Rope of Sand (1949) was Wallis's second attempt to duplicate Casablanca's success, and it's no better than Passage to Marseille. For Rope of Sand, Burt Lancaster assumes the Bogie-esque leading role, with Casablanca actors Claude Rains playing the Claude Rains role, Peter Lorre playing the Peter Lorre role and, cast against type, Paul Henreid playing Conrad Veidt's old part. French actress Corrine Calvet is the woman with the same family name as Rains's character in Casablanca, more or less in Ingrid Bergman's pole position.

Each of the big Hollywood studios had their own look, their own "house style," but Wallis was clearly so determined to emulate his crowning glory that Rope of Sand even looks like a Warner Bros. movie, despite having been made at Paramount. It's a slick, A-budget production, full of phony African continent exoticism, but it's only superficially entertaining. However, Olive Films' Blu-ray of the movie looks great, especially on big screens.

The story is set in South Africa, in the fictional city of Diamanstad, which everyone confusingly pronounces "diamond stud." Anyway, sadistic police commandant Paul Vogel (Paul Henreid), itching for respectability, watches over the mining operations of the Colonial Diamond Co. In an early scene he discovers a few stones hidden in the open wound on a miner's (Mike Mazurki) arm, Vogel gleefully, painfully ripping away the bandages to expose the crime.

Meanwhile, American drifter Mike Davis (Burt Lancaster) returns to Diamanstad, to recover a cache of diamonds hidden in the off-limits desert ruthlessly guarded by Vogel. Wealthy, refined Colonial Diamond Co. manager Fred Martingale (Claude Rains), sensing the reason for Mike's return, plots to use exotically beautiful but duplicitous nightclub "trollop" (as Vogel calls her) and blackmailer Suzanne (Corrine Calvet, whose grating voice sounds like Renée Zellweger with a French accent) to exacerbate tensions between Mike and Vogel. Two years earlier, Vogel tortured Mike in an unsuccessful attempt to learn the location of that bushel of raw diamonds. (See, torture never works.)

The movie has a few enjoyable moments: Mike's high-stakes poker duel with Vogel, and Mike turning up at Vogel's residence immediately after for a postgame confrontation. Claude Rains and Peter Lorre, as they almost always were, are fun to watch, even if they're both playing only very slight variations of characters they had played many times before. Henreid got a lot of praise for his monstrous Vogel but, truth be told, he's never believable, his distinguished good looks and cultured manner at odds with the "pig" (as others describe him) he's supposed to be playing. By contrast, Conrad Veidt, in Casablanca, could be immensely threatening sitting at a desk chatting on the phone. Henreid just overacts, though the tepid script all but invites him to.

In trying to recycle so much of Casablanca, the art direction and screenplay fudge things in unbelievable ways. Though less obvious to 1949 moviegoers, the sets and art direction, with lots of Arab and Moorish flourishes, generally resemble Casablanca a lot more than they do South Africa which, after all, is located at the other end of the continent. It's like populating a movie set in Miami with quaint covered bridges, New England churches, and apple orchards.

Script-wise, Mike unbelievably falls in love with the scheming Suzanne, even as she plots against him and, more unbelievably, she falls in love with him, apparently for no reason other than he's a good kisser and clearly preferable to Vogel, who virtually commands her to marry him.

Particularly outrageous is a climatic scene where, out in the desert, in the middle nowhere, Mike gains the upper hand over Vogel. He then does the kind of thing only incredibly stupid heroes do in movies: he empties his gun so that he can beat up the man who tortured him - twice! - in a fair fight.

Video & Audio

Rope of Sand, in its original 1.37:1 aspect ratio (the 1.78:1 listed on the packaging is incorrect), looks great throughout, with inky blacks and a pleasingly sharp, film-like image. The DTS-HD MA 1.0 mono is fairly robust also. However, one reel or so in the second-half of the film seemed to be about a half-second out of synch. No subtitles, no Extra Features.

Parting Thoughts

Enjoyable enough but a long way from Casablanca, Rope of Sand is fun for those who like watching great character actors slumming, but that's about it. Very mildly Recommended.

Stuart Galbraith IV is the Kyoto-based film historian and publisher-editor of World Cinema Paradise. His credits include film history books, DVD and Blu-ray audio commentaries and special features.