Destination Gobi Destination Gobi Destination Gobi is a 1953 American Technicolor World War II film from 20th Century Fox, produced by Stanley Rubin, directed by Robert Wise (his first color feature film), that stars Richard Widmark and Don Taylor. US Navy chief Sam McHale (Widmark) takes command of a unit of weather observers stranded behind Japanese lines deep in Inner Mongolia. McHale must lead his men across the treacherous Gobi Desert to the sea coast. Mongols that the sailors had befriended, led by chief Tengu (Murvyn Vye), help them elude the Japanese and steal a Chinese junk in order to reach Okinawa.
Gobi Desert been the bottom of a former lake, but is now nearly a dry salt-basin. The surface configuration is in fact markedly similar to that which occurs in the inter-mount latitudinal valleys of the Kunlun Mountains. The hydrography of the Ghashiun-Gobi and the Kuruk-tagh is determined by these chequered arrangements of the latitudinal valleys. Most of the principal streams, instead of flowing straight down these valleys, cross them diagonally and only turn west after they have cut their way through one or more of the transverse barrier ranges. To the highest range on the great swelling Grumm-Grzhimailo gives the name of