Along with Bengazi (1955), The Black Tent is one of the few feature films set in the last days of the British Military Administration of Libya from 1945 to 1951.

A promissory note dating from the Second World War has turned up at the British Embassy in Tripoli signed by his presumed-dead brother, who had given it to a nomadic Bedouin tribe.

When a German reconnaissance vehicle arrives at the camp, Captain Holland hides in the Roman ruins at Leptis Magna.

A group led by the Sheik and Captain Holland travel toward the British lines but come across a column of retreating Italian vehicles.

The film was based on an original story by Robin Maugham, who had served in the North African Desert during World War II.

[8][9][10] Star Donald Sinden had previously made Above Us the Waves with producer MacQuitty and Simba with director Brian Michael Hurst.

It was an early film role for Michael Craig, who had recently signed to the Rank Organisation; it was the first time he made a movie on location.

[11] The film used the site of the Roman ruins at Sabratha in Libya, which is by the sea,[12] although the plot suggests that the camp is deep in the Libyan desert.

This is a plot device to provide a bit of eye candy to the viewer and a reason for the Germans to visit in small numbers, like regular tourists.

[13] Macquitty later wrote Hurst "was meticulous in getting his way as a director and possessed an astounding ability to lay bare the psyche of anyone who opposed him.

[20] Turner Classic Movies calls the film "an odd duck... that has never received much fan love in its day or since, and in fact is barely remembered today.

But it is, for one thing, the first English-language film shot largely in Libya" and which "plays like something of a prophecy – six years before the epochal on-location imagery and direct exploration of British colonialism we're all familiar with in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962), here are vast desert-dune landscapes punctuated by Englishmen and testy Bedouin on camels, with all of the culture-collision freight that implies.