When I was far younger, I read about the Special Air Service and Long Range Desert Group in North Africa and built Tamiya models of their vehicles. The 1958 film Sea of Sand is about an LRDG mission deep behind enemy lines, as it should be, and some of the trucks are the same type as one of the models I built. Sure, they use Vickers instead of Lewis machine guns, but that’s close enough for me. I find this part of the North Africa campaign fascinating. These soldiers were resourceful, daring and inventive; I want there to be a great movie about them; I want to love Sea of Sand.

I have an inordinate fondness for these trucks.

I do not love Sea of Sand.

Sea of Sand is disappointing. It begins promisingly and has a reasonably good story and some good acting throughout. It may in many ways be the most accurate movie about the LRDG, but some of the combat sequences have glaring and sometimes ridiculous inaccuracies that act as random complication generators, as opposed to things that could happen in combat, and most of the individual stories are obvious and uninspiring.

Michael Craig plays LRDG veteran Captain Tim Cotton, and John Gregson (Angels One Five, Above Us the Waves) is the just-arrived Captain Bill Williams. One is a “by the book” Staff College Wallah; one understands desert warriors can’t follow the rules; one has a successful marriage; one is in the middle of a divorce, or something. Who’s got the happy marriage? Who will come down hard on a soldier for breaking the rules? Will they come to respect each other during the course of their struggles? It doesn’t matter. These individual conflicts aren’t interesting and don’t really effect what characters actually do at any point. Isn’t being in a desert fighting a war deep behind enemy lines enough conflict for anybody?

Richard Attenborough (Dunkirk, The Great Escape) has a supporting role, though his name often appears quite prominently in some versions. He has some good moments even though much of his story is as contrived and finally irrelevant as most of the others. This paragraph is a little too mean. A great many war movies have these small, interpersonal conflicts that are meant to help establish who the characters are, so we finally care what happens to them, but they are also often forced and false, as they are here, though Attenborough has the best one liners and some good dramatic moments.

Craig, Attenborough and one of the real stars of the movie.

In many ways, it is a reasonably good homage to the LRDG. It shows and explains the use of a sun compass, and has a scene with another group performing a road watch. At one point a soldier defends the British Petrol Oil and Water cans because, though flimsy, they can be modified into cookware, and they present as much of a problem in this movie as they reportedly did wherever they were used. Did I mention that the trucks are cool, too?

It also shows British troops trying to avoid combat by looking German, if one guy wearing a German cap while everyone else has British equipment and is in British trucks counts as “looking German.”  Part of the basic camouflage the LRDG used was being so far behind enemy lines that people would assume they were Axis forces in captured Allied equipment. Okay, I learned that from a series of pulp novels written by Gordon Landsborough, so maybe it isn’t true.

Look, airplane pilot or armored car commander–I have a German cap on; you should ignore all other evidence of me being British.

Much of the movie is unrealistic. In one scene the column of trucks is traveling deep behind enemy lines—that’s the LRDG’s thing; that’s why they’re cool—and they’re attacked by a lone armored car; apparently it just happened to be in the neighborhood. This attack kills several British soldiers, but there are no wounded on either side because things can’t be that complicated yet.

The way combat works in this movie is not unique; it is actually all too common. Generally, everyone has a machine gun with endless clips and keeps firing until all the Germans are dead and some British soldiers are dead or wounded. So when the armored car (seriously, just one—were they just out for a joyride?) attacks, all the British soldiers fire machine guns at it until it begins smoking, and then it explodes (more precisely there is in explosion near it and then a bunch more smoke) signifying its defeat.

Some parts of the movie are exciting and realistic. Their mission is to blow up a fuel dump deep behind enemy lines—as it almost always in in these kind of movies—but there’s hundreds of miles of desert to navigate, and the depot is protected by a minefield. They have to enter the facility through it while avoiding the German patrols, some, of course, driving around in M3s.

Except for the odd lone armored car attack, the journey to the enemy depot is well done. The attack on the depot, featuring the navigation of its barbed wire and minefield, is the best part of the movie, until the Germans start firing. Our heroes stealthily approach the depot, negotiate the barbed wire and minefield. They have to pause as guards walk by; there’s a mine detector making the satisfying beeping noise at appropriate times; there’s the requisite slow and careful sand removal as Williams works on defusing a mine and of course nearly sets off a different one. All of this is tense, exciting and well executed.

Then they are discovered, a little too easily, and for some reason, the Germans have British weapons, Stens and Brens. This happens often enough in war movies that I shouldn’t mention it (Bitter Victory is an interesting example because Germans fire Allied Thompson sub-machine guns, but some Germans who don’t fire carry German MP-40s) but at one point a German officer has a Luger, and I kind of wished he’d had a Webley.

This also highlights how the combat itself is the least realistic part of the movie. At another point, they are almost captured until Attenborough saves them by spitting brandy into the face of one of the Germans, throwing them all hopelessly off balance (This is known as the “Spitting Brandy” trick in LRDG circles) and everyone can start shooting machine guns at each other (though Cotton now has a German Walther P-38–he doesn’t have a Webley? Is there an anti-Webley bias in this movie?) until all the Germans are dead, and there is one wounded British soldier because now the plot calls for that particular complication.

The wounded soldier is one we happen to care about, and his story is good, though predictable. We care about five of the twelve or so soldiers on the raid; everyone else has his red shirt on, waiting for his death to somehow effect the people we care about—not that we care about the others all that much.

Some deaths in this film have weight but most don’t, which increases the sense of randomness—of the movie—not of war. It’s formulaic; it all went through a very sophisticated generic plot generator. It’s a very sophisticated one, so it’s okay, but it isn’t special.

Sea of Sand is in some ways the most authentic LRDG movie, but it is a long way from the best movie about the desert campaign. You will not rue the day you watched this movie; you might enjoy it just fine, but it is not as cool or interesting or daring or effective as the LRDG was, and that makes me a little sad.

Recommendation

You could buy Sea of Sand at Amazon; you could probably find it on a streaming service at a lower cost if you live outside of America. How about a super-cool Tamiya Model instead? I read the Glasshouse Gang series when I was younger, and recently purchased the trade paperback reprints, which reproduce the text accurately but are otherwise a little sloppy.

But finally, Play Dirty is my pick for a behind the lines desert movie. The version listed below claims to be region-free, but I ended up with a copy that won’t play on most North American systems, so beware, unless you’ve invested in a region-free player, which is kind of a good idea for this hobby.