646f9e108c World war two drama about the 1942 North Africa battle at El Alamein between the Allies and the Axis forces. June 1942 El Alamein: Rommel swept towards the River Nile. The fall Egypt and the all important Suez Canal seems inevitable. Italian and German scouts race towards Alexandria. Mussolini has given explicit orders that Italy&#39;s forces were to reach the city first. Italy, along with much of the rest of the world, was into producing lots of cheapo war movies (mostly WW2) during the late-60&#39;s. The trend died out with the disillusionment caused by the Vietnam war,did the popularity of these &quot;gung-ho&quot; war films.<br/><br/>Battle of El Alamein isn&#39;t such a film. It&#39;s probably the most objective and anti-war film made since ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT. While the battle sequences are big and exciting, there&#39;s nothing glamorous about fighting this kind of war. The soldiers are all shownequally miserable, barely eeking out an existence in a network of trenches on the sunbaked deserts of North Africa. While it primarily focuses on the heroics of an Italian division (the real-life Italian army was best knownone of the most poorly-led and low-morale armies at the time), the film doesn&#39;t get too preachy and while it villifies no one, only showing how some generals (especially the fictional Schwartz) inevitably swung the battle in their enemy&#39;s favor due to their impatience and misguided ideals.<br/><br/>THE BATTLE OF EL ALAMEIN also does a great job of blending fictional characters with nonfictional ones (like Rommel, Montgomery, Von Thoma, and Stumme) in a nonfictional setting. While the battle itself is abridged and perhaps over-simplified to focus on the Italian division, that&#39;s perhaps best for the sake of narrative, character development, and making the emotional impactstrongpossible.<br/><br/>Stylistically, the film is done fairly well in late-60&#39;s style, with plenty of zoom-lens technique, close-ups, etc. It does drag in spots but only due to the predictability because we KNOW that the axis is gonna lose, but it does a good job keeping the suspense high by showing the Italians taking heavy losses in every engagement. We never know which characters are gonna make it through and which ones aren&#39;t.<br/><br/>Despite it&#39;s flaws, I doubt a better, larger, or more compelling depiction of the battle of El Alamein shall ever be made. This isn&#39;t a bad WWII adventure, in fact a fair imitation of the big-budget Hollywood films from that vintage; the international cast is second-rate but both Michael Rennie and Robert Hossein cut a serviceable figureGeneral Montgomery and Field Marshall Rommel respectively - and there&#39;s a good performance by Enrico Mario Salernoan Italian officer of the Bersaglieri.<br/><br/>The film deals with Rommel&#39;s famous North African campaign, in which the Nazis were &#39;aided&#39; by the Italian forces (more precisely, the latter serveda shield to the former, with their largely disheveled armies being deemed disposable). Interestingly, but unsurprisingly, the Fascists are the heroes here (though Frederick Stafford is portrayeda martinet) while the Allies, i.e. the British, are the villains (at one point, they&#39;re even shown massacring a group of unarmed Germans in cold blood) - but, at least, there&#39;s one sympathetic member in George Hilton; the Germans stand somewhere in the middle: Rommel is treateda level-headed strategist who, however, is extremely critical of the Fuehrer&#39;s unrealistic orders (and, even if the film is clearly set in 1942, is already seen to be a willing participant in what eventually became the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler). The cast also includes Gerard Herter (who, memorably, had been the aristocratic sharpshooter and Lee Van Cleef&#39;s alter-ego in THE BIG GUNDOWN [1966])a German officer who doesn&#39;t see eye to eye with Rommel.<br/><br/>The action is frequent and well-handled, and there&#39;s even a healthy dose of comedy - at least among the Italian lines (which may well have been lost in the English translation!); besides, Carlo Rustichelli&#39;s upbeat score is a major asset…and surprisingly - but satisfactorily - the film provides a downbeat ending! I&#39;ll be following this with two other Italian war films - Enzo G. Castellari&#39;s EAGLES OVER London (1969), also with Stafford, and Sergio Martino&#39;s CASABLANCA EXPRESS (1989)…
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