I strongly suspect that the reason so many people like this film is that they remember it from years ago, when they were children. Not having seen it since I was a child I feel a little uncomfortable going into either its plot or its virtues except to say that I was tremendously fond of this film and saw it at least twice in its entirety on television. It is a low budget early fifties war movie set in the desert. There is nothing remarkable about it except that it's entertaining.
What I do remember is how creatively the low budget was used, and how this was turned into an asset since there are only a few major characters and they are isolated most of the time. The thing is, kids don't like having anything shoved down their throats by adults. Kids, at least of my generation, would tolerate just so much of the Disney-Captain Kangaroo-Howdy Doody stuff, then they'd go crazy. They'd do anything to break up the monotony of wholesomeness,--smash windows, hang from railroad bridges by their fingers, torture the cat--just as long as it wasn't what they were supposed to be doing. Where television and movies were concerned, this meant watching something you weren't supposed to watch. The problem was that Perry Mason bored children to tears; and besides, there was no air of the forbidden to it.
But once in a while one would stumble across something that was adult, more or less, and really rang the bell. The Steel Lady is a good example of a movie that probably didn't work too well for adults but was magic for children. They could understand it, since it was all about escape. It was set in an exotic place, which made it automatically exciting, and there was a closeness that developed between the characters simply because they were stuck together and had to make the best of a bad situation, one not unlike the ones children face all the time, except that most of us didn't have the good fortune to travel across the Sahara in a tank.
