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On the boat to his command with the foreign legion in Algeria, Major
Paul Dumont (Ralph Byrd) meets Helene (Lorna Gray), & before long the
2 fall in love & spend some wonderful nights together. But withthe
ship arriving at its destination, Helene disappears. It is not until Paulo
reaches at the fort he is supposed to work at that he meets her again - as
the fiancee of Jean (George Lynn), his best friend & colleague at the
fort. Paul's heart is broken, so he covers himself in work, & his job
is to train the Senegalese parachute detachment, where most of the
soldiers, natives but led by Harlem bred Blue Williams (Mantan Moreland),
have never seen an airplane, let alone a parachute.
Eventually though he makes good soldiers of them, but when they have a
manoeuvre in the open desetrt, the neighbouring bedouines feel provoked,
& the very same night attack the camp of the parachute command, badly
wounding Jean in the process. But one of them, Ben ali (Neyle morrow) is
captured & sentenced to death ... but he was unluckily the brother of
sheikh Abdullah (William Castello), who wants peace at any price ... but
not the price of his brother.
Meanwhile, Helene, in love with 2 men, has requested a meeting with
Paul at fortuneteller Hassan's (Alberto Morin) place, but once there she
has to find out that Hassan is not only a fortune teller but also delivers
weapons to Abdullah & his men. Hassan takes her captive though, &
Paul as well when he arrives, & Abdullah promptly sentences them to
death (but postpones tha actual exectuion).
Meanwhile, Jean, still in his sickbed, has on one side learned that
Helene is secretly in love with Paul, & on the other hand that both
she & Paul have gone to Hassan but never returned. So he, always a
friend, fetches the Senegalese parachuters, first goes to Hassan's place
where they seize the weapons & torture one of his henchmen to learn
the whereabouts of Paul & Helene, then they, by airplane, attack
Abdullah's place, & - you guessed it - the still sick Jean dies a
hero's death but Paul & Helene are freed, & in the end they marry.
By bno means a great film, but an hour of good-natured entertainment, a
bit of a cross between war-film, drama, romance & comedy, which works
reasonably well. Mantan Moreland, one of the few black comedians who had a
career in white movies (as wellas black movies), plays an unusually
serious role here. At one point he is even seen torturing a man, with
quite some delight.
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amazon.co.uk
amazon.de
eThaiCD.com
find Drums of the Desert at adultvideouniverse.com
