I wrote a bit about Dupont in my post of Jan. 27, 2017 and was pleased that The Steel Lady was screened by Turner Classic Movies in their tribute to Tab Hunter this week. This was Hunter's fourth film after being "discovered" by agent Henry Willson, who specialized in attractive young men who made the teenagers swoon but were often gay (Hunter, Rock Hudson, et al.). Hunter's shirtless role in Dupont's film is minor and effectively low-key; he plays the radio operator on a plane for an oil company that has to make an emergency landing in the Sahara Desert.
The others in the group are Rod Cameron, Richard Erdman, and John Dehner, all excellent character actors who made many films and radio shows (Dehner was a major radio star, in shows such as "Philip Marlowe" and "Frontier Gentleman") and were on their way to many TV shows. The group finds an old German tank buried in the sand and get it running with parts and fuel from the plane. Dipsomaniac Dehner finds diamonds hidden in the tank and keeps them to himself, as Bedouins attack the German tank in an attempt to get their stolen diamonds back.
The Steel Lady follows a trajectory common to other "stranded-in-the-desert" films, such as John Ford's The Lost Patrol (1934), Zoltan Korda's Sahara (1943), John Brahm's Bengazi (1955) and Robert Aldrich's Flight of the Phoenix (1965), i.e., the struggle against thirst, heat and hostile tribesmen in the attempt to get back to so-called civilization. Dupont, writer Richard Schayer and cinematographer Floyd Crosby (who started with Robert Flaherty and F.W. Murnau) give the movie a strong air of German expressionisn and fatalism, with the four men together in a tank in the desert.
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