Director and producer Moustapha Akkad who also produced the classic flicks, Halloween 1978 and Halloween II 1981 has created another gem in Lion of the Desert 1981.Starring Anthony Quinn who was also in other classic flicks, Jungle Fever 1991 and Across 110th Street 1972.Also starring Oliver Reed who was also in other classic flicks, Gladiator 2000, Tommy 1975, Z.P.G 1972, The Hunting Party 1971 and The Devils 1971.Also starring Rod Steiger who was also in other classic flicks, Wolf Lake 1980 and End of Days 1999 and another classic war flick, Waterloo 1970.I enjoyed the battle scenes and the desert settings.If you enjoyed this as much as I did then check out other classic war flicks, 'Breaker' Morant 1980, The Brotherhood of War 2004, Glory 1989, Pork Chop Hill 1959, The Red Badge of Courage 1951, All Quiet on the Western Front 1930, Gallipoli 1981, The Lost Battalion 2001, Paths of Glory 1957, Assembly 2007, '71 2014, Men Behind the Sun 4 1995, The Challenge 1970, City of Life and Death 2009 and Westfront 1918 1930.

Now that Libya is in the news, it might be good to look at this film, made 30 years ago. It deals with the two decades long rebellion by one Omar Mukhtar against the Italian colonial authorities in Libya, and how it was finally suppressed, through ruthless means, by the army of Mussolini in 1931. This movie was famously financed by Gaddhafi, whose funds allowed this relatively unknown war to be brought to the screen with a decent budget. The director was Syria's Mustapha Akkad, who would die two decades and a half later in a terrorist bombing. With its fine battle scenes, showing a diversity of military tactics, I think that military buffs will especially appreciate this film. The movie naturally has an anti colonialist point of view, but it's not unfair to the Italians, who are the center of much of the movie (despite this, this movie was banned in Italy for decades). As a movie dealing with the anti colonial struggle in the Arab world it can be favorably compared to the Battle of Algiers (Lawrence of Arabia is another movie that comes to mind). Anthony Quinn is impressive as the old, noble Omar, but the best performance of the movie to me is by Oliver Reed, as the brilliant but ruthless Italian general Graziani. Unfortunately, Rod Steiger, in his brief role as the Duce, just doesn't cut it, it looks like a poor parody and he even looks embarrassed to be there. And while not as bad a performance, John Gielgud is just not believable in his supporting role as an Arab sheik allied with the Italians. The movie could have been a bit tighter as well (it's almost three hours long) but despite these minor flaws, I recommended strongly.

The second (follwing Mohammed, Messenger of God) of producer turned director Moustapha Akkad's rather foolhardy attempts to create a popular Islamic cinema using Western cinematic and narrative forms which were 20 years (at least) out of date even in Hollywood, Lion of the Desert tells the story of the 20 year campaign of resistance against Italian imperialist occupation by the Bedouin desert armies of Omar Mukhtar. Anthony Quinn, who was also in Mohammed, play Mukhtar as someone's kindly old uncle, a wily old desert lion with one spectacled eye on the Koran and the other on the field of battle. Oliver Reed plays his nemesis, the Italian fascist General Rodolfo Graziani.The film is a fairly simplistic affair. Mukhtar and his fellow Bedouin are the personifications of good, patiently and relentlessly opposing the mechanistic might of the Italians. It's horses and guns versus tanks and bombs for the most part, and the film makes no bones about being propaganda for Mukhtar's resistance movement - not too difficult to swallow, considering the army he was facing. Yet in creating such a black and white view of reality (reminiscent of the many popular films the allies produced during and after the 2nd World War), the film comes across as dated, unambiguous and conceptually crude. The society that Mukhtar was defending is not questioned, even though it is clearly a society which is relentlessly anti-modern and in which women have very little active role to play. There is an intriguing scene in which a grieving war widow brings her son to Mukhtar's tent, and the old lion gives the boy his father's book and instructs him to "tell your mother to keep it safe for you." The woman must be told by the man, even when the man is her tiny child...The film is pretty successful in cramming a long historical story into two and a half hours of screen time, and the narrative is pretty clear. H.A.L Craig's screenplay makes rather too much use of repetitive motifs, which don't develop as the story goes on but simply come up again and again at intervals. The two most notable of these motifs are the constant encounters with "good" Italians who although they wear a fascist uniform shrink from the more abhorrent crimes they are asked to perform and have a scarcely hidden admiration for Mukhtar (exemplified by Raf Vallone's veteran negotiator), and Bedouin children in jeopardy but learning from the "spirit of Mukhtar" - this latter strand of motif leans towards the cloying and sentimental.There is a lot to admire in the film as an achievement in big-scale movie-making. The camera-work is excellent throughout, the battle sequences impressive and certain set-pieces (the montage of the concentration camps the Italians put the Bedouin in; the hanging of Mukhtar) are impressive and worth watching the film for. The performances are pretty ripe, except for Quinn, who over-eggs his pudding by being too kindly, too scholastic, too intrinsically good to convince as a real human being. We expect Reed to be hammy, but he is large without being absurd, and predictably outdone by Steiger doing a shouting turn as Mussolini (a role he also played in 1974's Mussolini: Ultimo atto). Far worse is the tendency to cast veteran British Thespians as elder Arabs: Andrew Keir just about gets away with it, but John Gielgud as a wily old collaborator with the Italians is preposterous, with his rich upper class English tones and pale skin.There's a certain pan-historical element to the story - the Bedouin stand for all colonised peoples fighting their colonisers; this is made explicit in the film by Mussolini comparing the wall Graziani builds with Hadrian's, and one gets the feeling watching the film that it could be inspirational to the oppressed people of Palestine now. Mukhtar, with his high ideals and refusal to torture or kill prisoners, is a very different Muslim fighter to the popular Western image of the suicide bomber today, which only makes director Akkad's death in 2005 in Amman, Jordan by an Al-Qaeda suicide bomber the more bitter and tragic.

I am Italian and I was first given the opportunity to watch it during an Arabic class in Egypt. It was so weird hearing the Duce speaking in Arabic (...yes, they did dub it and the result is sometimes very clumsy). I could then understand how do Germans feel nowadays anytime they watch movies about Nazism. As it sheds light on a very dark chapter of our colonial period (just take, for example, the use of chemical gases), I would suggest it to Italian history teachers. The fact itself that the movie was banned tells you something about our contemporary mentality. From an artistic point of view I would say that the movie is not that good (take for example the battles, and some characters are too stereotypically displayed). The execution of the 'Lion' was a very touching moment, though.