In a Great Big Sandbox

Station Six-Sahara. Not again. Not a re-re-re-release of that steamy old Lustspiel about several hairy males marooned in an outpost with Jean Harlow. No, this time it's different. This time several hairy males are marooned in an outpost with Carroll Baker. But never mind. Carroll doesn't turn up till the show's almost half over, and till she does it's pretty interesting.

The show is interesting principally as a play of personalities, a study of men among men. Four figures dominate the action:

Peter Van Eyck, a big blond German who looks like the Sportspalast sculpture of Superman, plays the chief engineer of an isolated oil-pumping station somewhere in the northern Sahara: a tyrannical infant with an infantile solution to the problem of suffering--he gives pain to other people and keeps pleasure for himself.

Denholm Elliott, a thin-lipped Briton who looks like Eastcheap trying hard to be Eton, plays the engineer's assistant: a natural victim who doesn't really know he's alive unless he's being tortured.

Jorg Felmy, a lumpish German who looks like an intelligent potato, plays the new man at the post: a decent but determined adult who knows what he wants, how to get it, and how to say no when he has had enough.

Ian Bannen, a haggard Celt who looks like Jason Robards on the morning after, plays the company clown: a come-day-go-day-God-send-payday type who always says what he thinks but seldom thinks before he says it.

So there they are. Grown men playing in the world's biggest sandbox and wondering how on God's green earth they got there. They bicker, they drink, they gamble, they bicker. By day the sun, by night frustration fries them. As the womanless weeks go by, they turn into wild-eyed wolves who would tear each other to pieces for a fresh young chicken.

Dinner, alas, is served--feathers and all. Carroll swoops down on Station Six like a dea ex machina: a dea wearing ermine and riding in a 1958 machina called a Mercury. All this in the central Sahara, mind, and no explanations offered. The spectator can only assume that the lady came to the wrong oasis--she was looking, maybe, for the one on Sunset Strip?

At any rate, she soon convinces the customers that they came to the wrong picture. To satisfy her role Actress Baker would have to look sexy; she doesn't. To match the men she would have to act; she can't. But then Garbo herself couldn't save this film from its script, which after Carroll's arrival takes one trite turn after another. And that's a shame. Before Sahara lapses into sex it really has sand.

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