You make two very good points. It's not surprising that this film didn't even hint at anything to do with the Holocaust. Even in the late 40s, when films were more frank in tackling such topics, it was only referred to somewhat obliquely if at all, since the subject was seen as too harsh for a commercial film. By 1951, with the Cold War underway, such a heavy subject was deemed out of place as we were now turning the West Germans into allies and trying to re-integrate them into western Europe. Movies about WWII were fine but the subject matter had to be mostly military in nature. Besides, audiences at that time were seeking escapism and didn't want to be reminded of such things.
I don't rate this film as highly as you do. It's good and entertaining and despite some glaring errors reasonably accurate (though James Mason bore no resemblance whatsoever to Rommel). The cast is generally good (with the enormous exception of Luther Adler, who is cartoonish and asinine as Hitler), but it's far from unique in terms of how outstanding it was; it was mostly a collection of supporting players, not leads, and in that sense nothing at all unusual. But I always felt it was a rushed job -- as you note it's not that long, and even then it has a huge amount of stock footage to pad the running time. Frankly, there probably wasn't much additional to say about Rommel given the focus of the film's story, beyond a Cliff-Notes tour of a few of his battles. He doesn't seem to have been a particularly interesting man outside of his military career.
You're quite right about the film's "will he or won't he" second half, this interminable tug-of-war between the two sides of Rommel's conscience. It does get pretty tiresome pretty quickly. But here too, I wouldn't go too far in regretting the absence of any mention of Rommel's dislike of Hitler's "Jewish policies". The wanton murder of civilians may have been offensive to an old-school military man like Rommel (and in this he was by no means alone in the German military), but for Rommel as well as the rest of the German officers who opposed Hitler -- including the participants in the July 20 plot to assassinate him -- their only goal was to save Germany from complete defeat, division and occupation.
Doubtless had the plotters succeeded in killing Hitler and, even more unlikely, actually seizing control of the government -- Goering, Himmler, Goebbels and millions of loyal Nazis would have moved against them -- they would have ended the operations of the death camps. But that was an incidental item for them. Whatever their distaste for the Nazis' racial and genocidal policies, Rommel and his fellow plotters were concerned primarily with sparing the country from suffering a total defeat -- and, especially, from the onslaught of the vengeful Russians. Like the rest of them, Rommel hoped for a negotiated settlement with the Allies that would allow Germany to keep its pre-September 1939 conquests: Austria, the Sudetenland (and perhaps the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia), the ports of Memel and if possible Danzig. These guys were not proponents of democracy and humanity and felt no guilt about German aggression and conquest. Rommel and the others were perfectly happy to aid Germany in invading peaceful countries, conquering other peoples, taking their lands and waging war. It was only when the tide turned and they saw that Germany was going to lose that they turned against Hitler.
Rommel was a man of honor and chivalry: he treated prisoners well and refused orders to kill or turn over Jewish or other "sub-human" soldiers to the Gestapo. He refused to deport Jewish civilians and wanted the troops who carried out a massacre in France shortly after D-Day punished, even arguing with Hitler about it. He even paid French slave laborers for their work on the Atlantic Wall. All this speaks well of him, and in the context of his profession he was certainly a "good man". But these character traits were not the motivating factors in his later opposition to Hitler.
All that said, any notion that Rommel deserved unalloyed credit even after he turned against Hitler is misplaced. He didn't do it because of the Holocaust (so not mentioning it doesn't mean much), and only did so after prolonged agonizing and because of the country's impending defeat -- not because of any sense of morality or right and wrong, and certainly not because of any sense of war guilt. What he and the others did took courage, but ultimately their motives were solely to protect their own people, not some grand humanitarian impulse.
As to not including any "whatever happened to" coda, such things were virtually never done in those days, and anyway, this was only six years after the war. Everyone knew what had happened to most of the more important characters, and his son was still only a young man. For the record, his wife Lucille lived from 1894-1971 and his son Manfred from 1928-2013; he also had an illegitimate daughter whom he took into his household -- with her mother -- as his "niece", with his wife's agreement. That of course also speaks well of him. Manfred, incidentally, served as Mayor of Stuttgart for over 20 years (1974-1996), and in the 70s was quite friendly with the commander of the local U.S. Army forces stationed nearby: General George S. Patton III!
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CindyH
8 years ago
Wow. What a deep and thoughtful reply! I agree with you on all that you said and I didn't mean to imply that I believed Rommel to stand for anything other than protecting Germany. He was still an enemy. He was still fighting on the wrong side, no matter how good a man he was. I understand his reasoning, but disagree in how he handled it. I simply wanted to point out that as a person, he was a good man.
I did think about the post war note after I posted this. I just decided not to edit it. I probably should have. What a silly notion that was!
I love your post and find it very thought provoking. You sound a lot like me in my thinking. I think about it all the time. It just amazes me how any government can turn so quickly in such a direction. The more I learn, the more it baffles me. It's supposed to be the other way around, but it isn't.
The worst part of it all, film aside of course, is that I don't think anyone learned anything from it.
Oh and I meant to mention that I also agree that Mason didn't resemble him. In that sense, I doubt very much anyone in Hollywood would have resembled him since he wasn't famous for for being overtly handsome. Still, I believe that Mason's portrayal of him is what I've pictured in my mind.
Thanks for your thoughts.
Random Thoughts: http://goo.gl/eXk3O
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hobnob53
8 years ago
Thank you very much for your nice reply, CindyH. Yes, I suspect our thinking on this subject is very similar. But you deserve the credit for opening such an in-depth and more complex thread topic than most. It allows for a lot of thought and discussion.
Rommel was indeed a good man, within his times and context. Indeed, it may be this very trait that kept stopping him from making a more decisive break with Hitler sooner. Even after he gave his blessing to the conspirators he took no direct, not even an indirect, role in carrying out the plot. He seems to have wanted to be on the right side yet still keep his distance from the messy aspects of actually killing his head of state. I wonder what -- if anything -- he might have said or done in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt (by that I mean in the first hours, when it was believed by many in Berlin that Hitler had been killed), had he not been in the hospital after his car was strafed by an Allied aircraft three days earlier.
James Mason played Rommel again, in a cameo, in the 1953 film The Desert Rats, about the Australians' defense of Tobruk after Rommel's forces had surrounded it. (He failed to take the city then but did seize it during a later battle.) That movie isn't a sequel but has obvious links to The Desert Fox. But in it, Mason speaks German; it's been a while since I've seen it but as I recall he does speak some English to a British officer, affecting a German accent. This at least was a bit more realistic.
Have you ever seen a film called Five Graves to Cairo (1943)? It's an ingenious war film, written and directed by the great Billy Wilder, in which a British officer stranded behind enemy lines in North Africa poses as a waiter in a Libyan hotel where he tries to wheedle secrets out of Rommel, who briefly establishes his headquarters in the hotel. Franchot Tone stars as the British officer, and Rommel was played by Erich von Stroheim, the arrogant German director who acted when no one would hire him as a director. Von Stroheim's characterization of Rommel is fascinating, considering it was made during the war when Rommel was very much alive and an enemy. Of course it's nowhere near a sympathetic portrayal, but in some ways it's surprisingly complex and not merely a one-dimensional villain. In fact, the film was criticized at the time for not making Rommel out as simply another strutting Nazi. The underlying plot is also very clever.
How a supposedly civilized nation like Germany could so easily veer into the kind of barbaric savagery it did, in so short a time and to such a hideous degree, has been the subject of millions of words these past 70-plus years. One can understand how a people facing depression and suffering injustices (real or imagined) resulting from their defeat in World War I could succumb to the rhetoric of a demagogue promising to restore their former glory. But it's a huge step from that to participating in, or at least going along with, the slaughter of millions in concentration camps as well as in wars of conquest. Billy Wilder, who lost his mother, stepfather and sister in the death camps, held his own fellow Austrians in even deeper contempt than the Germans, for trying after the war to separate themselves from the Nazis as "Hitler's first victim". Wilder remarked that the Austrians were an amazing people -- they've convinced the world that Beethoven was an Austrian and Hitler was a German!
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