Sea of Sand (1958) on Netflix
Captain Tim Cotton leads a Long Range Desert Group patrol behind enemy lines to destroy a German fuel dump before El Alamein. Captain Bill Williams joins to clear the minefield around it.
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- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb6.7/101,413 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Plot summary
In North Africa during the Second World War, Captain Tim Cotton leads a Long Range Desert Group patrol on a raid deep behind enemy lines. Ahead of the Battle of El Alamein, the patrol is to destroy a German fuel dump. A minefield surrounds the dump, so a Royal Engineers captain, Bill Williams, is posted to the patrol to deal with it. Williams is a regular soldier and has to get used to a unit that runs outside regulation. He finds a torn photograph of a girl in Cotton's billet, and Cotton calls her old news. Williams has a picture of his son and shows it to Cotton. The patrol sets out in five Chevrolet trucks.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Sea of Sand (1958)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Guy Green rejected the producers' plan to shoot the desert war film in a studio against a pile of sand, saying that instead they shot it in Libya at a time when the king still held sway.
- Michael Craig wrote in his memoirs that he felt the British film industry should make more contemporary stories instead of continually making war films, and mentioned a story to Richard Attenborough, who had just formed a company with Bryan Forbes; it became The Angry Silence, directed by Guy Green.
- Most of the film's European extras were British Army soldiers stationed in Libya under the military alliance between King Idris and the West, a relationship that ended with the 1969 coup led by Muammar Gaddafi.
- Actor Vincent Ball said the production had six of the worst old army trucks in North Africa, which were towed past the cameras half the time even though they had been fitted with new engines.
