bkoganbing You have to swallow a whole lot in order to give A Yank in Libya any credence of any kind. This was inflicted on the wartime American public by that bottom rung Poverty Row studio PRC.No doubt the folks at PRC thought to capitalize on those MGM classics A Yank At Oxford and A Yank At Eton in the title. School had nothing to do with this picture although someone sure missed their geography when they wrote this.Libya on your Rand McNally maps prior to our entry in World War II was colored the same color that Italy was as it was an Italian colony. Yet nowhere do you see signs of Italian soldiers or Italian anything. What we have here is neutral Libya being stirred up against the British in the person of consul H.B. Warner by William Vaughn an agent of the Fuehrer.Getting wind of this reporter Walter Woolf King who wants to scoop the world, but keeps blundering into the situation. He's driving Warner, Joan Woodbury and the rest of the British nuts.The British and the Nazis are supporting rival sheiks Duncan Renaldo and George J. Lewis respectively. Although in 1942 we did not know how things would turn out, the good guys prevail here.But any film that has Harry "Parkyarkarkus" Eisenstein as another agent give a wide berth.

MartinHafer Mike Malone is an obnoxious and stupid American reporter who, inexplicably, is hanging out under cover in Libya! He's boorish and stupid--which is a nice match, as all the rest of the folks in the film are really dumb. Because of this, the whole gun smuggling and Nazi infiltrator angles just don't make a lot of sense and the film leaves you wondering WHAT you've just seen! "A Yank in Libya" is a horrible movie and I have no idea why most of the reviews are so kind to this mess of a film. The only good thing about it is that the film can be fun to watch because it is so incredibly stupid!When the movie begins, you can see that the footage they're using of a desert scene is old re-used footage. It's grainy but more importantly, since it was from a silent film (which runs at a different speed than a sound film) the footage is too fast. As you watch the film, again and again you notice this, as the filmmakers actually just spliced up an old movie and inserted a few new scenes into it to make an all-new picture. Clever? Not really, as it's very obvious AND the new scenes are just god-awful--mostly due to the script having been written by a couple of chimps! Again and again, the dialog is just awful (a nice example is the line "why I'd be a cock-eyed whirling dervish...") and the plot just doesn't make any sense (one guy is shot from only a few feet away and is dead...but later, with no explanation, he's very alive and quite well!). The bottom line is that this terrible B-movie is so terrible that it actually could be seen as funny to bad movie buffs- -but all others stay clear!

Thunderossa It definitely fits the time period as the Axis & Allies were playing espionage games throughout most of North Africa & the rest of the world. It's not the best of films, but certainly not the worst of the budget films as described previously from the compilation War Classics. Duncan"Cisco Kid" Renaldo was actually very good in one of his first feature films. I really enjoyed the performance of Harry Parke (credited as Parkyarkarkus). Why he never got any bigger roles is beyond me. He played the perfect buddy/partner role and saved the movie...imho.As said, this film was part of a budget package from Superbox-Mart entitled War Classics. Eight movies for eight bucks, which included other never-heard-from-films that has some decent stars trying to pay the bills.This script is...well, not so hot. The editing & cinematography is...worse. If you can by-pass all of that and want to see the future Cisco Kid & a great sidekick that sadly never fulfilled his true potential, definitely pick it up! Otherwise, there's other WW2 films to watch.-Thunderossa.

frankfob You don't expect much from a PRC picture, and with rare exceptions--mainly from Edgar G. Ulmer and a few by Joseph H. Lewis or Lew Landers--that's exactly what you get: not much. This "epic" about Nazis in Africa trying to incite an Arab revolt against the British isn't much different. The script, by longtime PRC hacks Arthur St. Claire and Sherman Lowe, is trite, laughable, full of unfunny "wisecracks" and plot holes the size of Outer Mongolia. The direction, by longtime PRC no-budget specialist Al Herman, is semi-comatose at best. The performances, though--except for spectacularly incompetent and irritatingly hammy lead Walter Woolf King--aren't really half bad. Veteran comedian Parkyakarkus is actually the best thing about the film. He plays a guy from Brooklyn masquerading as a razor-blade salesman and brightens up the screen considerably when he shows up. He's got great comic timing, charm to spare and seems to be having a heck of a good time. Duncan Renaldo is fairly convincing as an Arab sheik--despite his Spanish accent--and veteran bad guy George J. Lewis as Renaldo's Arab rival does his usual fine job of villainy, even if he goes a bit over the top sometimes. Joan Woodbury is quite pretty and has a nice light touch, and she and Renaldo have great chemistry together, although--like the rest of the cast--she has none at all with King. H.B. Warner, whose career stretched back to the silent era, lends a shred of dignity to the low-rent proceedings, even though he blows his lines several times and, PRC being PRC, they weren't cut out. There's a great deal of stock footage spliced in from a big-budget silent movie with a similar Arab theme--although I have no idea which one it is--and, PRC being PRC, no effort was made to try to make it inconspicuous: I've seldom seen stock footage that was so blatantly obvious."A Yank in Libya" isn't very good, of course--well, OK, it stinks--but it would be worth a look just to see Parkyakarkus in his prime. I had heard of him and knew that he was the father of actor/director Albert Brooks and Super Dave Osborne, but had never actually seen him in anything before. It was worth watching this tenth-rate PRC "extravaganza" just to see him in action. Otherwise, forget it.