Rope of Sand

Story of a South African diamond mine watched over by a sadistic policeman tasked with looking out for smugglers.

Paul Henreid is actually quite menacing here, as the domineering commandant "Vogel". He is charged with making sure that nothing is smuggled out of the diamond mines under his charge. Burt Lancaster ("Davis") arrives back after a previous encounter with this nemesis, this time determined to retrace his steps and recover the large treasure he was forced to abandon previously. What now ensues delivers us a pretty well-trodden narrative as these two men try to outwit the other. The duplicitous mine manager "Martingale" (Claude Rains) alights on a cunning plan to get "Suzanne" (Corinne Calvet) to use her wiles on "Davis" to try and discover the location of the lode - but she has other ideas! With the seedy "Toady" (Peter Lorre) also whispering in his ear too, the scene is set for quite a tense battle of wills. The cast looks great on paper, and Lancaster and Rains are good, too - but somehow it doesn't quite click. The story takes far too long to get underway, and when the it does it rushes through a series of set-piece scenarios before an ending that I found rather too predictable.