31 Oct Tobruk
(1967) In 1942, the British send an eclectic team to destroy Rommel’s fuel supply at Tobruk, a city on the northern Africa coast of Libya. Rommel is charging toward the Suez Canal and must be stopped.
Tobruk, WWII Movie starring Rock Hudson and George Peppard
Part of that team is a unit of the British Army called the Special Interrogation Group (SIG.) The SIG was a band of German-speaking Jewish volunteer commandos from Palestine. In the film Tobruk, George Peppard played the leader of the SIG group. I enjoyed his performance as the Jewish soldier who played the part of a German commandant in order to get their trucks through the 800 miles of desert. The movie is a fictional story based on everything that was happening in North Africa at the time. The filming took place in Arizona.
The other main character is a Canadian expert in desert topography who knows the arid area well. Rock Hudson played the Canadian, and I was surprised at how much I liked his performance. Rock looked awfully good in 1967.
A father-daughter spy team showed up at one point. The young lady was an attractive blonde, and I fully expected there would soon be either a connection with either George or with Rock. She and her father had crossed the Sahara desert with a group of nomads called the Tuareg. During filming, her hairdresser must have rushed over between scenes to make sure her hairdo was perfect. Sand or no sand.
The Canadian director Arthur Hiller is best known for the 1970 Love Story with Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw.
Lots of action at the end (nominated for the Academy Award for Visual Effects) with a slightly miraculous ending.
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