“For eight months at Tobruk in 1941, fifteen thousand Australians and eight thousand British and Indian troops held a German army seven times their number and in seven times their armour. The Germans, understanding machines, but not these men, flung an insult to them in a name — 'The Rats of Tobruk'. This insult they carried on their bayonets right into the ranks of the oncoming German hordes. It has become one of the finest epitaphs of the war. To these men who could never be driven from their firing posts before Rommel, we pay homage”. This text and narration open The Rats of Tobruk (1944), and the film that follows focuses on three of those rats stationed in the Libyan port city under siege: Peter Linton (Peter Finch), a British writer; Bluey Donkin (Grant Taylor), a cattle drover; and Milo Trent (Chips Rafferty), a drover and dingo hunter.
In the Wake of the Bounty, released in 1933, was the first Charles Chauvel film discussed on Down Under Flix and remains the oldest film discussed on the site. The Rats of Tobruk is now the second Chauvel film and the second oldest title covered on DUF. Released in 1944, Tobruk appeared only a few years after the events it depicted and as the Second World War still raged on. For Chauvel (with his wife Elsa as co-writer) it was 11 years and three films after Bounty, and both his craft and the medium itself had grown in strides. Tobruk especially addresses two of the issues I pinpointed when discussing Bounty: the creakiness of the film’s non-documentary/travelogue scenes and its leaden cast.
Bounty features a pre-stardom Errol Flynn, not yet in command of his instrument (or at least that instrument). Tobruk features established Australian stars Rafferty, Finch, and Taylor comfortably in command of their craft, and this elevates the film’s dramatic material in (perhaps unfair) contrast to Bounty. Like Gallipoli and The Deer Hunter decades later, the film uses the narrative device of friends going off to war together. Like Gallipoli, the leads are sympathetic, broadly drawn archetypes; there are extended episodes of Anzacs behaving badly; and the promise of adventure goes unfulfilled and gives way to bleaker experiences. However, unlike Gallipoli, the characters here are ‘men’ rather than boys: working professionals with rounded personal histories, not the innocents sent to slaughter in Gallipoli.
Film culture is mired with sweeping and lazy fallacies, like the myth that all westerns before Dances with Wolves and Unforgiven were anti-Indian and romantic in their depictions of the Old West, or that anti-war films were birthed with the Vietnam films of the 1970s while all prior war films were simplistic and jingoistic. These myths are spurred in part by marketing seeking to bolster newer films’ stock at the expense of their predecessors, and are accepted all too readily by audiences uninterested in grappling seriously with older titles. Tobruk is a case in point addressing the latter myth, conveying some of the ugliness of war within its historical and production constraints. While lacking the visceral and immersive punch of battle sequences to follow in subsequent decades, there is much to appreciate about the staccato efficiency and bluntness of Tobruk’s combat scenes, with tightly framed compositions of tanks in motion, explosions, soldiers charging into battle, firing, falling, becoming tangled in wire, and so on. The film was made with cooperation of the Australian military, and utilizes military hardware and a considerable army of extras. Like Bounty, it also employs some documentary techniques, incorporating newspaper headlines and newsreel footage and narration.
The
film also engages with some of the popular culture of the era, both local and
global. While a strain of 'Waltzing Matilda', then fifty years young, appears in
the opening credits score, ‘We’re off to see the Wizard’ from The Wizard of Oz—five years old at the time of production and only two years old at the time
of the siege—is sung by troops as the Australian cavalry rolls into Tobruk.
Elsewhere, Finch the Briton delivers a quiet rendition of the St
Crispin’s Day speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V, in a more muted and melancholic timber than Laurence Olivier's rendition in his Henry V—also released in 1944 and designed
to stir British wartime morale—or Kenneth Branagh's rendition 45 years later. While this
would perhaps be considered hokey in a modern war film, it adds historical and
cultural dimension. So too do scenes of soldiers engaged in Easter Sunday
worship and a distressed soldier reciting the Lord’s Prayer, sincere and
uncynical moments of faith under fire that are largely absent in contemporary
war films and the broader sweep of secular popular culture.