If you can dig deep enough, only your pride gets hurt

I am not going to claim The Desert Rats (1953) is the greatest war film I've ever seen, but I caught two-thirds of it on TCM about a month ago and I was curious enough about the rest to fetch it off Netflix; I was rewarded. It's not really a documentary about the Australian 9th Division at the siege of Tobruk in 1941, although it has a newsreel-like narrator and historical footage is used for both battle scenes and passage-of-time montages throughout; the general outlines of military action may be accurate, but I hesitate to make any claims for the reality of Richard Burton's Captain Tammy MacRoberts and I am downright dubious about Robert Newton's Tom Bartlett. As a matter of fact, the internet tells me that the real-life Desert Rats were the British 7th Armoured Division, while the Australians called themselves the Rats of Tobruk. I assume the name was glossed over to chime with The Desert Fox (1951), the touchingly positive biopic of Erwin Rommel to which this film acts as a kind of thematic sequel. (James Mason reprises his role, speaking German this time.) That said, it's surprisingly low-key and snapshot for a 1950's WWII picture, with many fewer speeches than the genre usually calls for and some nice gritty touches, including the simple fact that after eight months in foxholes in the desert, everybody looks like hell.¹

It is also a war film that does not subscribe to the trope of death-by-redemption, which is immensely refreshing, especially when one of your leads is a stiff-necked British officer trying to prove himself to a company of raw Australians and the other a drunken ex-schoolmaster who can't even stand to hear the guns go off. ( But I'm off the point and I'm embarrassing you. )

I should probably credit Robert Wise, who turns out to be responsible for more films than I'd connected him with—there is apparently a good case for considering him a sort of stealth auteur as opposed to a studio hack. I see the cinematographer was Merle Oberon's husband who invented the Obie light. I don't recognize the screenwriter at all, which means I should leave this line of inquiry before I wind up reading about more films I've never seen and won't be able to unless TCM really likes me.

I am going out to see rushthatspeaks and some surprisingly summery sunlight. [edit: never mind, Rush is sick. I'm going to take a walk anyway. I feel like Typhoid Mary.] That was the youngest I've ever seen Richard Burton in a film. Worth your time.

1. The German and Italian in the film is never subtitled, encouraging the sense of realism. It also enables a wonderful scene with MacRoberts—temporarily a prisoner of war—trying to establish whether the man who's about to take a bullet out of his shoulder without anesthetic is really a doctor or just some quack from the ranks. He doesn't speak German; the man doesn't speak English. The question is relayed through the interpreter, who hasn't exactly endeared himself to either man. The possible doctor gives MacRoberts a long, irritated look, pushes up his glasses and snaps something back in a precise, long-suffering tone in which the words "Heidelberg" and "Wien" are clearly distinguishable: and then goes about removing the bullet in a most competent fashion, marred only by the fact that nobody has any real painkillers because it's the middle of North Africa and Rommel's supply lines were never what he kept asking for, thanks ever so, Berlin. It's one of those moments that pass through a whole other story which this film doesn't happen to be about, but nonetheless it's there. The doctor is mending a shirt and humming when the interpreter comes looking for him.