Newsman George Sanders arrives in Damascus and gets involved in various Nazi-related goings-on.
This was planned as RKO's response to Casablanca. With new found wartime prosperity, the studio spent lavishly for them, borrowing Sanders from 20th Century-Fox and hiring Virginia Bruce, Gene Lockhart, and even a couple of actors who had performed in the Warner Brothers' production. Even the background score by Roy Webb will sound familiar. What they neglected to do, alas, was to get a script that actually compared to the cobbled-together affair that Curtiz and company had to contend with. There's plenty of action in this movie, with Nazis, murders, camels racing across the desert, et c., et c. What there isn't are people caught in situations in which they have to make moral decisions, people with pasts that define their characters and dilemmas. Sanders isn't world weary. He's indifferent, a man doing his job because it pays the bills. Everyone seems a bit disconnected from what's going on, like H. B. Warner reciting Islamic platitudes while his world crumbles, or Robert Armstrong who doesn't even know how to dress for the weather at the start.
Perhaps that is the theme of this movie: pay attention! It does not begin to compare with the problems of little people whose problems don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. These people can take the plane out.
This is not to say this is a bad movie. If you're looking for the sort of movie that its title indicates, it's what's on the label, and it's well presented. It just ain't what won the other movie its Academy Award.
This was planned as RKO's response to Casablanca. With new found wartime prosperity, the studio spent lavishly for them, borrowing Sanders from 20th Century-Fox and hiring Virginia Bruce, Gene Lockhart, and even a couple of actors who had performed in the Warner Brothers' production. Even the background score by Roy Webb will sound familiar. What they neglected to do, alas, was to get a script that actually compared to the cobbled-together affair that Curtiz and company had to contend with. There's plenty of action in this movie, with Nazis, murders, camels racing across the desert, et c., et c. What there isn't are people caught in situations in which they have to make moral decisions, people with pasts that define their characters and dilemmas. Sanders isn't world weary. He's indifferent, a man doing his job because it pays the bills. Everyone seems a bit disconnected from what's going on, like H. B. Warner reciting Islamic platitudes while his world crumbles, or Robert Armstrong who doesn't even know how to dress for the weather at the start.
Perhaps that is the theme of this movie: pay attention! It does not begin to compare with the problems of little people whose problems don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. These people can take the plane out.
This is not to say this is a bad movie. If you're looking for the sort of movie that its title indicates, it's what's on the label, and it's well presented. It just ain't what won the other movie its Academy Award.