"My husband thought it was all terrific as long as I kept bringing in the money. I started objecting to everything, but it was too late. The sex-symbol image had already started. I turned down parts and they blacklisted me. The press attacked me viciously at every opportunity. I came very close to suicide." ~ Carroll Baker 

Seth Holt had a stellar career as an editor in British films at Ealing Studios for two decades before he became a producer and director in the latter part of his career. He only managed a couple of notable efforts as a director, a fine horror for Hammer called Taste of Evil and the excellent Station Six-Sahara. Holt herded a rag-tag cast of international actors, very much the vogue at the time, and without a major male star (and with the female star absent for a third of the running time) delivered a white hot, atmospheric Desert Noir, a category I just made up and very possibly populated by only this film. Station-Six Sahara was Holt’s third feature as director and was based on a French play by Jean Martet called Men Without A Past, which was filmed before in the 1930s as SOS Sahara. That play was adapted by Bryan Forbes and Brian Clemens, the former would become a successful director and the latter would go on to dominate Brit TV in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Martin (Jorg Felmy) arrives at a remote oil pumping station in the Sahara Desert, just as a coffin is taking out the man he is replacing. The camp is run by Kramer (Peter Van Eyck) a German in charge of a disparate bunch of various expats who do the grimy work and socialize each night over booze and cards to break the grinding boredom of their downtime. Into this male-only hermetic environment crashes Catherine (Carroll Baker), a glamourous woman and her ill husband and immediately agendas, alliances and lust rises to the surface as the men vie for her attention like dazed moths around a very hot flame.

Bryan Forbes was a writer on the ascent when he had promoted this project to a German production company in the late 1950s, but soon he partnered with Richard Attenborough to produce his own scripts before he started a fine career in directing. He’d done a rewrite of the earlier German film based on the source play, but Seth Holt had Forbes contractually do some more rewriting, with Clemens also chiming in, and finally had a script he could work with to film the sordid little tale of damaged people under stress on the edge of civilisation. Holt manages brilliantly on a small budget mostly filmed on English backlots, although he made the most of some location work in Libya to bring a seamless desert verisimilitude.

The pulpy, overheated nature of the project was amplified and turbo charged via Holt’s sweaty gaze. He uses the heat, remoteness and claustrophobia to treat his subjects like lab rats – the workers feel more like prisoners in a Stalag than free men grafting a living in an inhospitable landscape. The man in charge is a German who approximates nothing so much as a camp Commandant and the proximity in time to the end of WWII only exacerbates those resonances, especially for the two British characters, both ex-army. The casting of Peter Van Eyck and his uber-Aryan look was surely not coincidental, and Van Eyck plays the part to the hilt, austere, severe and aloof with a hotbed of repressed tensions. Ironically Van Eyck was anything but a Nazi, having left Berlin in 1931 and became a US citizen in the early 1940s (and was an officer in the US army) where he worked for Irving Berlin and Orson Welles before Billy Wilder cast him in Five Graves to Cairo.

Holt has rare fun with the two contrasting British characters, Fletcher (Ian Bannen) and Macey (Denholm Elliott). Fletcher is an extrovert, freewheeling Scot and Macey is an introvert, stitched up Englishman and the two are forever locking heads. An unforgettable scene captures it best when mail arrives and Macey gets several letters and Fletcher gets none, so Fletcher offers to buy an unopened letter off Macey for a month’s pay. Macey can’t resist so Fletcher makes a play of picking which one and then tucks it in his pocket, driving Macey wild. It also showcases two brilliant British character actors at the top of their game and highlights Holt’s ability with actors. Jorg Felmy is capable as the mild Martin who is freshly arrived into this steaming hell and Mario Adorf is fine as the taciturn Spaniard.

The star turn is, of course, Carroll Baker who arrives with a crash and turns the pressure valve all the way up. She’d made a sensation in Elia Kazan’s controversial Baby Doll and proved her chops by training at the Actors Studio in the mid ‘50s under Lee Strasberg in landing lead roles on Broadway before roles in Giant and Baby Doll propelled her to screen stardom. The Baby Doll role proved as much a curse as a blessing, typecasting her as the sexpot du jour and finding the right property for her became increasingly difficult. She turned to smaller, more independent films and her then husband Jack Garfein directed her in the excellent Something Wild, before she found this grimy vehicle. It says something of her dilemma that she was also working on the blockbuster western How The West Was Won in the same year. 

In some ways Station Six Sahara was Baker, at a crossroads in her career, giving a middle finger to her image as the sex doll – she is pushing the idea to the edge here and gives a full throated, look Ma no hands wild ride that forces an audience into mute witness at the darkness she revels in as we become complicit in her perversions - but make no mistake, she is a woman in control of her sexual needs. We are just as mesmerized as the men she plays off against each other and Holt keeps the fever dream at full pitch with angular close ups, abrupt cuts, claustrophobic atmosphere and a cluttered soundtrack of oil rigs relentlessly pumping or whistling desert winds keeping everyone on edge. Baker carries off the role with great conviction and even though she’s the late arrival here she’s superb and dominates the screen time she has – no small feat given her acting competition.

Holt makes the best of his pulpy possibilities and keeps the tone black as night, the sex sleazy as possible for the mores of the time and by keeping us aware of the ever festering violence that lurks beneath a thin layer of civility. He makes it clear that Catherine is a tortured, wilting desert flower, briefly blooming and destroyed by a hostile, uncomprehending environment. He embraces the irony of her exit timed with the monthly arrival of a bus of prostitutes as life on the outpost grinds on. Literally. Seth Holt would go on to a scratchy career that left no great mark and Carroll Baker would shortly be a Hollywood ghost, but this one of a kind showcase should be the ‘cult-iest’ of all cult films. Once seen, never forgotten.