Soga de arena

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.