as a child. The film noir era was coming to a close when this movie was created in 1949 but most of the crucial elements are there including use of the black and white, music score, contrasting dialog and action scenes, and so on, right up to the final scene. Perhaps the screenplay might have gotten a little more mileage out of Corrine Calvet and Burt but we need to remember that we're judging films of this era against a different yardstick. I seriously don't think that this movie would have come together at all using actors working today because they would all be hungering for a bigger piece of the movie than anyone got here or typically does get in film noir. This is not to mention what current directors typically do as a substitute for what film noir did with the camera and timing of scene combinations. So I disagree with the previous reviewer. Watch this if you can and enjoy!

Director William Dieterle did better movies than ROPE OF SAND but he never did one in more unusual settings than in South West Africa, now Namibia. Paul Henreid and Peter Lorre had featured in CASABLANCA seven years earlier, Rains had pulled off one of his best performances in Hitchcock's NOTORIOUS three years earlier, and Lancaster was beginning to make a name for himself. A really good cast for a film that did not seem set for great box office returns.

Interesting to note that apartheid was about to appear in that part of the world, yet it is human greed that dominates the film, with diamonds the commodity most sought.

Acting is generally good, although the French accent hinders Calvet's delivery, even renders it awkward at times. The fighting sequences fall somewhat short of credible. The screenplay is also uneven. Photography is very good.

As a little known film, it deserves watching. And it posts enough quality to not rate a waste of time. 8/10.

I have watched this movie twice and have been waiting for a DVD to be released for quite a while. You would think a film with Burt Lancaster, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Peter Lorre and Sam Jaffe would get some attention but, I don't believe this was ever available on VHS, either. Puzzling.

It's a good film and worth watching. The first time I saw this it reminded me a bit of Casablanca or To Have And Have Not. Oh, not in that class of those films but just being a solid foreign adventure tale with American and English actors in an exotic setting.

On the second viewing, I found the film lagged in a few spots, but it's still a very good movie. Lancaster is excellent as the good guy after diamonds in North Africa while Henreid is the sadistic bad guy and Raines is back somewhere in the middle as he was in Casablanca. Lorre and Jaffe are almost always fun to watch, too.

Calvert was a French actress and may not be that familiar to English-speaking audiences. Sometimes her accent is hard to decipher. I didn't find her appealing but I also wasn't as annoyed with her as others seem to be, either. I do agree there should have been a better female lead in here.

The film offers some good action and some nice black-and-white photography, especially with the nighttime desert scenes, which I really enjoyed. Hopefully, someone will do the right thing and make this available on DVD.

I rate this movie pretty highly and then I wonder, were Hollywood movies in the late 40s generally this good, in which case I'll have to see a lot more. "Rope of Sand" is so well made--the story clicks along, every shot is perfectly placed and serves the story, both day and night scenes in a desert are grandly photographed. The interiors are more elaborate than one might imagine, but Edith Head's costumes for Ms. Calvet guarantee that her character is irresistibly sexy. The cast has been gathered from across Europe and beyond--OK, some of them more difficult to follow than others--the supremely skilled actor, Claude Rains, Peter Lorre doing his elegant lowlife, Marais and Miranda singing in a nightclub. And of course young Burt Lancaster, both beautiful and doing the turns of his character. Credit then too to Paul Henreid, holding his own in a fight scene with Lancaster. And there's even a willingness to define South Africa by its racism, from the opening scene of a Black man being chased by converging trucks in the desert. I won't underline an inference about political economy.

This is a film of considerable charm and interest, a postwar noir updating of the Warner Bros. "Casablanca"-style foreign intrigue routine that substitutes a refreshing toughness for the earlier films' cotton-candy romanticism. As usual, the stalwart leading man plays second fiddle to the character roles. Claude Rains takes his wry-and-witty routine to the level of sublime high camp, Peter Lorre purrs lyrical philosophy in a rumpled linen suit and three-day beard, and Paul Henried does much better as the arrogant, sadistic villain (reminiscent of Ronald Merrick in "Jewel in the Crown") than he ever did as a leading man. There's even subtle criticism of the apartheid system thrown in. What could have been a minor classic and certainly the best of the "Casablanca" clones is severely compromised however by the presence of Corinne Calvet, whose ferret face and rusty-hinge voice make a potentially pleasurable film difficult to watch, let alone enjoy.