a_chinn Blandly entertaining WWII spy story about George Sanders getting involved with Nazis and intrigue in Damascus. Although filmed near the end of the war, the story takes play at the outset of WWI, with the Allies and Nazis both vying for Arab support. Petty low budget and nothing all that special except for the presence of the effortlessly suave Sanders, who manages to make this film worth checking out.

bkoganbing The action of this film never got anywhere near the Arabian peninsula for a film titled Action In Arabia. I guess the alliteration got to the folks at RKO when they titled this film as the scene of the action is Damascus.Which was after World War I Syria was a French mandate per the Versailles treaty. When France fell in 1940 the various colonial possessions had their own internal battles as to whether to declare loyalty to the Vichy regime or the Free French of DeGaulle. Then there were the various Arab tribes not to mention the Druse people in Syria who were not mentioned in the film all of them having their own idea on which horse to place their bets.George Sanders is an American reporter who had been covering the backwoods theater of Iraq during World War II. He's stopping in Damascus, but he also recognizes Alan Napier as a Nazi agent on the plane with Lenore Aubert who is the daughter of influential sheik H.B. Warner. He sends a colleague with a bead on the story who unfortunately gets killed following it up.Now Sanders is on a mission to see what's going on. With the help of Virginia Bruce and her father Gene Lockhart who we really never trust simply because its Gene Lockhart and you know the roles he's normally cast in. There's also Robert Armstrong of the American Foreign Service who's a bit thick but comes through in a crisis. It's a decent action propaganda programmer from RKO though it should have been entitled Intrigue In Damascus.

sol **SPOILERS** Dull as dishwater WWII action film with the suave debonair as well as witty George Sanders as American reporter Michael Gordon in the just liberated, from the Vichy French, Syrian capital Damascus.Gordon comes across an underground Nazi spy ring in the city after his friend and fellow American reporter William Chalmers, Robert Anderson, was found murdered with a knife stuck in his back. With the help of the woman of mystery and intrigue in the film Yvonne Danesco, Virginia Bruce, Gordon tracks the spy ring right to the steps to the swanky hotel he's staying at run by Nazi Aagent Eric Latimer, Alan Napler. Smelling that there's something rotten in Latimer's hotel, besides the food, Gordon goes into action despite being told by the US Ambassador Matthew Reed, Robert Armstrong, to take he first plane out of Damascus the very next day before he creates an nasty international incident.***SPOILERS*** It's when Gordon gets wind from Yvonne, who's actually a Free French spy, that the Nazis are trying to incite a Muslim revolt against British and Free French rule in the Middle-East that he finally convinces Reed to get off his duff and get the US, who at the time was neutral in the war, to put the squeeze on the Nazis and their Arab supporters! Not waiting for the calvary-the US &UK-to come to his rescue Gordon single handedly puts an end to this clear and present danger to the allied war effort by getting the word out, through his exotically beautiful daughter Mounirash (Leone Aubert), to the top Arab Desert Chief Adbul El-Rashid, H.B Warner, that something is stinking up his camp and it's not the left behinds from his camels and horses. The deal or word is that old man El-Rashid is being suckered by one of his top lieutenants the sneaky and Nazi loving Eben Kareem, Jamiel Hasson, to join in with the Nazis in their war against the regions, The Middle-East, top colonialist powers the hated British and French! It's then that old man Rashid blew a fuse and ordered his men to put an end to this traitor in their mist, Eben Kareen, who soon ended up together with his Nazi friends dead in a fiery car crash!P.S Among all the amazing feats preformed by George Sanders in the movie the by far most amazing was how he kept his sparkling white and immaculately pressed dinner jacker from as much as getting a speck of dirt on it all throughout the film! Sanders or Michael Gordon also was able to fly a plane as skillfully as any top air ace in the RAF USAAF or Luftwaffe. All that with having just under a dozen flying lessons under his belt! As for the fierce and revolting Arabs warriors in the movie the only thing that they seemed to be able to do was run around in circles, on their camels, in the Syrian Desert with no idea to where they were going! That's until the wise old desert chieftain Abdul El Rashid finally gave them some directions where to go!

ADAM-53 Basically, this is a Casablanca rip-off by RKO about passion and hidden Nazi sympathies in World War II Damascus. Ex-Simon Templer ("The Saint!") star George Sanders is on impeccable form as a New York reporter (with a British accent) on the trail of Nazi sympathisers in the desert. When his fellow reporter is murdered, Sanders (in a white dinner-jacket that predates Sean Connery's wearing of it in Goldfinger by some 20 years) sets off coolly to track down the killers, uncovering a plot in which the Nazis aim to unite the Arab tribes against the Allied forces. The story is pure hokum, but never mind. Some of the action and the audacity of the plot are breath-taking and anyone who enjoys The Saint or The Falcon films, or Casablanca, will probably enjoy it. It's only a pity Sanders didn't make more films as the hero -- this was his last. After this, he would only play the sneering villain and, eventually, become a real-life parody of his own screen persona. A pity, as he really could have been more hero than cad when the fit took him. If you like this movie, check out the novel by George Sanders (actually ghosted by Falcon screenwriter Craig Rice) called "Crime on My Hands" in which Sanders has to solve a muder on a film set. It's light, amusing and reminiscent of the Saint/Falcon films that made Sanders a star in the first place.