Station Six-Sahara
Seth Holt - 1963
Network BD Region B
As I have written before, one of the things I like best about home video in any format is that sometimes provides one with the opportunity to satisfy the curiosity of seeing an otherwise unseen film from one’s own past. In this case, it was a film I was too young to see at the time of release. I was twelve years old when Station Six-Sahara was released in the U.S. in August 1964. There is a vague memory of seeing the trailer at a theater in a downtown Evanston, Illinois theater. There is the even stronger memory of seeing the giant poster put up by the Balaban & Katz theater chain put up for their first run movies in the Chicago Loop theaters.
Posted above is one version of the Station Six-Sahara poster. For this twelve year old boy, it was an incredibly erotic vision. Talk about selling the sizzle and not the steak! Carroll Baker loomed large not only in the posters, but in the collective imagination of filmgoers with The Carpetbaggers having been released just a few months earlier. Seth Holt’s film took a little longer for its stateside release, partially trimmed by Allied Artists when the motion picture code was still in effect. Baker’s size in the posters is indicative of her stardom but not the size of her role.
The first half of the film is of the five men working at an oil pipeline pump in a remote part of the desert in a Middle East country. The men represent various shades of masculinity, essentially drop-outs from society, with tensions based on the sense of hierarchy within this small group. Carroll Baker literally crashes into this scene, with only one of the five seemingly immune to attracting Baker’s attention. That first night, the ordinarily casual, if not slovenly, men all dress up for that first dinner. As expected, there is sex, jealousy and death. It is well after the first half when Carroll Baker appears wearing those short shorts. As was common at that time for mainstream films, the extent of Baker’s nudity would be her bare back from the waist up.
Martin Scorsese has listed Station Six-Sahara as one of his favorite British films, with a recent screening presented in New York City. The selling of the film with Carroll Baker’s name and image makes sense commercially, but most of the film is carried by a formidable group of actors including Ian Bannen, Denholm Elliot and Peter Van Eyck. The film was partially shot in Libya which also present its own challenges for a British crew. Without exaggerating its importance, Station Six-Sahara is more of interest as a chapter in the career of a movie star who ran away from Hollywood at her commercial peak, and a film director whose short filmography is a collection of films of greater interest than their sometime lurid titles would suggest.
By the way, I have a framed copy of that poster in my home.