Raid on Rommel

British forces must destroy gun emplacements in Tobruk. Richard Burton once again gives n outstanding performance as Alex Foster who must destroy the German guns. This movie is a mixture of the guns of Naverone and battle of the bulge as you have American tanks m41 walker bulldogs and m48 Patton as German Panzers ( all of which is footage lifted from Tobruk ) similar to the bulge film. You have Burton exactly copying the actions of Peppard to fit the stock footage of Tobruk into the action scenes of this film. However this is what lets the film down as it doesn't use any new footage as far as battle scenes are concerned it is like watching Tobruk again but just with different actors. Still worth a watch as it is exciting and well acted

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?

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.

Richard Burton stars this film in which he is the British Captain Foster, who rescues some British doctors and some few soldiers from e convoy in which the Germans carried them to Tobruk. Captain Foster divide these British men so that some of them feign to be German and the others are the sick ones. So, leaving the German soldiers in the desert, they go to Tobruk, where they destroy the fuel deposits and then the canons so that the British Army can arrive at Tobruk port. Although the plot can sound nice and entertaining, Hathaway does not develop their characters (for example, the Italian prostitute is only decorative) and the Germans are very easy to be cheated. The director tries to adapt to the modern times, using many zooms and, perhaps, from the content point of view, in the character of Richard Burton, who is really an antihero: Captain Foster is a Maquiavellian man, who does not respect the Geneva conventions'rules, attacking a sanitary German convoy and using prisoners of war to get his aim. There two curiosities about this movie that I would like to remark: the first one is the use of war images from Tobruk by Arthur Hiller, which was also produced by Universal; the second one is that the filming location was in San Felipe, in Baja California Norte (Mexico) in spite of Africa. These facts show us that this film was B war movie in budget and in quality.

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"