After paying his dues throughout the '30s and cementing his status as one of Hollywood's biggest and most unorthodox leading men with Casablanca in 1942, Humphrey Bogart hopped over to Columbia to star in an ambitious combat epic for producer-director Zoltan Korda, half of the famous Korda brothers who created opulent Technicolor spectacles like The Four Feathers, Jungle Book, and The Thief of Bagdad. The result, Sahara, was another success for Bogie but doesn't usually come up in lists of his top classics as it doesn't offer any opportunity for his soulful, quiet romantic side. Initially penned by thriller novelist Philip MacDonald (The List of Adrian Messenger) and partially based on his novel Patrol, the film was officially and unofficially remade multiple times and became a TV staple for decades. However, it's been largely overlooked in the Blu-ray era with the 2025 U.K. release from Indicator marking its first special edition anywhere and only its second appearance in HD (following a basic 2018 edition in France).

After the disastrous Libyan battle of Tobruk in 1942, Master Sgt. Joe Gunn (Bogart) and his men with the Army tank Lulubelle are cut off from the rest of their unit and left to their own devices in the desert. With the unforgiving desert climate throwing up a major obstacle in itself, the soldiers including the resourceful Waco (Bennett) have to make their way to the nearest water source. Along the way they encounter and add on a motley crew of people including Sudanese Major Tambul (Bagdad's Ingram) and his Italian prisoner Giuseppe (Naish), while German Afrika Corps forces orchestrate an ongoing attack around them that could end their march to survival at any moment.

Shot under arduous circumstances near the Salton Sea in California, Sahara pulls out all the stops for gritty spectacle including the use of a real Army unit in training as extras. The film ended up with three Oscar nominations including Naish and the striking cinematography by Rudolph Maté (Gilda), and the story, essentially what was filmed earlier as The Lost Patrol, works like a charm with a narrative gambit lifted from the Soviet film The Thirteen earning a shout out in the credits. The entire ensemble cast is strong here, with the always powerful Ingram getting some of the best moments but making room for pros like Lloyd Bridges and Dan Duryea among the nine travelers. It's a crisp, no-nonsense adventure film with an interesting take on Allied versus Axis relations at the time, including a potent turn by Kurt Kreuger as the main villain.

Though readily available on VHS and DVD through those formats' heyday, Sahara has felt like more of a title you had to track down than one of the evergreen Bogart staples like The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo, and so on. Its relative neglect in the U.S. is at least balanced out by the stacked U.K. edition, which features a typically top-notch HD master supplied by Sony that keeps the original film grain intact (essential for a film with so much sweat and sand on display). The LPCM 1.0 English mono audio sounds great and comes with optional English SDH subtitles. It's always a pleasure to have C. Courtney Joyner around for a commentary, and in a departure from the norm, he goes solo on the track here with a thorough and engaging survey of this film including its somewhat tangled writing history, the backgrounds of all the major participants, the status of Bogart and the skills he honed in earlier crime and action films that came into play here, and the unique role of this among WWII films made during the war itself and the presence of propaganda elements in their narrative. In "Small Miracles" (12m34s), Ehsan Khoshbakht (editors of The Lady with the Torch: Columbia Pictures 1929–1959) talks about his own relationship to the film and its place in the history of the studio as an A-grade war programmer with more to offer than might meet the eye. 1942's "Building a Tank" (19m39s) is a straightforward industrial short about the the Detroit Tank Arsenal which handled the creation of the M-3 Lee tank in the film; if you love watching factory assembly footage, this one's for you. The same year's "The Siege of Tobruk" (17m42s) from the U.K.’s Army Film Unit covers the events of the country's biggest military disaster during the war, making this an interesting real-life prequel to the main feature and one you might want to throw on first for a welcome history lesson. Also included are a pretty rough SD reissue theatrical trailer (during its Screen Gems solicitation for TV) and the usual extensive image gallery of stills and promotional material, plus an insert booklet with a perceptive essay by the always excellent Imogen Sara Smith ("Desert Victory"), an archival on-set story about Bogart and his wife Mayo conducted for Screenland magazine, a 1943 profile of Kreuger by Virginia Wright, an interesting look at the film's promotional tie-in marketing designed to spur on the war effort, and brief notes on the two short films.

Reviewed on February 2, 2025