Those were some clean rats

This is one I’ve been meaning to post for ages but somehow haven’t got around to:

This is the American poster for the Australian film The Rats of Tobruk, which got a US release there some time in the 1950s, and evidently had to be retitled for Americans who might’ve mistaken it for a nature documentary… anyway, someone posted this on Bluesky, and they also posted this close-up of part of it:

That is… not the sort of thing that normally appears on film posters, is it? Especially not of THAT vintage. The big “UNCENSORED!” just makes it funnier somehow…

Now, I’ve never seen Rats of Tobruk, so I don’t actually know what’s going on with this scene; that’s a still from the film itself that I grabbed from IMDB, in which our bathing beauty is clearly not being menaced by another soldier so the poster lied to us there. Perhaps it actually is an important part of the film, rather than the poster artist just having a laugh. Maybe it’s a grand moment demonstrating that, although these men may have lived like rats, they practised hygiene like humans and insisted upon fighting Rommel with clean arseholes. Or maybe not.