Trailer
Plot summary
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps has the British Army in retreat toward Egypt and the Suez Canal, and the port of Tobruk, a threat to his supply lines, is held by the 9th Australian Division. The defending general gives British Captain MacRoberts command of the newly arrived Australian troops. The undisciplined Australians take an instant dislike to the no-nonsense MacRoberts. In their ranks he finds Tom Bartlett, his former schoolmaster, an alcoholic dismissed from his teaching post. MacRoberts offers to move Bartlett to a safer billet, and Bartlett refuses. The troops are sent to the front lines, dig in, and wait for Rommel's assault.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Desert Rats (1953)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- James Mason plays Rommel again here, this time usually speaking German and not sympathetic, and he wore Rommel's real scarf in the film, a keepsake the general's widow had given him.
- The film was a quasi-sequel to The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel (1951), which had been a critical and commercial success, and was reportedly made partly to portray a less likeable General Rommel after criticism that the earlier film had been too friendly to the Germans.
- Chips Rafferty and Charles Tingwell had both served in the army and tried to correct inaccuracies in the script. Rafferty said it was full of Cockney idiom, and that after looking it over a week before shooting he managed to get some of it changed into Australian slang.
