Directed by Ewald AndrĂ© Dupont with a screenplay by Richard Schayer, one might suspect Aubrey Wisberg's story was the inspiration for Elleston Trevor's 1964 novel, The Flight of The Phoenix, and the 1965 box office failure. Both films center around crash-landing in the Sahara desert with at least one dissenter in the group and the customary limited food, water, no radio, and any rescue attempt taking too long for their survival. Something has to be improvised. Wisely, the Yuma desert filming got underway at the very end of the previous year. The similarities between this B-movie cast and the 1965 big-budget cast separate the two but it is sometimes difficult to determine how much. Released by United Artists, it is a concise eighty-four minutes of adventure, produced and edited by Grant Whytock. Concise is not a word used to describe the extra hour added to the more implausible “Phoenix” film. The incredibly prolific Edward Small Productions again provides a movie without a dull moment. What Small did with limited budgets has rarely been equaled.
Heading up the four-man crew of American oil company employees in this film is Rod Cameron and Tab Hunter in his fourth film. Like today's many films or television series with a socially askew computer genius who saves everyone's bacon, Hunter nearly fits that role as sort of an electronics expert. John Dehner is the pessimistic “glass half empty” dissenter in the film. He and Cameron are at odds throughout the film, in no small part due to the former's alcohol addiction. Always available for a few quips is Richard Erdman, the dependable guy with an eye in the opposite (sex) direction. His countenance before crash landing, below, is both one of inevitable doom and acceptance.
Perhaps given the naive acceptance of the era's movie patrons—who were less critical about such things—one will need to ignore a few filming and editing shortcomings when viewed today, like the era's painted sandhills or studio backdrop screens. Perhaps most confusing here is the gear-up plane crash, burying the nose in a sandbank according to the pilot, Cameron. By the next morning, there is a mound of sand piled around the main landing gear, which clearly depicts the twin-engine Cessna T-50 in its tail-dragger stance. Then there is the bullet's cartoon ricochet effect that sounds more like a metal spring has broken loose from its anchor. But I digress. Nearly every film made—no matter the budget—has something amiss in one detail or the other.
Cameron sets out over a ridge and spots an antenna flag poking above the sand that is connected to a buried World War II Nazi tank. Thinking it may provide them a way out of a dire situation, the crew digs out the sunken tank. They notice German wording on the side roughly translating into the film's title. After burying the mummified German duo, Hunter repairs their radio with parts from the tank's radio but it only works long enough to tell their contact in Casablanca that they are alive.
All work together—even Dehner, for the most part—to get the tank mobile using the remaining gasoline from the plane. With zero options, Cameron must also use their remaining water for its radiator, a decision Dehner tries to thwart at gunpoint. Never get into a fistfight with square-jawed Cameron. Adding another element to the story is a satchel of jewels in a hidden storage compartment, a discovery that Dehner keeps to himself. Although there is more to the story than this, it is the same bejeweled tank Bedouin leaders have been trying to find since 1944—implausibly never spotting the flag or tank among the constantly shifting sands. The Bedouin leader, the Hersey chocolate-faced John Abbott, offers Cameron horses, pack camels and water in exchange for the tank. “We love tank!” Amazingly, the foursome agrees to the exchange with none wondering what the desert dwellers could possibly do with a tank unless they fill it with water. Smelling an infestation of desert rats, Cameron and the team reclaim the tank the following day in an intense battle.
