The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel (1951) on Netflix
Approved19511h 28mBiographyDramaWar
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel is in Germany recovering from diphtheria when British commandos raid his headquarters in North Africa. A call from Adolf Hitler sends him back to the Afrika Korps.
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Trailer
Plot summary
A raid by British commandos on his North African headquarters finds Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in Germany, recovering from diphtheria. Adolf Hitler's telephone call brings him back to the Afrika Korps, and the British Eighth Army under Bernard Montgomery prepares to counterattack at El Alamein. Short of men and equipment, Rommel is told by Hitler to hold his ground and fight to the last man; he blames the men around Hitler, asks that the order be sent again and crumples it. Illness returns him to Germany, where Dr. Karl Strölin, Stuttgart's lord mayor, asks him in his hospital room to side with a circle of plotters against Hitler. Sent to Western Europe to finish the Atlantic Wall, Rommel judges that it cannot stop an Allied invasion.
Cast
- Desmond Youngas Himself, Lt. Col. Desmond Young
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel (1951)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Finnish president and field marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim's personal Mercedes-Benz 770, a gift he had received from Adolf Hitler, was used as a prop car during the film's shooting.
- James Mason lobbied studio head Darryl F. Zanuck for the role of Rommel after his career slid downward following his move from Britain to the U.S., then signed a long-term contract to appear in one film a year for seven years.
- The film's source book was written by Desmond Young, a British lieutenant colonel and North African campaign veteran whose life Rommel had spared by insisting on strict military law; it sold about 175,000 copies in Britain.
- Nunnally Johnson said the British were generally positive about the project because of Rommel's high reputation there, but that there was controversy in the U.S. about a Hollywood studio producing a sympathetic biography of a German general.
- Johnson, who wrote and produced the film, normally took ten weeks to write a script, but The Desert Fox took him eight months because it was so complex and involved many people who were still alive.
- The film helped create an image of the German army that would be acceptable to the British public, after the Western Allies had depicted Rommel as the "good German" and used his clean-war reputation for West German rearmament and reconciliation.
