The Black Tent (1956)

Director: Brian Desmond Hurst

Cast: Donald Sinden, Anthony Steel, Anna-Maria Sandri

Synopsis: In the African desert, a British soldier romances the native chief’s daughter and helps the tribe fight off a Nazi attack.

The Black Tent has all the ingredients of a prestige production: filmed in sumptuous colour and in Vistavision, and shot on location in pre-Gaddafi Libya, it boasts a solid cast of British stiff upper lips including a no-nonsense Donald Sinden (Mogambo, The Day of the Jackal), a curly-haired blonde Anthony Steel, André Morell (The Bridge on the River Kwai, Woman of Straw) as an Arab sheik and Donald Pleasence (Race for the Yankee Zephyr) as a fez-wearing desert guide. It’s got Nazis, Arabs, desert treks and secrets in a sock, and yet it’s still a plodding bore of a film with virtually no plot. Steel plays a British soldier who weds an Arab princess during WWII, Sinden’s his post-war brother who treks across the desert to find out whatever happened to his bro. The princess is played by Anna-Maria Sandri, a pretty little thing who can’t act for toffee. It’s the kind of nothing movie the BBC used to broadcast on a Sunday afternoon when it knew half the nation would be snoozing in front of the box after a full Sunday roast.

(Reviewed 6th March 2012)