I must say I enjoyed this a lot when I first saw it, but that was many years ago and I was a child. Today, after movies have been more or less modernized, it seems really crude. Careless may be a better word.
Half a dozen Navy men are sent to a remote weather station in Inner Mongolia. They are joined at the oasis by a group of Mongol nomads, for whom they request saddles from the U.S. Army. A Japanese air attack drives off the Mongols, destroys the radio, and kills the officer in command, leaving Chief Boatswain's Mate Widmark to lead the men in an attempt to reach the sea, hundreds of miles away.
The location shooting in Nevada depicts the arid grasslands of southeastern Inner Mongolia with some accuracy. The performances may be good too but it's impossible to tell because the script is so clumsy, as if aimed at kids who were my age when I first saw it.
No kidding. It's written as if written by a computer with a low IQ. The Mongols are properly dressed and their housing is accurate but they are nothing more than generic "natives" with strange customs, full of suspicion, and puzzled by a camera. "Desert make Navy Chief Mad," says Sitting Bull -- I mean Murvyn Vye, the white man who plays the Mongol chief.
There is one scene, though, that I find more amusing than I did on first viewing, and that's the scene in which Widmark has filled a large weather balloon with helium and is about to release it. It always reminds me of when I was a deck hand on a Coast Guard cutter at a weather station in the Pacific. The meteorologists used helium balloons with tails of radar-reflecting tinsel. One night, one of the snipes got into the weather shack, filled one of the balloons and brought it below where the crew lay stacked in their bunks, passing the balloon around and taking big hits off it. What you wind up with is cerebral anoxia because the more helium you breathe, the less oxygen you get. I can't help laughing when I remember those dozen sailors lolling around and saying in these squeaky Mickey-Mouse helium voices: "Man, I never been so stoned." Mais, je divage. Where was I? Yes, the movie. ALL of the dialog sound utterly trite, down to the wisecracks. There is the inevitable attractive native girl. "Well, it looks like you made a big hit with her; I don't know how you do it." "It's my training as a meteorologist, son. I can take one look at her and tell weather." (That's the best crack in the movie.) Richard Widmark's narration is up to the standard. "The heat swam up to you like too much batter in a waffle iron." That raises the question of whether the writer, Freeman, had learned how to write from reading lots of Raymond Chandler.
The second half of the film devolves into a "journey" movie with bedraggled men hauling themselves across blinding-white sand dunes praying the next oasis may be just over the next hill. They acquire camels from the Mongols. Their riding camels is treated as an epic comic event, accompanied by an antic version of "Anchors Away." And when the men change out of their dusty khakis and don dark Mongol gear with those clown hats, why it's just a zany laff riot.
The men are captured by the Japanese, imprisoned, stage an escape, steal a Chinese junk, and sail to Okinawa. I know it was directed by Robert Wise but he doesn't seem to have put much into it, and the writers were asleep at the helm. It could have been a comedy thriller if it had been handled right, with Burt Lancaster swinging from the shrouds.
Half a dozen Navy men are sent to a remote weather station in Inner Mongolia. They are joined at the oasis by a group of Mongol nomads, for whom they request saddles from the U.S. Army. A Japanese air attack drives off the Mongols, destroys the radio, and kills the officer in command, leaving Chief Boatswain's Mate Widmark to lead the men in an attempt to reach the sea, hundreds of miles away.
The location shooting in Nevada depicts the arid grasslands of southeastern Inner Mongolia with some accuracy. The performances may be good too but it's impossible to tell because the script is so clumsy, as if aimed at kids who were my age when I first saw it.
No kidding. It's written as if written by a computer with a low IQ. The Mongols are properly dressed and their housing is accurate but they are nothing more than generic "natives" with strange customs, full of suspicion, and puzzled by a camera. "Desert make Navy Chief Mad," says Sitting Bull -- I mean Murvyn Vye, the white man who plays the Mongol chief.
There is one scene, though, that I find more amusing than I did on first viewing, and that's the scene in which Widmark has filled a large weather balloon with helium and is about to release it. It always reminds me of when I was a deck hand on a Coast Guard cutter at a weather station in the Pacific. The meteorologists used helium balloons with tails of radar-reflecting tinsel. One night, one of the snipes got into the weather shack, filled one of the balloons and brought it below where the crew lay stacked in their bunks, passing the balloon around and taking big hits off it. What you wind up with is cerebral anoxia because the more helium you breathe, the less oxygen you get. I can't help laughing when I remember those dozen sailors lolling around and saying in these squeaky Mickey-Mouse helium voices: "Man, I never been so stoned." Mais, je divage. Where was I? Yes, the movie. ALL of the dialog sound utterly trite, down to the wisecracks. There is the inevitable attractive native girl. "Well, it looks like you made a big hit with her; I don't know how you do it." "It's my training as a meteorologist, son. I can take one look at her and tell weather." (That's the best crack in the movie.) Richard Widmark's narration is up to the standard. "The heat swam up to you like too much batter in a waffle iron." That raises the question of whether the writer, Freeman, had learned how to write from reading lots of Raymond Chandler.
The second half of the film devolves into a "journey" movie with bedraggled men hauling themselves across blinding-white sand dunes praying the next oasis may be just over the next hill. They acquire camels from the Mongols. Their riding camels is treated as an epic comic event, accompanied by an antic version of "Anchors Away." And when the men change out of their dusty khakis and don dark Mongol gear with those clown hats, why it's just a zany laff riot.
The men are captured by the Japanese, imprisoned, stage an escape, steal a Chinese junk, and sail to Okinawa. I know it was directed by Robert Wise but he doesn't seem to have put much into it, and the writers were asleep at the helm. It could have been a comedy thriller if it had been handled right, with Burt Lancaster swinging from the shrouds.