Los amantes del desierto

Original release date: 30.01.58 (Madrid, 87′)

• Country: Spain/Italy
• Director: Goffredo Alessandrini, León Klimovsky, Gianni Vernuccio, Fernando Cerchio, Ricardo Muñoz Suay
• Certification number / date: 28322 on 16.12.58
• Italian release date: 22/12/58
• Production companies: Producciónes Benito Perojo (Madrid), P.A.R.C. Film (Italy).
• Alternative titles (+ dates and running times): Italy – Gli amanti del deserto; France – Le fils du cheik (1958 – 91′); Germany – Der Sohn des Scheik (06.12.57 – 84′); UK – The Son of the Sheik (1959 – 88′); US – Desert Warrior (1961 – 87′)
• Cast: Gino Cervi, Carmen Sevilla, Ricardo Montalban, José Guardiola, Franca Bettoja, Samia Gamal

Here’s a film with a complicated pedigree. Credited to five different directors (Fernando Cerchio, Gianni Vernuccio, Goffredo Alessandrini, León Klimovsky, Ricardo Muñoz Suay) and no less than seven different writers, it was actually filmed a good two years before its eventual release in 1958. Planned as an extremely high profile Spanish-Italo coproduction, it was blighted by production difficulties and it’s hardly surprising that it lacks a certain focus, despite obviously having a decent budget and its share of effective moments. It also has to be said that, despite the best creative efforts of all the many people involved, there’s very little that’s original or different about it.

Ibrahim (Gino Cervi) is a despot with ambitions: he wants to bring peace to the kingdom of Kamal, and if murdering all of his opponents is the only way of achieving this… well, then so be it. With the assistance of his not very trusty sidekick, Selim (José Guardiola), he’s soon managed to dispose of just about anyone who would dare so much as say a word against him, including the rightful ruler, Sultan Omar, and his son Prince Said (Ricardo Montalbano). Or supposedly so; in fact, Said is alive and well and already planning an uprising against the usurper.

An uprising, though, requires funding, and the only option open for Said and his men is to turn to banditry, raising money by ambushing caravans that are crossing the desert. During one of these raids, he happens to meet Princess Amina (Carmen Sevilla), Ibrahim’s daughter, although since she keeps her identity secret by pretending to be a dancing girl he isn’t aware of who she actually is. She, in turn, has fallen head over heels for him, despite his apparently rough ways and ignoble occupation. Unfortunately, she’s also busy fending off the attentions off the loathsome Selim who, unbeknownst to her, had been promised her hand in marriage by her father in exchange for his help in disposing of Omar.

Los amantes del desierto is another rather old fashioned historical adventure film, despite featuring a good deal more spectacle than is usual for similar productions of the time. The problem comes from the script, which is heavily indebted to the melodrama genre and feels rather predictable. At least Pia of Ptolomy, a less technically proficient film, revelled in its melodramatic origins; this just seems to have fallen back on them because it simply has very little else to offer. So you’re left with a film in which the bad guys are bad, the good guys are good, and you’re never in any doubt that everyone’s going to get their just deserts.

This is a shame, as there are some flashes of there being something much better lingering beneath the general blandness. There was obviously some kind of budget behind it, as is demonstrated by the use of location work and relatively substantial battle sequences, and some of the action sequences are made with a certain degree of flair. Other segments, though, are extremely stodgy, and it’s not hard to detect the hands of different directors at play. This inconsistency, which affects even the pacing and the look; three different cinematographic systems – Eastmancolor, Ferraniacolor and Gevacolor were used at various points.

In trying to work out the actual involvement of the assorted credited filmmakers, a certain amount of guesswork has to be allowed for. Klimovsky was known for being a director who’d lend his ‘name’ to Italo-Spanish co-productions in search of Spanish tax breaks, so it seems unlikely he had much to do with it all. Ricardo Muñoz Suay was similarly found mainly as a co-director, credited alongside Italian or French equivalents, although he seems to have had a little more about him than Klimovsky. Fernando Cerchio, meanwhile, was reputedly bought in to complete the film, although some sources say this was Klimovsky’s role (and Cerchio also wasn’t above lending his name to films made by other people (such as Goddess of Love (58), reputedly directed by Viktor Tourjansky)). Complicating matters further, Gianni Vernuccio was someone who seemed to specialise in location shooting, and was accredited as co-director more often than director (his association with desert set movies went back to at least 1951’s Dimaa fil Sahara, and continued through to la peccatrice del deserto (59) and Gharam fi sahraa (60, co-directed with, yes, León Klimovsky). Goffredo Alessandrini, meanwhile, was known as being one of the most prominent filmmakers of the Salo era, and as such his reputation had declined in the postwar period to the point where he was driven to go to Argentina in the early sixties in order to continue making films.

What can be stated with some certainty is that Desert Warrior definitely features some exterior shots filmed in Egypt, mainly involving Montalban and Sevilla having a discussion while the Sphinx and some pyramids are prominent in the background; this could, possibly, have been Vernuccio’s contribution. Then there’s a considerable amount of location work in Spain, somewhere that looks suspiciously like the Almeria familiar from the Spaghetti westerns of a few years later. As Mariangela Giordano recalled in an interview in Shock Express #2: “… we shot on location in Spain for four months.” Whoever shot these sequences – possibly Cerchio, possibly Alessandroni – shows some flair, especially at staging the action scenes, which are better than usual for the time. Then there are interiors, shot either in Spanish studios or Italian, some of which feel incredibly stagebound and static (with Klimovsky’s work being distinguished by its lack of fluidity, perhaps this was down to him).

A few more hints as to the background of the films making become clearer from looking at the testimony of some of those involved. During the filming of the Egyptian sequences, the Suez crisis broke out and the whole region became unstable, causing the whole shoot to pack up and wait until everything clamed down again. Carmen Sevilla, though, didn’t have the correct documentation with her, and was forced to flee the country by car across the Jordanian border, an episode she recalled as the most frightening experience of her life.

In his biography, Respetable público. Cómo hice casi cien películas, scriptwriter Mariano Ozores also mentions the film in some detail: “One day, at eight in the morning, Miguel Tudela called to say that he urgently wanted to see me at the CEA studios because they needed me to work as a scriptwriter. A car was sent to pick me up, and when I arrived at the studio I was greeted with the panorama of an enormous, beautifully designed Arabian palace, but the lights were out, the actors were dressed and sitting around and the production secretary, Carmen Pageo, was sitting in fornt of a typewriter. Tudela came to me and said: “Mariano, we need this character…” – he indicated Jose Guardiola, who was playing the villain of the piece – “… to approach the window, release a hawk into the air and smile to the camera in an evil fashion”. I said: “OK, that’s good”. And he said: “No, it’s you that must write it!” So, still in a daze, I approached Carmen and said to him: “Selim approaches the window, smiles perversely, releases the hawk and looks at the camera with satisfaction”. Tudela almost didn’t let me finish, ripping the page out of the typewriter and shouting “Let’s roll!” I found out later that the tensions between the producer and the director were such that Alessandrini had said he wouldn’t shoot anything that wasn’t in the script. I was one of the seven horrified scriptwriters of the film, and since it was now in the script the Italian had to agree to shoot this scene…”

As for the performances, Montalban and Sevilla were big marquee names at the time, again indicating that this was made with some ambitions. Unfortunately, they’re both a bit boring, with Montalban particularly failing to make much of an impression at all. Possibly the most memorable turn comes from José Guardiola – who would become a familiar character performer in later years – as the despicable Selim.