Cinema: Desert Song

Sands of Beersheba. "I don't understand any of you," says Diane Baker, shaking her fluffy American head over the lamentable state of things in an Arab village in Israel's Negev desert. One wise old Arab (David Opatoshu) has a terrorist son who still calls the country Palestine. Seeing that the problems of the new nation set sons against fathers, brothers against sisters, race against race, Diane naturally wonders whether her American Jewish beau, who died in the fighting, gave his life in a good cause.

Filmed in Israel on a budget low enough to guarantee a certain lack of pretentiousness, Beersheba at moments draws energy from the tensions simmering beneath the surface of life in a sunny, sand-locked settlement. Unhappily, after an honest and humane attempt to speak for both sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the movie settles mindlessly into the pitfalls dug by many another partisan melodrama. Love opens Diane's eyes, and the issues at stake in Israel become clearer somehow whenever she is near her dead fiancé's best friend Dan (Tom Bell). Soon Diane is grabbing up a rifle to repel a vicious terrorist attack, reviving the wounded and half-drowned Dan with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The sheltered American beauty is last seen at the wheel of an ammunition truck, racing toward a threatened outpost near the Egyptian border and beclouding the screen with evidence that the real story of modern Israel has been taken for yet another ride into the sunset.