Nine Men
Documentarian Harry Watt's first full-length feature is a war story set in Libya, where a sergeant and seven soldiers in a desert tomb hold off the Italians until help arrives. “The best of Watt's later features (especially The Overlanders) remained essentially documentaries in style and theme. Nine Men took British audiences by surprise in 1943. Used to the somewhat dull and unshowmanlike British propagandist documentaries, they found that this one had surprising warmth and real excitement in its lively hand-to-hand combat scenes.... In a purely documentary sense, the early training scenes are perhaps the best, being astonishingly ‘right' in detail, and also establishing a very real and convincing picture of the wartime relationship and mutual respect between sergeant and platoon, and the temporary abandoning of social barriers....” William K. Everson