The biggest Australian film made during the Pacific War, it was Charles Chauvel's follow up to Forty Thousand Horseman, complete with Grant Taylor and Chips Rafferty returning in the lead roles. It's a different sort of film, though - Horseman was a swashbuckling adventure tale, with spies, horses and French girls masquerading as boys; Rats is more serious. It starts quite soberly with a narrator introducing Taylor, Rafferty and their English mate Peter Finch, who is in Australia for life experience. Taylor's ex is a squatter's daughter type and they have some clunky romance scenes. Then war arrives and our three heroes wind up in Tobruk.
Chauvel aimed for authenticity and a lot of it looks like the real McCoy - there is documentary footage, lots of bunking down in sand dunes and driving around in tanks. The Tobruk story is an inspiring one but no filmmaker has managed to lick it's problems because it involved so much lying down on the ground and shooting at tanks as opposed to hand to hand combat, involved a lot of night fighting (which as shot here is confusing) and doesn't have an obvious climax.
Horseman's story was a bit silly but at least it was a story; Rats doesn't really have one, apart from Finch's romance with a nurse. It goes fight-injury-recover-fight-injury-recovery, etc. The comic interludes with George Wallace and Joe Valli are poorly integrated, and the New Guinea climax feels tacked on (it's cut off the version of the film I saw).
Grant Taylor is confident and masculine as ever, though slightly more battered than he was in Horseman - his reign as a leading man would soon be over. Rafferty does his Rafferty thing but Finch is very effective and moving.
For all the film's faults it is an invaluable time capsule of one of this country's greatest feats of arms. The visual look, the brusque attitudes of the officers towards the men, the seriousness of the treatment; even the poignant moment where Wallace tells the three leads "well, I had a go didn't I?" tell us much about Australia at the time. So it's a bit of a mess but it should still be watched if you're interested in Australian cinema or Australian military history.
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