The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel (1951)

(On Cable TV, November 2022) Frankly, it took guts for Hollywood to even think about making The Desert Fox—a film halfway sympathetic to a Nazi hero barely six years after the end of WW2, at a time when paying audiences wanted nothing else but be reassured that their wartime experiences shooting Nazis in the face were fully justified. But as WW2 historians will note, if you were going to make a film about a non-despicable Nazi, Edwin Rommel was the right choice. An acknowledged superior military strategist, Rommel was also a Nazi supporter of convenience rather than ideologically driven (he wasn’t technically a Nazi Party member, but, you know…) and—best of all—he was an active participant to the failed 1944 plot to kill Hitler, something for which he was forced by the Nazi regime to commit suicide. The other good move of the film biography was to get James Mason in the lead role—an actor known both for refinement and his ability to play ambiguous villains. The result is surprisingly good, and just-as-surprisingly mature for the time. It’s certainly not faultless—film historians and military historians agree that, in being too favourable to the historical figure, The Desert Fox gave rise to a pernicious “Rommel Myth” that exaggerated the man’s qualities and downplayed his troublesome facets. Still, as a movie, The Desert Fox is, at the very least, an effective piece of propaganda. It’s not that much of a war film—much of the battle footage is recycled from earlier films or news footage, while much of the occasionally scattered plotting is made of parlour conversation. There is a much, much better film to be made about Rommel and his complexities, but for a 1951 production, The Desert Fox remains surprisingly effective.