Raid on Rommel (1971) starring Richard Burton, John Colicos, Clinton Greyn, Wolfgang Preiss directed by Henry Hathaway Movie Review

Raid on Rommel (1971)   2/52/52/52/52/5


Richard Burton in Raid on Rommel (1971)

Scene Stealing Tobruk

The plan was simple, British commando Foster (Richard Burton) was to rescue the 5th commandos who have been caught in Tunisia but have over powered their captors. And then with these trained men head to Tobruk and knock out some batteries on the coast. But it seems not all the men Foster finds himself with are commandos as he has some men from the medical corp. who are pacifists which makes life doubly hard for him especially as he plans to go ahead with his plans.

Richard Burton was a curious actor, well come on here was a man who was a legend for his acting talent yet for some reason he appeared in some less than brilliant movies. You may put two and two together and say that he did these lesser movies because of the way he lived his life with the women and the booze but when you consider he felt acting was an art it seems even more surprising that he would agree to star in such poor movies as "Raid on Rommel".

Now I am not going to waste much breath on "Raid on Rommel" because having spent 99 minutes of my valuable time watching it I don't want to surrender much more. So to put it simply we have a ridiculous premise with Foster rescuing commandos, finding himself with pacifist members of a medical corps and going ahead with the plan despite their continual objections. But we also have a mixture of action and footage lifted from other movies such as "Tobruk" with little in between which grabs your attention. But there is more as we have a female character who is only there to be exploited from lifting her skirt to fan herself to pouring water over her top to cool herself, It is all simply ridiculous especially when you get the unintentional comedy of the nursery rhyme sound track with scenes of training which lack continuity.

What this all boils down to is that "Raid on Rommel" is a poor excuse of a war movie which I imagine might have entertained young boys back in the early 70s but watched over 40 years after it was made the issues show themselves as many and outweigh anything which is positive about the movie.


LATEST REVIEWS