Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Original Screenplay 1953

The Contenders:

The Band Wagon
The Desert Rats
The Naked Spur
Take the High Ground!
Titanic (winner)

Tobruk

Films: The Desert Rats
Format: Movies! Channel on rockin’ flatscreen.

I’ve said before that I grew up at least in part on war movies, so when I encounter one that I haven’t seen before I get a little excited. More than that, for many years, a lot of my pleasure reading was history of World War II, and of that war, I was the most interested in the North African campaign. That means that The Desert Rats hits on all of my trigger points. It’s a war movie I hadn’t seen before, it’s a World War II movie, and it focuses on the siege of Tobruk and at least in part on the Afrika Korps. Better, it even has James Mason reprising his role as Irwin Rommel that he played two years previous in The Desert Fox.

So I’m sorry to report that The Desert Rats did not live up to my expectations. This isn’t a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination. It’s just not a great one. It’s too short, for one thing, at just 88 minutes long, and it tries to pack far too much into that 88 minutes, where a film that ran two hours would be able to much more account for all of the story. More seriously, it treads on the same ground as a lot of war movies that have come before it, and that have in many cases done this better.