Australian
Screen

Clip description

Units of Rommel’s Afrika Korps launch an assault on the allied defences at Tobruk, using tanks and infantry. The allied artillery shells land among the advancing Germans but do not stop them. Hand-to-hand fighting breaks out as they cross the defensive wire. The Australian defences are stretched to breaking point.

Curator’s notes

It is clear that Chauvel received a great deal of assistance from the Australian defence forces, in both materiel and men, which indicates the importance the government placed on the propaganda value of the film. There is no sequence like this in any Australian film before The Rats of Tobruk, in terms of the scale of the explosive effects. Chauvel was able to deliver great realism and visual excitement with gunpowder and the loan of real tanks. Whatever the film lacks in dramatic subtlety, in comparison with Forty Thousand Horsemen (1940), it has a great deal more bang for the pound.

Shooting the battle as a night sequence adds considerably to the sense of chaos and confusion, but the camerawork is superbly communicative. George Heath shot both of Chauvel’s war features, but his work on this one is arguably superior to Forty Thousand Horsemen (1940), partly because of the simplification of elements – sand, sky, soldiers and clouds.