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Clip description
On an armoured patrol into the desert, men of the Australian 9th Division run into an Italian patrol. Peter Linton (Peter Finch) is wounded in the first skirmish. Bluey Donkin (Grant Taylor) and Milo Trent (Chips Rafferty) break off alone into the sand hills, picking off the enemy until both are wounded. As Milo tries to help Bluey, his own head wound makes him unconscious. Bluey tries to keep him awake until their comrades arrive in an armoured vehicle.
Curator’s notes
This is the film’s first real encounter in the desert and Chauvel emphasises the immediacy and very personal nature of the fighting, as well as the comradeship of the Australian soldiers. They are characterised as ferocious and individualistic fighters, able to function on their own, like guerrillas, but devoted to each other’s care once the enemy is defeated.
The style of this sequence is almost like a newsreel. The narration, written by Maxwell Dunn, is redundant in terms of information, but it gives the audience a sense of direct communication, as if being addressed by a friend in a letter from the front. Audiences were used to narration on newsreels; they were the only source of moving images about the war in an age before television news. Chauvel made use of real newsreel footage in the film, but also newsreel techniques. After the war, this kind of simulated naturalism would be given a name and a great deal of recognition in Europe, as neorealism.
Chauvel had spent two years in the earlier part of the war making documentaries for the Department of Information and it is clear that this experience fed into the way he made his movies after 1940 (see While There is Still Time, 1941; Power to Win and Soldiers Without Uniform, both 1942; and A Mountain Goes to Sea, 1943).
