Fort Alger

For a plot, "Fort Algiers" leaves nothing to the imagination. And very little hidden. Right away, we know who the bad guy is, so there's no intrigue at all to this film. It's not very well directed or edited, and the acting is just so-so. One reason to watch it is to see Raymond Burr before he became Perry Mason and found his niche on TV. Another reviewer commented that he or she could see why he left Hollywood. Yes, it's obvious that he wasn't much of an actor. Even in these early films of his – I've watched a couple lately, his weight must be over 300 pounds.

The romance and spying in this are just plain hokey. It's not even a very good picture of life in the Foreign Legion. Yvonne de Carlo has one of her roles as a foreigner, and she probably does the best acting job for the whole film. The battle scene provides a little action but even that seems awfully stagy. The tribes must have been a few miles away when the oil field workers spotted them approaching. Once they charged at full gallop, it took forever for them to cover the ground to the oil wells. While the film quality is very good, the production values are clearly second-rate.

This just isn't a film I can recommend.

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.

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.

It's been well over a year since I had mentioned I'd be renting this one on DVD, after being impressed with Lesley Selander's neglected low-budget horror effort THE VAMPIRE'S GHOST (1945). At the time, I had even joked about the fact that the director's filmography included six(!) pictures with the word "fort" in their title – this, of course, being one of them.

Despite the lowly rating, I enjoyed the film for what it was – a thoroughly unassuming romantic adventure. Its B-movie roots are evident in the ample stock footage (particularly during the final desert charge on an oil well – which also presents an incongruity in wardrobe, with heroes and villains dressed in outfits from different time periods!) but also the choice of leading man, Carlos Thompson: the Argentinian actor made only a handful of English-language films (none very notable, though his last film was the delightful French WWII comedy LA VIE DE Château [1966] with Catherine Deneuve) and committed suicide back home in 1990.

Anyway, FORT ALGIERS was really a vehicle for Yvonne De Carlo, who specialized in such forgettable exotic fare around this time; here, she's a French agent who had forsaken lover Thompson for 'the cause' – but meets up with him again when she's sent to spy on evil Arab potentate Raymond Burr (highly amusing in a turban). Leif Erickson delivers an unbelievably hammy performance as Thompson's arrogant sergeant – though his character is eventually softened when selected for the hero's buddy in a mission (in which Thompson has to rescue De Carlo from Burr when the girl's cover is blown); the rest of the cast includes such familiar faces as John Dehner, Anthony Caruso and Robert Warwick.

I watched this courtesy of the Movies4Men channel, which offers a very wide range of quality. This was middling. Set in the early 1950s, it seemed to have an early-20th-century atmosphere to it, with massed Arab attacks on Legionnaire forts and columns of soldiers marching to the rescue with no motorised or air support. There were a few mid-century cars in the stock footage of Paris and an Arab town, and Yvette does use an eavesdropping device, but that's all.

The actors do well enough, though I didn't recognise Leif Ericson as the crop-haired sergeant - he certainly chewed the scenery. And it's always good to see the dependable John Dehner (and Yvonne de Carlo).

I was a bit puzzled by the Amir calling on his troops not to mention, on pain of death, the massacre at the beginning of the film, as it would have soon become common knowledge.

The mid-film relaying of the message did go on a bit and, as has been mentioned, there was something wrong with the distance and time when the Arabs arrived at the oil well.

All in all, pleasant, predictable viewing.