IMDB Link
IMDB rating: 7,7
Director: Zoltan Korda
Main Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Bruce Bennett, J. Carroll Naish, Lloyd Bridges, Rex Ingram, Dan Duryea
"Zoltan Korda's Sahara was one of the more exciting action movies to come out of World War II, with a brace of fine performances and a plot - derived, in part, from The Lost Patrol as well as from a Soviet-made documentary entitled The Thirteen - that has been reused at least a dozen times since (most directly in a solid western called Last of the Comanches). But it was also a movie that helped its director find his own 'voice' as a filmmaker, and stands as a uniquely leftist (but not communistic) action film to come out of Hollywood in the middle of World War II. Director Zoltan Korda was the left-leaning brother in the filmmaking family led by Alexander Korda, and throughout the 1930s had been forced to sublimate his own ideological leanings to those of his far more conservative brother.
Sahara, made for Columbia Pictures rather than for Alexander Korda, was the movie where Zoltan's sympathies with colonized and oppressed peoples finally broke out into the open, and his antipathy toward British imperialism finally manifested itself. The hero is American, portrayed in low-key fashion by Humphrey Bogart. He's almost an archetype, a cool, clear-thinking tactician, unencumbered by racial or class prejudice, and immediately takes charge of the contingent of British soldiers on the run from the Germans, telling them how to survive, how to fight and, in many ways, how to live. The British aren't depicted as evil so much as aloof in terms of their officer class, and motivationally out of reasons for fighting the Germans. The movie is a subtly ideological work with a heavy emphasis on action, and it gave Bogart (as well as Bruce Bennett and Dan Duryea) a chance to play uniquely clear and richly heroic roles.
The filmmaker would later bring Alan Paton's Cry, The Beloved Country to the screen at a time when few people outside of South Africa knew or cared about the racial divisions in that country." - www.allmovie.com
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