The Fighting Rats Of Tobruk
by Charles Chauvel
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Chips Rafferty, Grant Taylor, Mary Gay, Pauline Garrick, Peter FinchDirector: Charles Chauvel
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Black & White, Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 68 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2001-12-18
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Fox Lorber
Movie Reviews of The Fighting Rats Of Tobruk
Movie Review: Disappointing
Summary: 2 Stars
Story of the "rats of Tobruk," the Australian force who, in 1941, withstood a months-long battering siege by the German Edwin Rommel's forces to retain possession of the Egyptian town of Tobruk. The story is told through the eyes of cattle drover Bluey Donkin (Grant Taylor,) dingo trapper Milo Trent (Chips Rafferty,) and English writer Peter Linton (a very young Peter Finch, in one of his earliest feature roles.)
THE FIGHTING RATS OF TOBRUK (1944) opens on a pastoral scene - lowing herds roaming over the gently rolling hills of Australia, whips cracking, and on the background soundtrack a male chorus singing an outback song. Corny, but it's a fair enough way to open a movie made during wartime. Tells the audience - this one was made in Australia - what we're fighting for. Bluey, Milo & Peter break from the herd and call on Kate Carmody (Pauline Garrick), a pretty young thing with whom Bluey has some kind of on again, off again romance going. Fifteen minutes and a couple of clumsy lover spat scenes later the lads are shipping off to the northeastern coast of Africa.
By now - twenty minutes into a seventy-minute long movie - I was getting worried. The Bluey and Kate scenes were supposed to establish why HE'S fighting. Launch a couple mortars his way and he'll figure out that Kate's the best thing in his life, but those love scenes were too stilted and inconclusive to establish anything.
It gets worse. The Australians oust the defending Italians from Tobruk and learn the Germans are planning a strong counter-offensive. They'll have to defend their prize against overwhelming odds. Shortly after landing in Tobruk the three go on a patrol, the tank they're riding in gets stuck en route, and they're attacked by a German patrol. There are some basic rules when filming (and editing) action scenes - have a consistent flow of action, unless you want to impart a sense of confusion (not the case here) establish and maintain a consistent point of view for the audience, if an introduced character is injured on-screen don't pan or cut away from him unless you intend to return before the action ends. FIGHTING RATS violates all these rules and the ambushed patrol scene is a fizzle. Finch's Linton is shot and then forgotten about. Guns are fired thatway, even though we aren't sure if the enemy's out there, don't have a clue what their strength is or how great a threat they pose. In fairness, you can tell this film is missing footage - some scenes open with a character already halfway through his lines - and the ambushed patrol scene might be missing celluloid as well. But it's not missing that much, and this smells like inept editing or, more likely, an undershoot sequence where the director (Charles Chauvel) simply didn't film enough to cover the scene. Worse yet are the night scenes, which are almost completely dark and, although we know something important is happening onscreen, it's impossible to tell what.
I don't get much of a kick coming down on a movie like this. Chauvel so goes out of his way to photograph his subjects heroically - you know, full face portraits of anonymous soldiers shot from below and framed by a gray sky, an extended montage of battered but unbowed defenders at a battlefield Easter service, that kind of thing - that I couldn't help hoping that sincere sentiment wouldn't be wasted. But it is. Nothing in this flick works - not the bookended love story, not the action scenes, nor especially the comedy interludes provided by George Wallace, an Australian comic who is probably best described as an unholy mix of Ed Wynn and Lou Costello. This film might be of interest to fans of Peter Finch who are curious to check out his before-he-was-a-star work, but that's about it.
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