JohnHowardReid Rope of Sand suffers from a surfeit of additional dialogue. The scenes are often so verbose, Dieterle has to break them up, giving them some sort of pace by filming in very short takes from a large variety of camera angles, as in the card game sequence. On occasion he combines these effects with unobtrusive camera movement. Unfortunately, it doesn't really work. There's just too much dialogue to overcome. The movie is all but buried under its weight. Still, some of the players do manage to come across effectively, particularly Claude Rains as a Machiavellian mining magnate and lovely Corinne Calvet, making an impressive Hollywood debut as the seductive Suzanne. (Although she receives "introducing" billing, she had in fact already appeared in three French films. Her husband John Bromfield has three small but important scenes as a tempted guard).Lancaster is somewhat stiff as the hero, but Henreid plays the sadistic commandant with unaccustomed gusto. On the other hand, Peter Lorre's part seems to have been conceived as an afterthought. Though mumbling his way through several scenes, he has really very little to do, his one big scene - an account of Lancaster's misfortunes - being made completely redundant by its repetition in a more vital flashback form later on in the picture... In the censored print under review, there's no climactic fight between Lancaster and Henreid at all. The former simply pushes his opponent out of the jeep, thus destroying the whole point of the film and denying the audience the all-action climax that all the elaborate groundwork has led us to expect. Instead we have a rather tame confrontation scene with Rains repeating the kind of ambivalent characterization that made him so unforgettable in Casablanca. (He has some typically bitter sarcastic humor too, which he delivers with his usual relish). Despite his prominence in the billing, Mike Mazurki has only a small bit. But Kenny Washington impresses, whilst Sam Jaffe plies his somewhat stereotyped stethoscope with his customary reliability. As expected, producer Wallis has dressed up this re-union with first-class production values, including Lang's moodily atmospheric black-and-white lighting, striking art direction and attractive costumes.

clanciai After a row of the most subtle and sensitive love films ever made in Hollywood, William Dieterle resorted to this brutal and primitive drama of greed in the deserts of Kalahari. The actors are all superb (except Corinne Calvet, who is a failure and never even convincing as such,) but the script is lacking in any human credibility. Such an eloquent actor as Paul Henreid is made to play a sadistic villain without any human nuances, and Burt Lancaster is mostly used to apply his knuckles. The only good performance is Claude Rains, whose relevant cynicism in this dreadful study in greed is all too convincing. Sam Jaffe and Peter Lorre add some sympathy by their decadent characters but not much and far from enough to make this film interesting in any other way than photographically. Only Franz Waxman's fantastic music makes it endurable at all. Sorry about that, Mr Dieterle. Your previous masterpieces made us expect more of you than this sordid B-melodrama.

MARIO GAUCI This is the fourth merely adequate Burt Lancaster movie I am watching in a row (as part of my ongoing tribute to him to mark, albeit a month in advance, the fifteenth anniversary of his death) which comes more of a disappointment in this case given the fine director (William Dieterle) and cast (Lancaster, Paul Henried, Claude Rains, Peter Lorre, Sam Jaffe and Mike Mazurki) involved. While it is true that Dieterle's career had already peaked with PORTRAIT OF JENNIE (1948) and went slowly downhill from there, the film's main fault lies is in the surprisingly uninteresting (given the desert location and diamond mine setting) plot that fails to give rise to much excitement or memorable incident. Naturally, with a cast of that calibre, some good scenes or lines cannot be amiss and, in particular, Rains (as a Macchiavelian director of the company) and Henried (effectively cast against type as the brutish foreman) seem to be relishing their roles; conversely, Lorre and Jaffe seem wasted in their underwritten parts of, respectively, a philosophizing fence and an alcoholic doctor. Another liability is leading lady Corinne Calvet: while looking sensual enough as the femme fatale hired by Rains to seduce adventurer Lancaster and eventually falling for him, her thick French accent become decidedly grating after a while! Incidentally, the copy I acquired is taken from a German print - with the opening credits in that language but the film, luckily, in English! I suppose it would be interesting to compare Val Guest's film from another era that I also happen to have in my collection - KILLER FORCE aka THE DIAMOND MERCENARIES (1975) - which, apart from the similar theme, also makes use of a stellar cast (Peter Fonda, Telly Savalas, Christopher Lee, Hugh O'Brian and O.J. Simpson) but, unfortunately, I will not have time to do so at present. I do not know if the fact that I have been watching lightweight fare all Summer long has made me lose patience somewhat with more of the same but, clearly, I was expecting to enjoy ROPE OF SAND more than I eventually did. Or, perhaps I am just overly anxious to start the upcoming Halloween Challenge in October...

parker_nightengale Rope of Sand, an adventure thriller supposedly set in post-WW II South Africa, certainly receives the vote of "classic" in my book. Far away places, a romance triangle, suspense, even a bit of humor at times...it's all there in a neatly executed, well-acted plot that makes you wish YOU could have been there and tried just what Burt Lancaster did. I have watched this movie more than half a dozen times over the years and still get that sense of intrigue and mystery and fascination with the setting and story that I got on the first occasion, as a child. The film noir era was coming to a close when this movie was created in 1949 but most of the crucial elements are there including use of the black and white, music score, contrasting dialog and action scenes, and so on, right up to the final scene. Perhaps the screenplay might have gotten a little more mileage out of Corrine Calvet and Burt but we need to remember that we're judging films of this era against a different yardstick. I seriously don't think that this movie would have come together at all using actors working today because they would all be hungering for a bigger piece of the movie than anyone got here or typically does get in film noir. This is not to mention what current directors typically do as a substitute for what film noir did with the camera and timing of scene combinations. So I disagree with the previous reviewer. Watch this if you can and enjoy!