The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel

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The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel
Directed by	Henry Hathaway
Produced by	Nunnally Johnson
Written by	Nunnally Johnson Desmond Young (book)
Starring	James Mason, Cedric Hardwicke, Jessica Tandy, Luther Adler
Music by	Daniele Amfitheatrof
Cinematography	Norbert Brodine
Editing by	James B. Clark
Distributed by	20th Century Fox
Release date(s)	October 17, 1951
Running time	88 min.
Country	USA
Language	English
IMDb profile

The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel is a 1951 film with James Mason as Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Also in the cast are Jessica Tandy and Leo G. Carroll as Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The film shows Hitler's best known general, Erwin Rommel, from the German defeat at El Alamein in 1942 to the time of the July 1944 plot against the Führer.This culminated in Rommel being accused of being involved (although this was never proved) and, in order to protect his family, being forced to commit suicide. The story is narrated, strictly for dramatic purposes, by actor Michael Rennie, who dubs the voice of Colonel Desmond Young, the author of the book The Desert Fox. Although we hear Rennie's voice coming out of his mouth, we actually see Young playing himself in the film. As the film opens he is serving in the Indian Army. Following an encounter with Rommel in Africa, he makes it his life duty after the war to discover what really happened to Rommel during the final years of his life. (At the time that Young wrote his book, it was believed that Rommel had died in battle.)

Mason's performance as Rommel (in this film, not its prequel The Desert Rats), is generally regarded as one of his best, but the film itself was criticized upon release for being too sympathetic to the general, glossing over his initial great admiration of Hitler in order to portray him as a likeable and doomed tragic hero who realizes Hitler's evil and incompetence too late. Unusually for a World War II film, the actors who play Germans (except for Luther Adler, who plays Hitler) do not play their roles with the usual phony accents encountered in that genre of film; they speak as they did in regular daily life, although none of them were German. (This was also done in the 1930 classic World War I film All Quiet on the Western Front, another film in which nearly all the characters were German.)

[edit] Trivia

The beginning of the film shows British Commandos attempting to assassinate Rommel, with about a dozen Germans killed and half a dozen commandos also killed. Actually only about 4 Germans and 1 commando (Geoffrey Charles Tasker Keyes, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for the action) were killed.

In the film, Leo G. Carroll as von Runstedt tells Rommel, "Victory has a thousand fathers; defeat is an oprhan", a line quoted without attribution by President John F. Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs Fiasco in 1961.