THE British government’s documentary, “Desert Victory,” is a pleasure and an excitement. It is a real documentary, not a newsreel assembly that jumps from one minute part of one event to another minute part of another event until two reels are over. “Desert Victory,” in fact, puts you inside the North African campaign where it was last October, and allows you to see it as it progresses, from the beginning to the end. At the start the British Eighth Army was barely holding a thirty-mile front between the Quattara depression and the sea, and at the end British tanks are passing, thirteen weeks later and 1,300 miles further west, through the gates of Tripoli.
This is the first time a movie has been the original source for the clearest account of an event. The film-makers of the British government were obviously as well prepared for the attack that came in the night of October 23 as was the Eighth Army under Montgomery. The photographing of this attack is so successful that the soldiers come as close to being movie players, without being, as is possible—this while clawing their way forward through barbed wire, or fishing anti-tank mines out of the sand, or as their bagpiper plays while walking with the Highlanders, stiff-legged and sweating, through their own land mines. Seconds before the signal for attack is given the screen goes bare and silent, and then explodes in your face as British artillery laid down the barrage that shook buildings outside of Alexandria, sixty miles away. So that here, for the first time, is a sustained record on film of an attack, as it was being made—the entire scope of Montgomery’s plan is studied as it unfolds. Incredible photography was almost underfoot of the advancing Highlanders, up ahead clearing the way with the heroic sappers, with the air force that was strewing the desert with Axis wreckage. There was even a photographer to run around with the dour, angular-faced Montgomery. Everywhere the event is examined with the completest curiosity of which the camera is capable (from Rommel’s viewpoint as well).
“Desert Victory” contains the two great ingredients of the English movie tradition: slow, lucid, beautifully modulated photography, and nearly perfect film editing. The photography sees the outside world of texture and light values in the same way as the human eye, leaving the business of drama and working up of emotions to the content of the event itself. (The opposite of this method, of course, is that of Orson Welles, whose camera is used to fix mood artificially.) While English photography seeks the clarity of the eye, English editing tries to follow the demands of human instinct, that is, to approach the heart of an event and to stay with it as long as one’s curiosity holds out. This technique, as applied in “Desert Victory,” is in contrast to the flickering, choppy aspect of the Russian war documentaries, where the heavy hand of moral and purpose is always teaching you your lesson—this scene is to show that the Nazis destroy art, that one that the Russian pianist raises morale, the other that Russian women work in coal mines, etc., and never is the continuity controlled by the unpredictable progress of the event but by a program of secondary meanings. This is not in any way to condemn the brilliant work the Russians are doing in covering their war, but only to say that emotion and interest in a film have more chance of taking hold when the event is shown at such length that it can speak for itself.
The longest chase in history, that of Rommel from El Alamein to Tripoli, is in the film sketchily, mostly signposts and a touch at each stop—Tobruk, Bengazi, El Agheila—to watch the crowds lining the street as the British go through. But the main purpose of the film has already been accomplished, to a thorough degree, and that rare thing, a perfect movie, has been made. Col. David McDonald, of the Army Film and Photographic Unit, directed twenty-six men in making “Desert Victory”; four were killed, six wounded, seven captured. It is a fact that Tobruk was actually taken by the British film unit, which arrived some hours in advance of the fighting forces.
April 12, 1943