]The film""s frightening, daring, and far-fetched plot, from a screenplay written by co-producer and Broadway playwright George Axelrod (famous for the Broadway playWill Success Spoil Rock Hunter?andLord Love a Duck (1966)), was based on Richard Condon""s 1959 novel of the same name.Oh look, Jo.My birds.They got back in time" - at the moment of her death when the birds fly off from the window sill, in the very moving, tearjerking scene.It was impossible to abort the launches or to knock them down.Luthor described how he was planning to divert one Naval nuclear rocket (a 500 megaton bomb) to strike the San Andreas Fault in California, thereby destroying the western portion of the state (as it fell into the sea), and making Luthor""s desert real-estate (owned by Lex Luthor Incorporated) to the east more valuable - and the new West Coast of the US (with new coastal cities including: "Costa Del Lex, Luthorville, Marina Del Lex, Otisburg").The film conveys the enigmatic, complex life and exploits of an eccentric, rebellious, desert-loving, messianic, Oxford-bred British Army officer cartographer (repeatedly referred to as an "Englishman"), who unites the desert-dwelling Arabian Bedouins against the oppressive Turks (allies of Germany) during World War I.