Encore La Guerre

Taxi for Tobruk is a modest French-made drama that effectively understates the points that None But the Brave garbles at the top of its Voice. The setting is North Africa, 1942. Shelled out of their halftrack vehicle, four French soldiers flee across the desert. Next day they slip up to a German patrol car and slaughter four men camped on the sand near by. The fifth, an arrogant young Afrika Korps captain (Hardy Kruger), becomes their prisoner.

En route to El Alamein, the Frenchmen sweat and struggle while the German sneers. When they are bogged down in the sand, he refuses to dig. When he begins to unbend and reaches under a seat to offer an injured man a first-aid kit, they clobber him unconscious. Shirtless and wearing German army caps, they join a German troop convoy and narrowly escape disaster when a French P.W. in the convoy recognizes one of the fugitives (France's singing idol, Charles Aznavour) as a countryman. Later, in one fine funny scene, the Frenchmen push the car out of a ditch with their captive at the wheel and gape helplessly as he drives off with all their weapons. The captive becomes the captor, but not for long.

Slowly, under the ceaseless threats of German minefields and strafing from Allied planes, the barriers between men are obliterated. In the absurdity of their situation, they discover a common humanity, a measure of individual worth. Eying a comrade, one soldier grumbles: "Doctors call his case paranoia. The army calls him a corporal." The dialogue is rough in texture, true in tone. And though Taxi arrives at its destination bearing no new arguments against the futility of war, Director Denys de la Patelliere reinforces the old ones with soundness and dash.

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