Comando en el desierto

Looking at the criticisms of poor Richard Burton for taking a role in Raid on Rommel makes me want to put a word in for him. Acting was a craft as well as an art to him, it's how he made his living. I'm sure he got a good pay day out of Raid on Rommel. I think he also wanted to try the action genre as well. He made a much better choice with Where Eagles Dare though.

It's a poorly conceived story from start to finish. Someone in Allied Headquarters in London had the brilliant idea of freeing a bunch of captive commandos in North Africa and send them on a mission to Tobruk to spike some harbor guns. Same idea as in Guns of Navarone. So Burton gets the job.

But upon executing the escape he discovers he has freed a bunch of medical personnel and hardly enough commandos. Never mind he uses what he has.

His mission is to blow up those guns, but on discovering a fuel depot for Rommel he makes a little side trip to blow it up. Hello, but I think he was compromising the mission he was sent on. Wouldn't it have made a lot more sense to do the job you're assigned to and then when you got out you tell headquarters and they do another mission? That makes more sense to me.

The fuel depot sequences and the finale with the guns at Tobruk harbor are taken from the Rock Hudson film a few years earlier. Burton gives a rather pedestrian performance as does the rest of the cast.

By the way as if our heroes didn't have enough on their hands they're also transporting the mistress of an Italian general. That man wasn't going to sacrifice any of the comforts of the homefront. They keep her all doped up and at one point, one of the commandos decides to sacrifice for king and country and give his all for the mission.

Just who was the dope who thought her up?

There are a lot of bizarre chains of circumstance which set up the plot of this. People just happen to have talents and interests which assist the plot, others have very improbable reasons for being where they are, and so on.

But if you can forget about the artificially convenient, this is a pretty good tale, pretty well told. A medical corps unit, and some of its patients, who start out as captives, end up, under the leadership of Richard Burton, being a commando team who play a vital part in the assault on Tobruk. Oh, and there's a girl in there somewhere.

There are plenty of tense moments, adventures, incidents, and so on. People get shot, things get blown up, the Germans are uniformly stupid except for Rommel, the military genius.

It's got all the ingredients (even if it did borrow some of the more spectacular explosions and so on from another movie), and the actors are as convincing as they can be given their improbable backgrounds.

A perfectly enjoyable, inconsequential, undemanding movie which makes two hours or so pass pleasantly enough.

This is one of these films that often crops up when someone brings up the topic of worst war films . It probably doesn't deserve this reputation but there's no denying it drowns in a sea of mediocrity . From the outset there's a major spanner in the works with its setting of Libya in 1943 where radio broadcasts talk of the Battle for Tobruk . The film never states when in 1943 it's set but this doesn't matter because the battle for Tobruk took place the previous year and by 1943 Rommel was on the back foot and not as this film suggests on a knife edge between victory and possible defeat . The outcome of the North African campaign was certain in 1943 , especially with the Operation Torch landings in November the previous year . One can understand some artistic license in making the stakes some what higher but not to the point of rewriting history . Wouldn't have just been easier setting the film some time in early 1942 when things were far more uncertain ?

Richard Burton even today is a legend of British stage but his career arc in cinema left a lot to be desired and he's obviously slumming it big time here . One wonders if he's trying to emulate the success of WHERE EAGLES DARE where is character is on a top secret mission to defeat the Nazis . The problem is the top secret plan is a bit to similar to a previous and much better film called TOBRUK and if this wasn't bad enough RAID ON ROMMEL makes use of footage from TOBRUK very blatantly which leads to several instances of confused continuity and is a distraction . It also explains why Burton has his hair bleached since the climatic battle scene is culled from TOBRUK where blond haired George Peppard takes on some German tanks . As a footnote the continuity announcer pronounced the title as " Rain on Rimmill " which whilst being some what surreal sums up the carelessness of this movie

This afternoon the BBC aired once again this abominable film about a British commando unit set out to destroy a German petrol dump in order to prevent the Germans from using their tanks. As far as I am concerned everything that could be wrong about this movie is wrong: the Germans are portrayed as silly cartoon-like figures who are only interested in war and who believe everything Hitler says. The British protagonists are all civilized people who took on the battle reluctantly and are heroes simply because they're British. This film is also rather comical: at one point one of the British special service man is seen in an encounter with the German general Rommel. Every now and again this British soldier tries to show that he speaks German fluently. Well, he doesn't. You don't have to be German (and I am not) to see that these so called highly trained commandos wouldn't last an hour if they were dropped as secret agents in Nazi-Germany. If this film was shot in the years between 1940-1945, I could have understand. But in 1971?

I watched this movie with my dad when I was a kid. I just felt nostalgic, and bought a copy of this movie off Amazon.com. After watching it, I realized that most of the battle scenes were actually from the 1960's Rock Hudson Film "Tobruk". The plot was nearly identical, but "Tobruk" is the better of the 2 to see. Still if you are a fan of Richard Burton, you can't go wrong with this version. Another plus, it is available on DVD, while "Tobruk" can only be found on used VHS. Burton was much better in "Where Eagles Dare" but carries this movie anyhow. Lots of familiar faces can been found in this movie if you are a fan of WW2 movies. The German nemesis in this one can also be found as the German tank commander in "Kelly's Heroes"