Sandstorm over desert hero's Nazi deal

The Film The English Patient, which opens here this spring and has won rhapsodic reviews in the United States, has come under fire for whitewashing a real-life Hungarian count as a romantic figure when he was really a Nazi sympathiser. Critics say the fictionalised portrait plays down his German wartime collaboration and turns him into a hero.

Based on Michael Ondaatje's novel of the same name, The English Patient recounts the story of a beautiful Canadian nurse (played by Juliette Binoche) who cares for a horrifically burnt pilot (Ralph Fiennes) in a decrepit Tuscan castle.

Anthony Minghella's film then flashes back to the pre-war years, when Fiennes's character, Count Almasy, was a dashing explorer in north Africa. A Hungarian cartographer and archaeologist who is part of an international, British-funded team in Egypt's western desert, he has a love affair with the wife of another team member who, in turn, is a British spy. When war breaks out, Almasy sells his precious desert maps to the Germans so that he can acquire a plane to retrieve his injured lover.

Cinema-goers have flocked to American cinemas to relish the sight of Fiennes's handsome face framed against desert emptiness, and the icy beauty of Kristin Scott Thomas as his lover.

But just when the film had picked up seven Golden Globe nominations and was hotly tipped for the Oscars, the murmurs of discontent began about the way in which both novel and film portrayed Count Almasy. One critic dismissed the Minghella film as "amoral and ahistorical", raising the debate once more as to whether writers and film-makers have an obligation to the truth.

Little has been published about the real Almasy, a shadowy figure whose knowledge of the desert was, according to those who knew him, unsurpassed. He criss-crossed between Allied and German lines in northern Egypt, on one occasion travelling deep into the desert using water and petrol he had hidden there years before.

This enabled him to deliver an infamous spy, Hans Eppler, close to Cairo where he carried out his clandestine activities, based in a houseboat on the Nile. Almasy, meanwhile, became an aide de camp to Rommel, the "Desert Fox", and was awarded the Iron Cross.

Minghella and Ondaatje's most outspoken critic is Elizabeth Pathy Sallett, the daughter of Hungary's consul general in 1930s Egypt. In 1936 Mr Pathy failed to convince King Faud of Egypt that he should support Count Almasy's plan for a desert museum because the monarch had learnt from British intelligence that the Hungarian would use the building as a front for spying activities.

"Almasy held my father responsible," said Mrs Sallett. Mr Pathy's name was later found on a list carried by Almasy of "the first people Rommel planned to arrest when he occupied Egypt," she claimed.

Such was the conspiratorial atmosphere of war-torn Egypt that Mr Pathy resigned his consular post when Hungary sided with the German war cause.

But Mrs Sallett refuses to see the events as typical spy-versus-spy activities. Her accusation is that by supporting the Germans, Almasy supported Nazism. "It was not unknown what the Germans were doing in Europe, what Nazism meant," she said. "Almasy must have known."

Miramax Films, which made the film, insists that "the film is a work of fiction based on fiction".

Michael Ondaatje, who won the Booker Prize for The English Patient, says his account is not a history lesson, "but an interpretation of human emotions - love, desire, betrayals in war and betrayals in peace - in an historical time."

In fact, those who relish Ondaatje and Minghella's interpretation of Count Almasy's life may well be taken aback by just how far the pair have taken it. Far from being a romantic hero who risked his all for the woman of his dreams, Almasy was a homosexual.