prman-1 I saw this movie only once, on a TV Late Show in 1962, and had to leave in the middle for some other business. I never knew how it ended. I never saw it broadcast since. And, as a B-movie, it was generally unavailable, but now I see that it has been transferred to DVD. I could not recall who starred in it either. Imagine my surprise (and delight) that TCM chose to program it around noon on Sept. 19, 2016. This was 54 YEARS since I first saw it. Talk about closure. I enjoyed the somewhat hard-to-believe premise of the story, and the dealings with the (fake) camel jockey Arabs, who probably would have killed the Americans on first sight—knowing today how they feel about unbelievers. Still, the movie is compelling on a small scale, and well worth watching.

Mark Erickson I watched this movie several times when I was about 5 years old. All my older siblings were off to school, and my mother was doing her morning chores. I used to dream about finding that tank in the desert and driving off in it to defeat the bad guys. For years I've been trying to find a copy of it, and I am thrilled to know there are others who remember and enjoyed it as much as I did! I'm surprised there hasn't been a modern remake yet. It's hard to comment though on the quality of acting or direction when you haven't seen this movie since you were too young to know about that stuff, but from a kids point of view, I'd have to say this movie has everything an adventure-minded boy of the 50's and 60's would want to see in a movie.

rahprods I remember seeing it once about 40 years ago when I was about 7, and it just stuck with me: The image of those guys digging in that sand dune and finding that cool WWII Afrikakorp tank with the witch painted on the turret; pure adventure. I never knew the title, but today I decided to do a plot search on IMDB and finally discovered it after all these years. I do remember it as being ultimately unsatisfying, but it's amazing how one solid image can last in a kid's mind. Will try to rent it for old time's sake.

telegonus I strongly suspect that the reason so many people like this film is that they remember it from years ago, when they were children. Not having seen it since I was a child I feel a little uncomfortable going into either its plot or its virtues except to say that I was tremendously fond of this film and saw it at least twice in its entirety on television. It is a low budget early fifties war movie set in the desert. There is nothing remarkable about it except that it's entertaining. What I do remember is how creatively the low budget was used, and how this was turned into an asset since there are only a few major characters and they are isolated most of the time. The thing is, kids don't like having anything shoved down their throats by adults. Kids, at least of my generation, would tolerate just so much of the Disney-Captain Kangaroo-Howdy Doody stuff, then they'd go crazy. They'd do anything to break up the monotony of wholesomeness,--smash windows, hang from railroad bridges by their fingers, torture the cat--just as long as it wasn't what they were supposed to be doing. Where television and movies were concerned, this meant watching something you weren't supposed to watch. The problem was that Perry Mason bored children to tears; and besides, there was no air of the forbidden to it. But once in a while one would stumble across something that was adult, more or less, and really rang the bell. The Steel Lady is a good example of a movie that probably didn't work too well for adults but was magic for children. They could understand it, since it was all about escape. It was set in an exotic place, which made it automatically exciting, and there was a closeness that developed between the characters simply because they were stuck together and had to make the best of a bad situation, one not unlike the ones children face all the time, except that most of us didn't have the good fortune to travel across the Sahara in a tank.