A by-the-book Second in Command officer, John Gregson, is posted to the LGRD in the midst of the Libyan desert during the fight against Rommel's Afrika Corps. His CO is Michael Craig, who allows considerable relaxation of the rules in this isolated and undersupplied desert outpost. (You can tell Craig disregards regulations because at their first meeting he invited Gregson to use Christian names.) Well, as you can imagine, Gregson finds these scruffy types a rather rum lot.
It doesn't help when orders are received to send three truckloads of men on a long-distance raid against one of Rommel's supply dumps.
It's a long trip. Water is in short supply and when one of the men, Richard Attenborough, fills his canteen with brandy he gets a proper pranging from Craig, who may be unconcerned about uniforms and all the stuff we called, well, chicken scat when I was in the military, but is stern enough when it comes to getting the job done.
There is an encounter with a German armored car, which our men win but only at some cost. There is a mine field which must be carefully probed as the men crawl through it. A sentry is stabbed to death. The petrol dump is destroyed and a narrow escape follows. The unit is pursued by three fully manned German armored personnel carriers. The trucks break down, one by one, until the last handful of survivors face a forty-mile walk back to the base. A badly wounded man, Percy Herbert, begs the others to leave him behind with a machine gun so they can save themselves.
If it all sounds familiar, that's because it is. It's not a bad film, in the sense that it's not insulting to the intelligence. The problem is that it might all have been written by a computer if the suitable equipment had existed at the time. The dialog adds nothing much.
There is one element that distinguishes this from most other desert warfare films, and that is the pain registered by the men who are wounded. People die according to the usual conventions -- they twirl around and fall dead. But the wounded seem genuinely to suffer. When they're picked up from the desert floor to be carried to the waiting truck, they HURT, and they let us see it. Not that they would whine about the pain. As Craig replies to an inquiry about his wounded arm: "I know it's there."
Otherwise, well -- if you want to see a fine movie along these lines, there are others available. Try "Ice Cold in Alex" for a start.
It doesn't help when orders are received to send three truckloads of men on a long-distance raid against one of Rommel's supply dumps.
It's a long trip. Water is in short supply and when one of the men, Richard Attenborough, fills his canteen with brandy he gets a proper pranging from Craig, who may be unconcerned about uniforms and all the stuff we called, well, chicken scat when I was in the military, but is stern enough when it comes to getting the job done.
There is an encounter with a German armored car, which our men win but only at some cost. There is a mine field which must be carefully probed as the men crawl through it. A sentry is stabbed to death. The petrol dump is destroyed and a narrow escape follows. The unit is pursued by three fully manned German armored personnel carriers. The trucks break down, one by one, until the last handful of survivors face a forty-mile walk back to the base. A badly wounded man, Percy Herbert, begs the others to leave him behind with a machine gun so they can save themselves.
If it all sounds familiar, that's because it is. It's not a bad film, in the sense that it's not insulting to the intelligence. The problem is that it might all have been written by a computer if the suitable equipment had existed at the time. The dialog adds nothing much.
There is one element that distinguishes this from most other desert warfare films, and that is the pain registered by the men who are wounded. People die according to the usual conventions -- they twirl around and fall dead. But the wounded seem genuinely to suffer. When they're picked up from the desert floor to be carried to the waiting truck, they HURT, and they let us see it. Not that they would whine about the pain. As Craig replies to an inquiry about his wounded arm: "I know it's there."
Otherwise, well -- if you want to see a fine movie along these lines, there are others available. Try "Ice Cold in Alex" for a start.