The Sahara

by Eamonn Gearon

  On the eve of his regiment’s embarkation for the Sudan to battle the Mad Mahdi for control of the country, Harry Faversham, a young officer, resigns his commission. Stung by accusations of cowardice by his three closest friends and his fiancée, Faversham follows his erstwhile regiment to the Sudan determined to prove himself, and force his friends to take back the white feathers they gave him as a mark of cowardice. The parched Sudanese desert is captured in Technicolor and the film was considered one of the most advanced cinematic creations of its time. Two of its cast would later be knighted, Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir John Clements, who played Faversham.

  On the other side of the Sahara, and a couple of decades after the events portrayed in The Four Feathers, Fort Saganne also has European occupiers and locals clashing in the desert. A 1984 French film set in French Algeria, it features Gerard Depardieu as the hero, Charles Saganne, who is battling not just the Algerians but his own lowly background, and the political games of those responsible for promoting and condemning French colonialism.

  Beau Geste

  Considering their lengthier and broader colonial experience there, it is perhaps appropriate that the French should take the laurels for the most famous Saharan story and its numerous film versions. The very title Beau Geste is enough to conjure up images of weary legionnaires in kepis, pitched battles against defiant Tuareg and a seemingly deserted Saharan fort. This classic high adventure desert movie, based on the 1924 book by P C. Wren, satisfied all the stereotypes of its day, including the heroic, upright British, a sadistic French sergeant-major and savage tribesmen.

  Michael “Beau” Geste leaves home and joins the French Foreign Legion after the apparent theft of Blue Water, a precious stone belonging to his aunt who has raised Beau and his orphan brothers. By taking the blame for the alleged theft, Beau is satisfied that although these measures are drastic, he has done the right thing and saved something of the family’s honour. When they learn what he has done, Beau’s brothers, Digby and John, likewise run away from home and join the Legion, being as keen as Beau to make a conspicuous display of their chivalry.

  The classic 1939 film version, starring Gary Cooper, Ray Milland and Robert Preston as the Geste brothers, was filmed in the deserts of Arizona. The importance of the desert is established before the first scene as the film’s title is revealed written in sand, only to be concealed by more sand carried on a desert wind. The story’s premise is summed up by an on-screen Arabian proverb that reads “The love of a man for a woman waxes and wanes like the moon... but the love of brother for brother is steadfast as the stars, and endures like the word of the prophet.”

  A slow opening shot of an empty desert establishes the Sahara’s onscreen presence. Then, having crossed a sea of dunes, a relief column of the French Foreign Legion arrives at the embattled Fort Zinderneuf, only to find it silent but with its defenders still upright at their posts. With no signs of the enemy, we discover that the fort is mysteriously manned by the dead. As the story says, “Everybody does his duty at Zinderneuf, dead or alive!”

  The book was an instant success upon publication, as was the first film version, which came out just two years later with the tagline, “Hard lives, quick deaths, undying love!” A silent film, it featured some of the biggest stars of the day, including Ronald Coleman as Beau.

  The 1966 film version is the least true to the story, losing not only one of the Geste brothers but dispensing with the missing gem and family dishonour to have Beau appear instead as an American businessman determined to take the blame for embezzlement by a dishonest partner. Starring Guy Stockwell as Beau, Leslie Nielsen in a rare non-comedic role as Lieutenant De Ruse and Telly Savalas as the tyrannical Sergeant-Major Dagineau, the film is less gripping than either of the earlier versions, perhaps because of the unnecessary meddling with the plot. One of the few links to earlier versions of the film is that it too was filmed in Arizona, rather than the Sahara.

  Beau Geste is such an enduring favourite that it has sparked more film parodies than straight adaptations, including comic offerings from Abbot and Costello (Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion) and the British Carry On team (Carry on... Follow That Camel), whose interpretation of the story was filmed on Camber Sands on the south coast of England. The first of these spoofs is the 1931 silent film Beau Hunks, the first of two versions by the iconic comedy double act of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. In both Beau Hunks, released in the UK as Beau Chumps, and the 1939 “talkie” Flying Deuces, the plot revolves around the cliché of a man joining the Legion in order to forget a lover. In both films a heartbroken Ollie decides to join the Legion, taking the perpetually compliant Stan away with him. In Beau Hunks Ollie’s love interest is Jeanie-Weanie, or Jean Harlow, who only appears in the film as a photograph. When the pair reach their post, a fort in the Algerian desert, they discover that all their comrades have likewise signed up to forget Jeanie-Weanie, who is also the love interest of the rebel leader. To complete the Saharan motifs, Stan and Ollie become separated from their unit during a sandstorm, arriving at Fort Arid ahead of everyone else before single-handedly defeating the rebels and saving the day.

  Profitable as the French Foreign Legion has proved for filmmakers, it is with Second World War films that the studios have really hit the jackpot. Replacing unfashionable empire-inspired story lines, directors were for decades able to draw on events that audiences understood as recent news rather than unremembered history. First among these was Sahara. Released in 1943, the action takes place in Egypt’s western desert, beginning with an Allied retreat and concluding with news of victory at the first Battle of al-Alamein. Although an unashamed piece of Allied propaganda, Sahara remains an enjoyable film. Directed by Zoltan Korda, of The Four Feathers fame, it came out almost a year to the day after the end of the Second Battle of al-Alamein.

  The film’s leading actor is Humphrey Bogart, whose star was in the ascendant after the previous year’s release of Casablanca, and he assured Sahara’s success. Billed as “A mighty story of adventure, courage and glory in the desert”, the film follows a mixed-nationality group of Allied soldiers, consisting of Americans, British, Irish, French, South African and Sudanese who are, more or less, lost. Also in their company is an Italian prisoner, sympathetically portrayed railing against the idiocy of Mussolini and the evil of Hitler. The group come to a small, virtually waterless well only to be joined shortly thereafter by a similar-sized group of Germans. The crux of the film is a battle of wits between the two groups who face off and subsequently fight, while the desert threatens to kill them before they manage to kill each another. Bogart plays Sergeant Joe Gunn, a tank commander who brings the Allied stragglers to the well on his tank, Lulu Belle, and tries to negotiate food for water. Like other Saharan-based films, Korda’s desert is as important as the soldiers, and one senses how terrified they are of the desert, the emotionless entity against both sides.

  Sahara was Columbia Pictures top grossing film of the year, and with the film closing with an Allied victory it was an effective propaganda vehicle at a time when news of victories was scarce. Although Korda enjoyed working on location in Africa for other productions, it was impossible to shoot Sahara in situ, the war still being fought there, so it was filmed instead in Imperial Valley, California.

  Released more than a decade after the war’s end, Ice Cold in Alex (1958) perfectly captures the mayhem of any conflict but also aims to show heroism against the odds. The action centres on Captain Anson, played by John Mills, and his loyal but not-uncritical sergeant (Harry Andrews). While retreating from a German advance, the men are given the job of delivering two nurses, who have become separated from their unit, to Alexandria. An Axis attack forces the quartet to negotiate a path across the desert in an ambulance called Katy, while trying to avoid enemy troops. The group grow suspicious of Captain van der Poel, played by Anthony Quayle, a South African officer who claims to be lost. Added to this is the fact that battle-fati
gued Anson is on the verge of becoming an alcoholic, and his forward progress depends on his vision of a bar in Alexandria where the beer is served ice cold, providing the film’s evocative tide.

  During the course of their journey the British characters discover that Quayle is a German spy, although they do not tell him this until they are free of the Sahara, and in the comforting embrace of Alexandria and Captain Anson’s favourite bar, the exterior shots of which were actually filmed in Tripoli’s Cathedral Square, nearly 1000 miles west of Alexandria. The bond that has grown between them during the course of their struggle against the desert means that Anson reports Quayle to the authorities as a German prisoner of war who surrendered to them rather than as a spy, which would lead to his death by firing squad.

  As the four sit at the bar with an ice cold beer in front of each of them, Anson does not wait for the usual niceties of raised glasses and “cheers”, but empties his glass in a single, steady gulp as the others look on. Replacing his empty glass on the bar, Anson utters the immortal line, “Worth waiting for.” Quayle’s arrest allows the German officer to close the story by reminding viewers of the centrality of the desert in the production, to acknowledge that it was a case of, ‘‘All against the desert, the greater enemy.”

  One of the more intriguing Sahara-themed Second World War films is The Hill (1965), set in a British military prison camp in the Libyan Desert. While the war in the desert continues, the soldiers in the camp, who are mainly guilty of minor offences, are brutally mistreated by many of the prison’s military police guards, who delight in handing out frequent and severe punishments for minor and imaginary infractions. Although he later wavers in his abuse of the men, one of the strictest disciplinarians is Regimental Sergeant-Major Wilson, played by Harry Andrews, who also played the sergeant in Ice Cold in Alex.

  The unrelenting villain of the film is a new member of the prison staff, Staff Sergeant Williams, who takes sadistic pleasure from disciplining the prisoners, his favourite punishment being to force the men, in full kit and in the heat of the day, to repeatedly climb an artificial sand hill that stands in the middle of the prison yard, from which the film takes its title. The death of one of the prisoners, who fails to receive adequate medical attention from the camp’s doctor (Michael Redgrave), precipitates a number of power struggles among the guards, with their different views on prisoner treatment, and the prisoners, who live in fear of being the hill’s next victim.

  The hero among the prisoners is Joe Roberts (played by Sean Connery, already established as James Bond in the previous year’s Goldfinger). A former sergeant-major demoted for striking an officer, Roberts encapsulates the inherent predicament of prisoners and guards alike when he says, “Everyone is doing time here, even the screws.” Although largely filmed in Spain, the director Sidney Lumet recalled in his autobiography that the weather was hot enough to recreate the feeling of a Saharan summer. Worried that the heat might lead to debilitating dehydration among his cast and crew, Lumet asked Connery if he was still urinating, to which Connery replied, “Only in the morning.”

  Desert Epics

  More recently, the 1996 film adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient achieved great critical success, winning nine Oscars and numerous other awards. Directed by Anthony Minghella, the film faithfully follows the novel, where the Sahara is the setting for romance and danger before and during the Second World War. An involved story, it tells a number of interconnected tales in non-linear fashion, revolving around themes such as crises of identity, betrayal and doomed love, all against the backdrop of pre-war desert exploration and the war itself

  The explorers of the story are based on the members of the Zerzura Club, the pioneering pre-war fraternity of Saharaphiles in the vanguard of motorized desert travel, including Ralph Bagnold, Patrick Clayton and the English patient himself, Laszlo Almasy, played by Ralph Fiennes.

  Although the Libyan Desert in Egypt, also known as the Western Desert, is central to the story, the all-star cast of Kristin Scott Thomas, Willem Dafoe and Colin Firth never set foot in Egypt, Tunisian authorities making it easier to shoot a film there. Because of budget constraints many purported shots of the Sahara, including some of the aerial views of the desert, were filmed in a soundstage, which is one of the film’s few disappointing aspects.

  With a post-war setting, another adaptation of a book to focus on the Sahara is The Sheltering Sky (1990). Based on Paul Bowles’ 1949 novel, the director Bernardo Bertolucci’s motion picture is considered by many to be one of the most beautiful works of cinema of the decade. Bowles hated it. In Let It Come Down, a film about his life, he says, “it should never have been filmed. The ending is idiotic and the rest is pretty bad,” - this despite having played the part of the film’s narrator.

  Starring Debra Winger and John Malkovich as Kit and Port Moresby, the film tells the story of an American couple in North Africa who are continually travelling south to ever-remoter desert locations. In part hoping to discover themselves, they are also ostensibly trying to salvage their moribund marriage although their friend from home, George Tunner, accompanies them on their travels. Tunner is the most excited by the prospect of the journey, exclaiming, “We’re probably the first tourists they’ve had since the war.” Kit replies disdainfully, “Tunner, we’re not tourists. We’re travellers.” Unlike many of the films already discussed, Bertolucci was determined to film in the Sahara itself, which required the crew to travel to locations in Morocco, Algeria and Niger. The extra effort of location shoots comes through on screen, with the enervating heat going a long way towards making civil, everyday relationships between the characters almost impossible.

  Aït Benhaddou, Morocco, one location for The Sheltering Sky

  Men With a Mission

  “We soon arrived among them, and were struck by terror at the sight: - huge mountains of loose sand piled up like drifted snow, towered two hundred feet above our heads on every side, and seemed to threaten destruction to our whole party.”

  Capt. James Riley, Sufferings in Africa (1817)

  From the first meeting between a native Saharan and an outsider, goods and knowledge have been traded across the desert. These exchanges were not always carried out willingly; the interaction has often been marked by violence, but it has continued without interruption. When steps were taken to formalize relations between states, the presence of diplomats was required. When knowledge was sought, scientists from innumerable specialist fields were dispatched to obtain it. Apart from the Sahara itself, there was often little or nothing that bound together the otherwise disparate collection of individuals who were drawn into the desert’s orbit.

  Diplomats today benefit from the protection afforded by the recognition of other countries but for many years those sent out by their political masters could not always rely on such niceties. The arrival of a foreign diplomat was often met with unease by local authorities. Some were seen as an economic threat, wishing to pursue direct trade in territories where local rulers would rather maintain economic control. In other cases insularity made rulers wary of outsiders, who could be a threat to their power; in many cases, local chiefs lived to see these fears realized.

  By the mid-seventeenth century European powers were sending representatives to Tripoli, in recognition of the state’s de facto independence from Constantinople. Courting the deys, or rulers, of Tripoli was not always an easy task. For one thing, the city’s most important commercial activity the rulers oversaw was state-sponsored piracy. Although foreign representation was largely restricted to the coastal ports, as termini of trans-Saharan trade, a base in one of those cities allowed diplomats to gather more information about the interior than their hosts would like.

  One legendary British diplomat to the “Sublime Porte” in North Africa was Colonel Hanmer Warrington. Born two months after the American Declaration of independence, Warrington was an army officer for twenty years before being
appointed British consul-general to Tripoli in 1814. At that time the city’s ruler, Yusuf Pasha Karamanli, had seen corsair activity curtailed by the Royal Navy.

  One result of this development, Warrington understood, was that the dey had turned his attention southward, developing ambitions to control the Saharan slave states of Bornu and Sokoto. Warrington believed that this was a great opportunity to garner information about the interior and possible new trading partners in that direction. As a result of the close relationship between the consul and the pasha, which Warrington once boasted meant he could “do anything and everything in Tripoli,” there followed a remarkable period of British exploration, trade and anti-abolitionist agitation. If Warrington saw a conflict of interests between Britain’s anti-slavery policy and the pasha’s interest in the slaving empires of the south, he was apparently able to resolve this to his personal satisfaction.

  Warrington’s relationships with representatives of other foreign powers in Tripoli were often less friendly than those with the dey. In part because of his closeness to Karamanli, Warrington had an inflated sense of self-importance that his western counterparts considered haughty and arrogant. Recounting the details of one diplomatic battle with a foreign colleague, he closed his report to London with the words, “I am an Englishman (thank God). He is not.”