"Alex" is Alexandria, Egypt, in 1942. The thing that is "ice cold" there is the glass of lager that John Mills in going to buy for himself and his three diverse companions after they coax their steaming two-ton ambulance through several hundred miles of inhospitable Libyan desert, threatened by Nazis and failures both mechanical and human.
It's a genre movie. We've seen numerous other examples. There is, oh, "Sahara" with Humphrey Bogart, "The Immortal Sergeant" with Henry Fonda, "Flame Over India" with Kenneth More, among others.
The obstacles are almost generic in themselves. Which route do we take at this cross roads? Will the oasis be occupied by the Germans? We're liable to run out of petrol. Wait -- this well is dry! We'll never make it over that sand dune, or through the qattara depression. We'll never get out of this alive. Achtung, Minen! Will the bridge hold? One more man aboard may make the difference between our getting there or not.
Yet, for all its reshuffled features, I can't remember another example of the dangerous desert journey genre that was better done than this.
The four people in the ambulance are John Mills as the proud, exhausted, weak, but resolute commander; Harry Andrews as the by-the-book Sergeant Major; Anthony Quayle as the German officer posing as a South African; and Sylvia Sims as the blondest, most blue-eyed, most clean-featured, most impeccably groomed, most nubile, most sensitive, goddam loveliest poster child of a nurse that human eyes have ever beheld.
The others may sweat. The others may get suburned and dusty and their hair all tangled. They may have grime in their wrinkles and engine oil under their fingernails. But not Sylvia Sims. She's my kind of nurse. That she turns in a decent performance is gravy.
Mills is good too. He's always good when the role suits him. He was superb in a similar role in "Tunes of Glory." Anthony Quayle, though, should stay away from any part that calls for a dialect. Not that he's a weak actor. He was fine as Brutus in a recording of "Julius Caesar." But it's the story itself that makes this movie stand out from its generic companions. It's a long movie, but, with the exception of the "sun's anvil" scene in "Lawrence of Arabia," it accomplishes the difficult task of not only getting that military ambulance to Alex, but of convincing us that it took a lot of anguish, work, and determination to get it done.
I'll mention one scene. The ambulance, which resembles a truck, can't make it up a steep slope, so the men remove the plugs, face it backwards up the hill, and laboriously wind the crank. Inch by bloody inch, the stone-heavy conveyance creeps upward. The job exhausts everyone. Then, when the top of the rise is near, the ambulance slips out of reverse and into neutral and, with no one on the brakes, rattles all the way downhill, so the job must begin all over again.
That scene is emblematic. Somebody, in this instance Christopher Landon, knew what he was writing about. I can't imagine that much of this screenplay was done by a naive but imaginative writer in the comfort of his expansive city flat, perhaps next to a cozy fire. The writer at least knows something about military ambulances and the internal combustion engine in a way that, say, the writers of "Sahara" need not have known.
No movie is perfect, and this one is no exception. Two-thirds of the way through, Sylvia Sims has never been more than one of the team. Then, one night, Mills wanders off behind some clumps of sand. Sims follows him, flops down next to his supine figure, begins to caress his hair and pleated features, then glues herself to his lips after about one minute of this foreplay, or oneplay. Ka-boom, and the pair are now lovers.
But that's about it as far as weaknesses go. There's an enormous amount of tension ginned up by procedures such as finding a way through a mine field or being pursued across the rough ground by a pair of German armored personnel carriers.
But that glass of Carlsberg was worth it. Nice job by all concerned.
It's a genre movie. We've seen numerous other examples. There is, oh, "Sahara" with Humphrey Bogart, "The Immortal Sergeant" with Henry Fonda, "Flame Over India" with Kenneth More, among others.
The obstacles are almost generic in themselves. Which route do we take at this cross roads? Will the oasis be occupied by the Germans? We're liable to run out of petrol. Wait -- this well is dry! We'll never make it over that sand dune, or through the qattara depression. We'll never get out of this alive. Achtung, Minen! Will the bridge hold? One more man aboard may make the difference between our getting there or not.
Yet, for all its reshuffled features, I can't remember another example of the dangerous desert journey genre that was better done than this.
The four people in the ambulance are John Mills as the proud, exhausted, weak, but resolute commander; Harry Andrews as the by-the-book Sergeant Major; Anthony Quayle as the German officer posing as a South African; and Sylvia Sims as the blondest, most blue-eyed, most clean-featured, most impeccably groomed, most nubile, most sensitive, goddam loveliest poster child of a nurse that human eyes have ever beheld.
The others may sweat. The others may get suburned and dusty and their hair all tangled. They may have grime in their wrinkles and engine oil under their fingernails. But not Sylvia Sims. She's my kind of nurse. That she turns in a decent performance is gravy.
Mills is good too. He's always good when the role suits him. He was superb in a similar role in "Tunes of Glory." Anthony Quayle, though, should stay away from any part that calls for a dialect. Not that he's a weak actor. He was fine as Brutus in a recording of "Julius Caesar." But it's the story itself that makes this movie stand out from its generic companions. It's a long movie, but, with the exception of the "sun's anvil" scene in "Lawrence of Arabia," it accomplishes the difficult task of not only getting that military ambulance to Alex, but of convincing us that it took a lot of anguish, work, and determination to get it done.
I'll mention one scene. The ambulance, which resembles a truck, can't make it up a steep slope, so the men remove the plugs, face it backwards up the hill, and laboriously wind the crank. Inch by bloody inch, the stone-heavy conveyance creeps upward. The job exhausts everyone. Then, when the top of the rise is near, the ambulance slips out of reverse and into neutral and, with no one on the brakes, rattles all the way downhill, so the job must begin all over again.
That scene is emblematic. Somebody, in this instance Christopher Landon, knew what he was writing about. I can't imagine that much of this screenplay was done by a naive but imaginative writer in the comfort of his expansive city flat, perhaps next to a cozy fire. The writer at least knows something about military ambulances and the internal combustion engine in a way that, say, the writers of "Sahara" need not have known.
No movie is perfect, and this one is no exception. Two-thirds of the way through, Sylvia Sims has never been more than one of the team. Then, one night, Mills wanders off behind some clumps of sand. Sims follows him, flops down next to his supine figure, begins to caress his hair and pleated features, then glues herself to his lips after about one minute of this foreplay, or oneplay. Ka-boom, and the pair are now lovers.
But that's about it as far as weaknesses go. There's an enormous amount of tension ginned up by procedures such as finding a way through a mine field or being pursued across the rough ground by a pair of German armored personnel carriers.
But that glass of Carlsberg was worth it. Nice job by all concerned.