Directed by Nicholas Ray
My rating: 2.5 stars out of 4
IMDb
(DVD, Columbia TriStar)
Richard Burton and Curt Jurgens are British officers in North Africa. They are assigned a dangerous mission to steal documents from the Germans in Libya. Instead, they mostly argue with each other over the meaning of courage and war. It can all be traced back to the fact that Burton was once in love with Jurgens' wife. All of the intellectualizing tends to obscure the more interesting desert survival trek that is at the heart of the movie. In one disgusting scene, a camel is killed and an internal organ carved out. Burton drinks the juice out of the organ to counteract a scorpion bite. Typical of the plot, he is really just trying to show Jurgens that he is more of a "man" for drinking it. More macho acts follow, some soldiers die in the desert and some are rescued.
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