Humphrey Bogart has a new type of role with sand replacing Greenstreet as the inscrutable foe, and he show his appreciation of the change by turning in what is distinctly one of his best performances in recent years.

The picture itself is a good and interesting variation on a well-worn theme. An American tank loses its formation and, in subsequent wanderings across the Saharan wastes, picks up an English medical officer, a Fighting Frenchman, a Negro veteran of at least a dozen wars and insurrections, an Italian soldier, a German officer, and others too numerous to mention, including, eventually about a gross of assorted Nazi prisoners. The process obviously involves plenty of blood and thunder, and the picture works itself up to a well-planned climax, leaving everyone satisfied.

By far the most notable feature of the show, aside from a few really superb acting jobs, is the intelligent treatment of the enemy. Here are presented carefully and convincingly the dilemma of the Italian fighter with nothing to fight for, the unflinching arrogant faith of the Nazi mind, and more powerful than all this, the intense humanness persisting somehow even amidst the mechanical brutality of modern war. For this alone, "Sahara" is well worth seeing, and, incidentally, worth suffering through the other half of the bill.