There are two reasons why I am rating 'The Desert Fox' 7 stars. The first is James Mason, who is excellent. In fact I realised only now, when I re-visited the film after having first watched it as a child (probably in the 1970s) that it was he who shaped my image of Erwin Rommel. He did so far more than photographs of the real Rommel did: For me, the Nazi field marshal has always looked and acted like Mason, who portrayed him as a sensible and fundamentally decent person. The other reason for my rating is the fact that when this film was being produced in 1951, director Henry Hathaway made a serious effort to come to grips with a personality that to some extent is still enigmatic. The film is based on the Rommel-biography by Desmond Young, which was the result of painstaking historical research. The author had scoured archives and interviewed eye witnesses, apparently taking due care in evaluating his evidence. Today, of course, his work has been largely superseded by modern research. A comparable film based on modern historiography would, for example, stress that Rommel owed a good part of his career to the personal rapport he had established with Hitler (whom he apparently genuinely liked and admired) in the 1930s. Beginning with El Alamain would no longer be possible. Still, all in all 'The Desert Fox' is a good film; it was state of the art when it came out. Worth watching.
