Daredevils of the Desert is an interesting entry in the 22 movies created for the The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones. While most of the movies comprise two TV episodes glued together, Daredevils only comprises one – Palestine, October 1917 – but in an extended form. The single episode is also beefed-up with footage from the Australian film, The Lighthorsemen, which broadly covered the same topic – the Battle of Beersheba – where the Australian Mounted Division’s 4th and 12th light horse regiments (4th Light Horse Brigade) conducted a mounted infantry charge on the Ottoman Empire’s garrison there.
As an Australian, the episode is quite special to me. While the Australians in the episode are portrayed – to my eyes and ears – as a little too ‘ocker‘, I can still see the essential truth of how they come across. This is how foreigners see us and, like most stereotypes, it’s not a complete invention. I could certainly go down to a sporting oval in my city tomorrow and witness people acting and talking the same way.
I also like the way Indy acts with the Australians, enjoying their company, getting on the booze with them, sharing a meal of rabbit, horse racing along a beach, playing rugby, and generally fitting in. It doesn’t feel forced at all as the egalitarian nature of the Australian soldiers he falls in with – something our country was built on – meshes well with Indy’s American background and his own upbringing.
Indy also makes the claim that he, “loves Australia” when mentioning that he flew in a plane there with Harry Houdini when he was younger. I believe this was going to be a plotline in an unmade episode with the Corey Carrier version of Young Indy, which seems entirely possible to me with the way episodes were shown wildly out of order – chronologically speaking – when first on TV. I would have loved to see pre-WW1 Australia done in Season 3 of the show. Alas, it wasn’t to be and little information exists.
Daredevils of the Desert is also notable for the guest cast. It’s ridiculous, really, when you have Catherine Zeta-Jones and Daniel Craig in quite large roles, while Ben Miller from Death in Paradise and the 6th Doctor Who, Colin Baker, show up in smaller parts. And this is before the actors that Australians will particularly notice, but who aren’t known on a global scale, such as Cameron Daddo, who was a big name here, back in the day. I also enjoyed that Sean Patrick Flanery gets to have quite a brutal fight with Craig towards the end of the story which, for a “kids TV show” and without exaggeration, is borderline the kind of gritty brawl Craig would be having, decades later, as 007. It’s surprisingly brutal in places.
The story also sees Indy meet up again with T.E. Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia – who he met as a boy in My First Adventure, and has been writing to in many stories since. It’s a nice moment, and feels quite organic for Lawrence to know of Indy’s intelligence and language capabilities when he recommends him for the role of infiltrating Beersheba ahead of the Australians to ensure its water supply isn’t blown up.
The only aspect that’s fudged here is that Indy “just happens” to be in Cairo at the time. French intelligence (although I note Indy still wears his Belgian uniform), seems to have Indy racking up the frequent flyer miles from episode to episode, that’s for sure. Hey ho. I guess you can’t have it all.
All told, this is what I’ve been calling in my reviews to date a more “serious” episode of the show. It’s a war movie, basically. I think back to the bejewelled crotch-thrusting and literal Kafka-esque moments in the previous movie, and think, “Is this the same show?” Some might think that’s the beauty of being able to tell different stories under the same umbrella but, to be honest, I find it a little all over the place at times. Either make Indy a slightly bumbling kid who’s in over his head and does silly things, or make him a determined young man fighting in a world war – and stick with it. His character often feels a little too, “whatever the plot needs” for me. Fortunately, what was needed this time suited me, and it’s an 8.5/10.