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"Gallant gesture," the summation at the end of the course (The Lost Patrol, Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Gunga Din). An Arabian proverb on fraternity visualized under the French flag, a couple of mysteries (disappearance of the family sapphire, Saharan fort lined with bodies) answered. Children have their games, toy boats with real gunpowder, they know how to tend to a wound because "that's what they always do in books." A question of honor for the Geste boys (Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, Robert Preston), out of the drawing room and into the desert. "Where would you go if you wanted to disappear completely and still have some excitement?" "Foreign Legion." William Wellman hews closely to Brenon's silent blueprint, virtually a painter's copy that nonetheless fits snugly in his studies of male groups aloft and grounded. The brothers are reunited and separated in the barracks, under a sergeant (Brian Donlevy) who proved to be too cruel for Siberia. ("I didn't know there were so many soldiers and so few battles and so many fevers" is his superior's last sigh, the martinet smiles over his corpse.) Mutiny on the Bounty is a recent memory, "you don't have to be the pigs. You can be the butcher." The mugs in the supporting cast allow for a good deal of vivid sketching, Albert Dekker and Broderick Crawford with scar and Stetson, J. Carrol Naish combining Peter Lorre and Sam Jaffe as an oleaginous ganef. (Susan Hayward as the damsel back home is a doily among dunes.) The taskmaster rises to the occasion during a Tuareg raid, "the best soldier we'll ever see" is at last a dog at the protagonist's feet for an improvised Viking funeral. Feldman's satirical analysis has a different stance on heroism: "Medals are like hemorrhoids, sooner or later every asshole gets one." With Charles Barton, James Stephenson, Heather Thatcher, G.P. Huntley Jr., Harold Huber, James Burke, Harvey Stephens, Stanley Andrews, Henry Brandon, and Donald O'Connor. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |