The New Pictures, Oct. 18, 1943

Swing Shift Maisie (M.G.M.) is one of those B-budget marrow bones which are tossed to the simple appetites of the sticks, but which many a choosy cinemaddict prefers to the average A-budget epic. In part this is due to Cinemactress

Ann Sothern, one of the smartest comediennes in the business. In part it is due to a crisp script, which manages to lather up a good deal of apt comic comment on the lives and habits of U.S. defense workers. The film’s central characters are Good Girl Maisie Revere (Miss Sothern in her sixth Maisie picture) and Bad Girl Iris (Jean Rogers). They are sidelighted by a cocky test pilot, for whom Maisie falls hard, and by a bolt & nut man—the chinny type who assures every new girl in the plant that he knows all the angles.

Maisie, an ex-showgirl, has an undulant walk that elicits wolf calls from welders’ masks as she saunters about the plant. But Maisie is a model of kindliness, courage, efficiency. Iris is more of an artist’s model. She shanghaies Maisie’s pilot into betrothal. She is even more bored than Maisie with the richly kidded clubs for “Ladies in Waiting” (girls who are waiting for servicemen to come home) which are set up to boost the morale of women war workers. She gets her unbound hair caught in the plant machinery and is fired. She sobs Maisie out of $20 and her fiance out of $100, steals Maisie’s suitcase, slip and nylons. Then she departs with the bolt & nut man for the Cottonwood Apartments, where “opium smoking is not permitted in the corridors.” When Maisie tries to prevent this assignation, Iris denounces her for sabotage. But Iris winds up with a wastebasket rammed over her head, while Maisie winds up in the arms of her airman.

Sahara (Columbia) is a preposterous melodrama about Humphrey Bogart, nine other heroes and a derelict tank; it is also a triumphant combination of first-rate entertainment, intelligent cinematics, and an unusual amount of honesty about war. It mixes these ingredients in a much-used shaker, according to the old Lost Patrol formula.

A 28-ton U.S. tank named Lulubelle is isolated during Rommel’s African heyday. Under Humphrey Bogart’s command, it staggers southward through sand and heat. Fuel and water run short. The crew picks up first a mixed batch of English and Empire men, later a Sudanese soldier (Rex Ingram) and his Italian prisoner (J. Carrol Naish), finally an arrogant young Nazi ace (Kurt Krueger). Half dead with thirst, this military mixed grill at last reaches an abandoned well, finds a choked dribble of water. There, as they die off one by one, the Allied men manage through a series of improbable strata-ferns and heroisms to hold off and capture an entire German battalion.

This story is told so expertly, detail by detail, that the whole unlikely affair seems believable. More than that—it often approximates hard and honest facts about war and about people. In the routine war melodrama it is always an American prisoner who, faint with thirst, scornfully refuses to yield information while an enemy officer drinks his fill and tosses the surplus into the sand. Here, the situation is reversed. Sahara rings dozens of such changes on old formulas, and in their simple way they make more hard sense pictorially than most documentaries.

Humphrey Bogart is the only well-known actor in the picture. To say that he is as good as the rest of the cast is high praise. Even the extras, for once, look like soldiers. Reason: they are soldiers who were training at Camp Young, Calif., near which the picture was made. Other members of the cast notable for their light, incisive realism are Kurt Krueger as the cold Nazi ace, Rex Ingram as the dignified Sudanese, John Wengraf as a treacherous Nazi major, Richard Nugent as a British doctor, Carl Harbord as an English ex-typesetter who likes poetry. Even more gratifying is J. Carrol Naish as the innocent, bewildered Italian prisoner, shooting the works in an entirely new kind of part for him, after years of playing limp, narcotic petty-gangsters.