Destination Gobi (1953) on Netflix
CPO Sam McHale wants sea duty, but the Navy sends him to a weather station in the Gobi Desert. Nomads under Kengtu camp at the oasis, and he hopes to enlist them.
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- Netflix3.2/5
- IMDb6.3/101,331 votes
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Trailer
Plot summary
The Navy builds a meteorology command to forecast weather for operations in the Pacific, and assigns Lt. Cmdr. Hobart Wyatt and CPO Sam McHale to its most remote station, an oasis in the Gobi Desert of Inner Mongolia. McHale has just come off a cruise aboard The Big E and wants nothing so much as to get back to sea. Mongolian nomads led by Kengtu make camp at the oasis, and the Americans and the nomads settle into an uneasy coexistence. Seaman Jenkins, a former cowboy, remarks that the Mongols would make fine cavalry, so McHale requisitions sixty Army saddles in the hope of persuading them to join the fight against the Japanese.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Destination Gobi (1953)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film is loosely based on real events: the Gobi weather station was the operation's "crown jewel" in meteorologically uncharted territory, and instead of the Japanese air strike shown in the film the real camp had a skirmish 25 miles away. Edmund G. Love dramatized the story in Collier's on September 6, 1952.
- Before the film was announced, producers had Gary Merrill, Richard Basehart, David Wayne and William Lundigan in mind for it; none of them ended up starring in the finished 1953 film.
- Ernest Borgnine said in interviews that he believed this film and Richard Widmark's role of CPO Sam McHale were the basis for the character Quentin McHale in Borgnine's 1960s television show McHale's Navy.
