THE STEEL BAYONET, a British WW2 saga from 1957, migrated to the States a year later on a double-bill with the gritty western Fort Massacre. Watching this as a kid back in the early 60s it qualified as “Neato!” because (1) we colonials were early on schooled to appreciate sober war flicks from our ally (Sink The Bismarck!, Yesterday’s Enemy, The Dam Busters, etc.) and (2) because it concluded with a noisy, lengthy, wipe’em out battle. Just the sort to re-enact with toy soldiers on your bed (drop screws onto the 1/72 scale Airfix figures) or in the back yard, where handy dirt clods exploded “realistically”. Tie up the dog to keep her off the battlefield.

Um—with all due respect to its capable actors and the valiant veterans of the 8th Army—re-enlisted a good six decades later it’s a wee tougher crumpet to gnaw. The ad-poster call to arms of “It Stabs To The Guts Of War!” translated via the script and direction to something closer intestinal gas, produced by manly departure from martial reality.

Tunisia, 1943. Though the tide has finally turned against the German and Italian forces under ‘Desert Fox’ Rommel, the Axis still have plenty of fight left. Expecting a counter-attack, an under-strength British company defends a strategic farm against massed Wehrmacht infantry and tanks. Leo Genn has the lead role as the man in command, and the supporting cast is pocked with stalwarts, among them Kieron Moore, Michael Medwin, Robert Brown and Percy Herbert. See if you can spot bit player Michael Caine, wearing another country’s uniform. The actors do their duty, and credit goes to the sound crew for their plenitude of excellent combat noise effects. *

Howard Clewes wrote some good scripts (The One That Got Away, a top true war story from the same year, and The Day They Robbed The Bank Of England) but he was off-target here. A bit where a trooper gets heroically killed while delivering a cup of tea to his officer under a bombardment really pushes the Stiff Upper Lip motif into Operation Lockjaw: this is the sort of material that would later be cruelly mocked by Richard Lester and John Lennon in How I Won The War and further sniffed by the blokes of the Python squad.

With the Salisbury Plain in England subbing for the North African desert, the 85 minutes were produced & directed by Michael Carreras. He often did fine work as a producer (many Hammer faves) but as a director he was sketchy. With this assignment Carreras and/or his second unit team let slip the havoc of fancy during the climactic clash. ‘The lads’ have inexhaustible ammo with which to mow down scores of bunched-up Nazi soldiers. They manage to evade death or injury from enough tank shells (landing a few feet away) to subdue Russia let alone plaster a farmhouse. They trounce outnumbering enemy troops in hand-to-hand combat with ease since the automaton ‘Jerries’ apparently never trained for something so basic.

* One can’t help but wonder what some of the cast members thought of this overripe cinematic bravado. Leo Genn served in the Royal Artillery, won the Croix de Guerre for bravery and helped handle war crimes the Nazis committed at Belsen concentration camp. Percy Herbert slaved as a POW for Japan’s mercy-free railway hacking across Thailand. Uncredited 24-year-old bit player Michael Caine had manned a machine gun against Chinese infantry frontal assaults in Korea. What they did, witnessed and endured in real life makes the film’s easy wholesale dispatch of clumsy enemy waves not just silly but offensive. Who knew that the Afrika Korps was so given to suicidal banzai charges? Certainly not the British, Australian and American soldiers who faced them.