Noites no Deserto

The great John Gilbert stars as manager of a diamond company in South Africa. He is kidnapped by a pair posing as English aristocrats (Mary Nolan, Ernest Torrence) after they steal $500,000 worth of diamonds.

They head into the dessert and quickly get lost. Their accomplices soon perish after drinking from a poisoned water hole (poisoned by Torrence himself). Gilbert is tied up in a wagon pulled by oxen, but the power soon shifts as they get hopelessly lost and the water is used up. Gilbert is freed and gets the upper hand.

Terrific little action film with great bits of comedy, and the three stars are solid.

Gilbert's last starring silent film. He looks great and has great fun as the man who hasn't seen a white woman in 3 years. Nolan is beautiful, and Torrence has one of his best roles as the villain.

Gilbert had begged MGM to make this as a talkie but LB Mayer refused. Too bad. This might have been a real classic and a solid success for Gilbert in the new medium. Rather, they stuck him in a sappy romance, HIS GLORIOUS NIGHT, and he flopped. It was all downhill for John Gilbert after that. MGM's stupidity was cinema's great loss. John Gilbert was a great star and should have had a great career in the 30s.

If Desert Nights had come out in 1926 instead of 1929 people would be far less critical of it. I thought it was a super sexy melodrama and romance, with great performances by John Gilbert, beautiful Mary Nolan, and Ernest Torrence, the perfect villain with a touch of humor.

My favorite scene is in the beginning, before the trouble begins, when Ernest is playing the piano and the young couple, played by Mary and John, waltzed on the front porch. John Gilbert could have been a professional dancer, he was that good.

The story is about a bunch of jewel thieves caught in the desert, but you really won't care. Just watch it for the stars, and to see just how gorgeous John Gilbert still looked in 1929. Sigh.

9 out of 10 stars.

John Gilbert DIDN'T exit pictures because of a high voice. In fact, his voice was a gravelly baritone; not mellifluously romantic, but perfectly suited to the characters he played in his later sound films. It's too bad this was released as a silent.

This pre-code desert adventure film features solid performances by the leads (I always perk up when I see Ernest Torrance in the cast list), beautiful photography, and a plot full of tension from shifting power and sexual tension.

Gilbert plays a bad good guy-- roguish, gritty, full of dark humor, and willing to play his captors off each other with anything it takes for his survival. One reviewer compares him to Errol Flynn. I can see that, but also the Clark Gable of "Red Dust".

A good, suspenseful film with all the advantages of the late silent period.

John Gilbert's charisma is evident here as the manager of a diamond mine in Capetown, South Africa, forced to accompany the five diamond thieves into the desert to prevent him from "squealing." Among the thieves are Ernest Torrence and Mary Nolan, who gained admittance to the mine in the first place by pretending to be the expected Lord Stonehill and Lady Diana. Although the acting was uniformly good, I found there were too many plot holes that distracted me and made me dislike the film ultimately. I did enjoy seeing the beautiful Mary Nolan, an actress I was not familiar with.

I was also bothered by the abbreviated print shown on the Turner Classic Movies channel, which ran only 62 minutes. The copyright length of the film indicated the film should have run 80 minutes at the sound speed. A cut was obvious at one point where Torrence suddenly acquired a gun, whereas Gilbert had the upper hand in the previous scene. Perhaps this is the only print available these days.

Of all the major American studios, MGM was the slowest to switch from silents to talking pictures. The studio head, Louis B. Mayer, insisted that talkies were just a fad...and so they continued making silent films up through 1929. Other studios had pretty much gone all talking by 1929. One of the later silents, and John Gilbert's last silent, was this dandy film "Desert Nights".

The film is set somewhere in Southern Africa. You aren't sure of the country but you know that the Kalahari Desert is in the region. This desert plays an important part because the boss of a diamond mine, Hugh Rand (Gilbert) is kidnapped and a fortune in diamonds is stolen by some clever crooks. However, Rand turns out to be the clever one as he ends up taking the crooks for a strange adventure.

There really wasn't anything I didn't like about the film. Gilbert is good, as always and the film is well written and exciting. Additionally, the end if smart and works well. Surprisingly, I don't think this film was ever re-made as a talking picture and with such an interesting plot, it should have been.