Montgomery's Iron Back 8th Army ... Rommel's Crack Africa Korps ... they met head on and tore the earth apart !
1969-01-01
N/A
96 min
June 1942. As Rommel swept toward the Nile, the fall of Egypt and the capture of the Suez Canal seemed inevitable. Italian and German advance units raced toward Alexandria. Mussolini had given explicit orders: The Italians must arrive first!
This could have been interesting, because it takes the perspective of the Italian troops charged by Mussolini with the capture of Alexandria in the 1942 North African campaign. It has a stab at drafting in an internationally recognised cast - Michael Rennie is Field Marshal Montgomery, and Robert Hossein features sparingly as Rommel, but for the most part this consists of a mediocre cast that I found made it quite difficult to distinguish between who was who, and on whose side! The dubbing didn't help, either, with the accents all but indistinguishable from each other and the quality of the production offered us visuals that are frequently just as confusing. There are plenty of pyrotechnics, and some quite well staged battles - especially with the foxholes and tanks towards the end, but the narrative is weak suggesting a disorganised and haphazard strategy from the Axis powers that did nobody any justice, historically. Sure, it doesn't help either that we all know what actually happened but I felt this could, with a bit more focus from the writing (and some quality talent in the dubbing suite), have offered us an interesting counter-balance to the accepted cinematic versions from this exciting and perilous theatre of WWII.
