Raid on Rommel

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 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?

The history is wrong. The props are inaccurate. The story is over the top derring do nonsense. It was the presence of Richard Burton that drew me to this turkey. Alas, it must have been his worst role. I fail to see how any film maker can be so careless with his subject and so contemptuous of his audience. The Germans did not use flying boats and certainly not in the desert. The Wehrmacht did not use the type of campaign ribbon shown on the German uniforms. There are no puffy white clouds over the Libyan desert. Edward R. Murrow's CBS broadcasts could not have been heard in Africa. And on and on and on. Nor have we even approached the absurd plot, complete with an Italian bimbo and a philatelic Erwin Rommel. Or the very chintzy special effects. Nope. My one line summary says it all. A really bad movie!

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"

It's simply too bad that this movie was ever made. Okay, "Raid on Rommel" isn't the worst WII movie ever produced. Browse through some of my other reviews, and you'll soon learn that. The sad thing is, any middle-aged American man is liable to pick this one up off of the DVD rack at Suncoast like I did a few years ago and be shocked by how such a promising-looking movie turned into such a big letdown.

Made in 1971, "Raid on Rommel" was originally planned as a made-for-TV special to make some more money off of the special effects sequences in "Tobruk", far too many of which were incorporated into this film. The far-fetched plot revolves around a British commando unit who have to sneak behind the German lines and blow up the shore batteries at Tobruk, allowing the British Navy to sail into the harbor unmolested and begin an attack. There's a lot more going to complicate matters, including the presence of a conscientous objector (Christopher Cary), an Italian prostitute (Danielle de Metz), Field Marshall Rommel (Wolfgang Preiss), and a zealous Nazi Captain (Karl Otto-Alberty). Non of these supporting characters are developed in the least, which is quite unfortunate - especially considering that the latter two are among the best "Nazi" character-actors to have ever graced the screen.

Long on action and short on intelligence or flair, "Raid on Rommel" proves to be one immense bore from start to finish. The action sequences revolve almost completely around footage lifted from "Tobruk". This is probably because "Raid on Rommel" was shot on a shoestring budget. This shows up in that even actors from our film are substituted for by actors from "Tobruk" (there's a sequence where Burton's character is taking on a German tank, and whenever there is a cut to the "Tobruk" footage, it becomes jarringly obvious that the actor in the other shots is George Peppard rather than Richard Burton). Whole scenes, plot points and character traits seemed to lifted from "Tobruk", too, which was a real shame.

Another deadly flaw in the film's execution is the poor choice of casting Richard Burton in the lead. I've never been a fan of Burton. His work in "Where Eagles Dare" was entertaining and fun, but nothing to stand up and applaud for. Here, he doesn't even put an effort into making his role convincing. He sleepwalks through most of his scenes; there are a few points where he calls characters by other characters' names or by the actor's name.

Even on DVD, the non-English sections of the film (and there are several of them) are not supported by subtitles, making it almost impossible to tell what is going on between the characters. There are key discussions between Rommel and Captain Schroeder which lead up to the climax, and I could only understand snippets of these scenes thanks to a semester of college-level German.

I had always considered Henry Hathaway a great director; after all, he was the brains behind the John Wayne classic "True Grit", one of my favorite westerns. The rest of the crew had experience limited to other low-grade movies or fairly strong TV series. At best, "Raid on Rommel" plays like an extended episode of "The Rat Patrol" and just cannot be taken seriously as a feature film. See "Tobruk" instead.

4/10