Warner Bros. in the 1930s had no office called 'story recycle center,' but they functioned as if one existed. It was common practice to remake story properties, often in just the space of a few years. Several favored stories were remade twice. 1945's Escape in the Desert was easily identified by most viewers as exactly what it is, a reworking of the storyline of the Bette Davis and Leslie Howard hit The Petrified Forest (1936), updated to replace gangster Humphrey Bogart with an escaped German flyer (Helmut Dantine). A new prologue explains how fugitive Nazis hole up at the remote Last Chance Motel. Howard's philosophical poet-drifter is now a Dutch pilot that old Gramp (Samuel S. Hinds) mistakes for an enemy escapee. Wartime rationing strands them all at the tiny desert oasis - Gramp's gasoline shipment isn't due for a couple of days. Departing from the original play by Robert E. Sherwood, the screenplay by Marvin Borowsky and Thomas Job elects to have Dantine and his German henchmen Rudolph Anders & Kurt Kreuger deliver frequent hateful Fascist speeches extolling the superiority of the Aryan race. This is the last of three WB movies made by young Jean Sullivan, who had been hired directly from UCLA just the year before. Sullivan's thankless assignment is to take over the café waitress performed so memorably by Bette Davis. The reviews reserved most criticism for the film's incessant political speechifying, as by 1945 audiences were tiring of Nazis spouting hate messages like, 'Tomorrow the world!' They also took exception to the comedy relief supplied by the stalled tourists played by Alan Hale and Irene Manning, a quack dentist and his bickering wife. Variety complained that the film's tension falls apart on their arrival, "as if they wandered into the wrong sound stage and just stayed there." Warners may have been attempting to establish Manning and Hale as a comedy duo; they had just served the same function in the previous year's Make Your Own Bed, a farce about a wealthy couple dealing with the wartime servant shortage.

By Glenn Erickson