The Lebanese Mission (1956) User Reviews

The uranium syndrome

[dbdumonteil · 27 November 2008]

It was the last line for estimable director Richard Pottier,the man who directed the first version of "some like it hot" ("Fanfare D'Amour" ).He could also be good at films noirs as "Meurtres" or "la Ferme Aux Loups" bear witness.But as far as adventure movies are concerned ,it does not really make it.The screenplay is not only dull and slow,as the precedent users pointed out,it's also desultory and incoherent.Pierre Benoit's books were extravaganzas ("L'Atlantide" on which Pabst based one of his movies) which were acceptable in the exotic atmosphere of the FRench thirties ;in the fifties,it was over the hill.The adventure movie,as HG Clouzot had brilliantly proved ("le Salaire De lA Peur") became more demanding.....

What have we got here: an absurd cast gathering French (Jean Claude Pascal as the handsome macho raider ,Jean Servais as the villain),Gianna Maria Canale ,the Italian Beauty ,as a treacherous courtesan , Omar Sharif (you read well:he was credited under his Egyptian name) ,Jean Lefevre (later a specialist of French coarse comedies),Lucianna Paoluzzi (later a James Bond girl in "Thunderball" as Paluzzi)..... And even Juliette Greco who pulls the obligatory little tune in a nightclub .Both Greco's song and a belly dance are mostly filler.

The subject revolves around uranium which was found by Sharif in the Arabian desert.Despite the ending,"the treasure of the Sierra Madre" ,it isn't....

slow and dull

[dbborroughs · 4/10 · 1 June 2008]

Slow, unremarkable story about a guy working for a big company looking for oil in the Lebanese desert stumbling upon uranium instead. There's lots of crosses and double crosses and the like but it's played more as soap opera then adventure as a couple of women are thrown into the mix. I watched this for a good half hour with out having any real idea what was going on and never really caring. It seemed to be lots of manly men talking to each other in the radio and ignoring instructions to hang it up and go back to Beirut. I didn't see the point. It picked up after that but the pacing was still such that I found myself nodding off. To be honest it was nice to see a very young, almost unrecognizable Omar Sharif in a supporting role, but the movie is a snoozer and its going into my case of DVDs I can fall asleep to.

Crud And Sand

[writers_reign · 4/10 · 14 May 2009]

I associate Richard Pottier with black and white films from the thirties and forties - such as the five he directed for Continental during the Occupation. Some of them were actually quite good, all were better than mediocre but now it appears he feels a need to turn in a piece of hokum to balance the books. The colour (the first Pottier I have seen in anything other than black and white) does nothing to improve and/or enhance what is mainly an embarrassment for which a multi-lingual cast has been assembled and then more or less instructed to wing it. For the record there's a lot of sand, a couple of songs that have no bearing on anything and some uranium. I don't think anyone involved would thank me for naming them so I won't.