The Steel Lady (1953)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Four men explore the Sahara for oil. They crash land in the dessert where they find an abandoned German WWII tank. With no hope of rescue, they repair the tank to drive to civilization. The German crew had done something shameful and one of the crew finds a bag of jewels. Arab nomads encounter the lost tank and seek to recover the treasure of Kalifa stolen by the Germans during the war.This is a solid B-movie premise. I do have a complaint about the dialogue. It's hard to understand sometimes when the score or the noise from the tank is too loud. Technical difficulty can be expected in some these B-movies although a remastered version could turn down the running score. Of course, I doubt there are enough fans to fix the sound worthwhile. I only recognize Tab Hunter solely because his recent death was on the news. They are all solid character actors although no one stands out. This is fine.

I saw this movie only once, on a TV Late Show in 1962, and had to leave in the middle for some other business. I never knew how it ended. I never saw it broadcast since. And, as a B-movie, it was generally unavailable, but now I see that it has been transferred to DVD. I could not recall who starred in it either. Imagine my surprise (and delight) that TCM chose to program it around noon on Sept. 19, 2016. This was 54 YEARS since I first saw it. Talk about closure. I enjoyed the somewhat hard-to-believe premise of the story, and the dealings with the (fake) camel jockey Arabs, who probably would have killed the Americans on first sight—knowing today how they feel about unbelievers. Still, the movie is compelling on a small scale, and well worth watching.

If, as a boy, you came across this as a random showing on local TV, it stayed with you. There's something about the desert setting; the discovery of treasure; and the bonding of protagonists sharing a common urgency against a defined enemy, that stays with you. I remember watching with my older brother. I'm 65 at this entry. Older brother is dead now. But when I think of this modestly budgeted movie (which I've only seen twice), I remember it fondly for it's adventurous setting and my brother explaining things about the tank and it's machine gun.Today, it might be easy to dismiss this film as a low-budget time-filler. But don't. Watch it. It will bring about a sense of comforting simplicity. You'll want to be inside that old Afrika Corps tank. You'll want to be with the cast. You'll want to help them make decisions to help save their lives. Keep watching and let your imagination drift inside that old tank. Join them ... and vanish into 1953, when we believed and trusted our government.

I have seen this film at least 5 time as a viewer from my early teens through late 20's and as a U.S. Army Post theater projectionist I ran the film every night for four days. The picture is about several oil men in a multi-engine transport plane that gets caught in a sand storm which chokes up the engines forcing the pilot to crash-land in the middle of the desert (I believe the Flight of the Phoenix films were remakes of this movie). Using parts from the plane they use to refurbish a German WWII army tank they find (The German name on the side of the tank translates roughly to The Steel Lady), they fight their way to the rescue point for a very heroic ending I will not give away. Decently acted and a must see. I give it a high rating of 8.