Desert Victory
David MacDonald
['Ettore Scola', 'Pere Portabella', 'Roman Kachanov', 'Carl Froelich', 'Nitai Palit', 'Warren Beatty', 'Dennis Gansel', 'Henry Koster', 'Max Linder', 'Laurence Harvey', 'Sean McNamara', 'Victor Salva', 'Chantal Akerman', 'Andrew McLaglen', 'Michele Soavi', 'David Elfick', 'Britt Allcroft', 'Vishal Bhardwaj', 'Larry Semon', 'Stephen Chow', 'Nagathihalli Chandrashekhar', 'Ritwik Ghatak', 'Gordon Chan', 'Tommy Lee Wallace', 'Russell Crowe', 'Phil Joanou', 'Clara Law', 'Loretta Young', 'Aldo Fabrizi', 'Manivannan', 'Joshua Logan', 'Mel Gibson', 'Frances Marion', 'Greg Mottola', 'Sidney Olcott', 'Koreyoshi Kurahara', 'Fred Schepisi', 'Anjan Dutt', 'Partho Ghosh', 'Cherie Nowlan', 'Clark Johnson', 'Jacques Deray', 'Peter Chan', 'Alexandre Michon', 'Larry Fessenden', 'Jerry Warren', 'Ketan Mehta', 'Julian Huxley', 'Ralph Nelson', 'Warren Leight', 'Ruba Nadda', 'Pierre Morel', 'Jean Delannoy', 'Visconti', 'Bill Paxton', 'John Boorman', 'Eric Laneuville', 'Tim Roth', 'Hiroshi Watanabe', 'Shekhar Kapur', 'Stephen Poliakoff', 'Walt Becker', 'Toshio Matsumoto', 'Marleen Gorris', 'Hans Alfredson', 'Frank Launder', 'Pete Michels', 'Mohan Kumar', 'Ayan Mukerji', 'John Singleton', 'Michael Curtiz', 'Jack Layton', 'Adurthi Subba Rao', 'Bob Saget', 'Edward Sedgwick', 'Frank Oz', 'John McTiernan', 'Harald Zwart', 'Radha Mohan', 'Arthur Rosson', 'Goffredo Alessandrini', 'Ramesh Bhat', 'Harold Lloyd', 'Shoojit Sircar', 'Paul Auster', 'Thom Fitzgerald', 'Arthur Dreifuss', 'Christine Hakim', 'Taylor Hackford', 'Matt Chow', 'Arthur Maria Rabenalt', 'Buddhadeb Dasgupta', 'Giacomo Gentilomo', 'Yoshinori Kitase', 'Faisal Saif', 'Rauf Khalid', 'Billy Wilder', 'Makoto Shinkai', 'Basu Bhattacharya']
Desert Victory
Desert Victory is a 1943 film produced by the British Ministry of Information, documenting the Allies' North African campaign against Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and the Afrika Korps. This documentary traces the struggle between General Erwin Rommel and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, from the German's defeat at El Alamein to Tripoli. The film was produced by David MacDonald and directed by Roy Boulting who also directed Tunisian Victory and Burma Victory. Like the famous "Why We Fight" series of films by Frank Capra, Desert Victory relies heavily on captured German newsreel footage. Many of the most famous sequences in the film have been excerpted and appear with frequency in History Channel and A&E productions. The film won a special Academy Award in 1943 and the 1951 film The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel took sections of the film for its battle footage. The film has been criticised for emphasizing the British role in the victory, while playing down the American contribution to the battle. Mark Harris, author of the "Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War," a novel about the role five prominent Hollywood directors played in the war, has stated in an interview on Turner Classic Movies that when asked about the omission, the British war department retorted that the Americans "didn't have any good footage." A sequel, "Tunisian Victory," was produced as a co-allied production between British and American propaganda agencies, with American film makers Frank Capra and John Huston allegedly restaging actual events, such as liberations, as well as tank and air battles (some of which was actually filmed in Orlando, Florida) to achieve high quality footage that the British couldn't refuse. The British supposedly knew immediately that the footage was fake, but since they themselves restaged much of the footage, this uneasy collaboration continued.