Aventuras en el Sahara

In the eyes of producer and naïve film enthusiast Menahem Golan, Sahara was supposed to be a spectacular fusion of two classics of the 1960s, The Great Race and Lawrence of Arabia, and with a dash of The Blue Lagoon, whose star he hired for the lead role, thrown in for good measure. The result, however, serves as further proof of Golan’s huge ambition and lack of reflection. The mix of influences – racing, war between desert tribes, romance – doesn’t work, because the individual elements negate each other. In practice, this means that as soon as the race begins, it is interrupted until the end of the film so that the characters can get involved in the tribal skirmishes and enchantingly soak up the local culture and customs (or rather the filmmakers’ clueless idea of them). As is typical of Golan, it’s not just the racing that remains a mere promise, as Sahara is simply a textbook example of how to cheaply make a movie that, as a pitching concept on paper, will give the impression of being a spectacular blockbuster. The desert rally is promptly interrupted because it would have required numerous relocations of the crew, the tribal wars would have required too much money for the action scenes, and even Brooke Shields has bathing and bedroom scenes, but she performs the former in her underwear and the latter are entirely discreet so that the fresh-faced star wouldn’t demand a higher fee. Rather than a late-period epic of the studio system, the film is more reminiscent of an Oriental trash flick based on a Karl May novel – after all, it has several things in common with Kingdom of the Silver Lion. Though it is necessary to add that, unlike that German hodgepodge produced by Artur Brauner, the craftsmanship of Sahara is better by several orders of magnitude. Though Golan’s aim was undoubtedly to make a universally accessible blockbuster, the film was a box-office bomb. Inadequate promotion is more to blame for that than the quality of the film. Despite Golan’s faulty vision, Sahara is not a spectacular costume adventure, but merely a run-of-the-mill trash flick. The movie’s female protagonist precisely follows the standard arc in which a seemingly wilful and unmarried woman embarks on a journey to an exotic location, where she falls for Mr. Mysterious, with his deep-set eyes and statuesque body, first succumbing to passivity in his arms and then, in the climax, becoming a helpless damsel in distress waiting for that walking ideal to come and get her out of trouble. (21.12.2014)