La legione dei condannati

The Nuremburg trials are nearing their end, with some Nazis being hanged and others sentenced to life imprisonment, but one criinal remains untouched. No one knows what he looks like. So they send Dick Powell after him. Since this evil man has joined the French Foreign Legion, Powell does likewise, and is sent to French Indo-China to catch what turns out to be Stephen McNally and make love to Märta Torén.

It's a capable programmer. There are battle scenes. There's Vincent Price in villain mode, expediting McNally, and the shadows grow darker and longer gradually, under the camera of the under-rated Maury Gertsman. Director Robert Florey fills the time ably; although the movie times in at 85 minutes, it never grows dull.

The film follows undercover agent Dick Powell (Whit) as he tracks down fictitious Nazi Martin Brunner as portrayed by Stephen McNally (Reicher) in the French Foreign Legion in Indo-China. I assume that McNally's character is based on real life high ranking Nazi Alois Brunner and the story is a fictionalized interpretation of where real life Brunner may have gone. Incidentally, the real Brunner never got caught. Can Dick Powell track down and capture McNally, or does this story foretell the actual truth of how Brunner may have evaded his searchers?

The film begins in a documentary style with clips from the Nazi war trials before it turns its attention to the plight of one particular high-ranking Nazi who has evaded capture. We follow the leads that place him in Indo-China, and that's where we meet our cast, all of whom give good performances. My favourites are McNally and Carol Thurston, who plays devious Vincent Price's (Van Ratten) servant girl, Li-Ho-Kay. Oh yeah, she's handy with a knife.

The film seems to tie itself up rather too neatly but it is an interesting journey - there is suitable tension throughout the film as well as intrigue as to what will happen. We are taken into the world of the Vietnamese freedom fighters, who, as a separate issue, win a victory in the end, a few years later.

A lot of post war politics gets mixed up in Rogue's Regiment, a story about a manhunt for an escaped Nazi war criminal. The plot takes a lot from the Orson Welles classic, The Stranger.

But when Edward G. Robinson is hunting Orson Welles and tracks him to Connecticut he's in the comfort zone of the good old USA even if he doesn't know that Welles is whom he seeks. But Dick Powell as an Army Intelligence Officer tracks his man all the way to Southeast Asia and has to join the French Foreign Legion in order to smoke him out.

Which brings us to the point that Rogue's Regiment can lay claim to the fact that it's the first Hollywood motion picture to talk about the Vietnam War. It wasn't Vietnam then, it was French Indochina where the French are rather foolishly trying to reestablish colonial control. A whole lot of history might have changed in the 20th Century if they had realized colonialism was dead. The rebels were called the Viet Minh then and they were making life very tough for French troops outside their outposts. Six years after this film was made, these same French Foreign Legionaires and regular French Army troops would be surrendering at Dienbienphu. But that's getting way ahead of this story.

The Foreign Legion has been the host to all kinds of criminals and other assorted riff-raff since its founding. They ask no questions when you enlist and Germans, some of whom might have been occupying France, are enlisting. It's here that our man hopes to find anonymity and here to where Dick Powell tracks him down.

With the able assistance of French Intelligence Officer Marta Toren who is working a case of her own, Powell ferrets his man out. In fact he uses the same gambit that Robinson does in The Stranger. There's another well known Nazi in the Legion company and Powell uses him as bait.

Such folks as Stephen McNally, Vincent Price, Edgar Barrier and James Millican fill out the cast in this story set in the then exotic locale of Indochina. Carol Thurston who played the tragic Tremartini in Cecil B. DeMille's The Story Of Dr. Wassell also set in Southeast Asia plays another exotic female in love with the wrong guy.

Though Rogue's Regiment gets a little silly at times, Powell gets captured by the Viet Minh and escapes rather too easily, almost like one of those serials, still the film is generally good. And being a first to talk about the war in Indochina, Rogue's Regiment is a historic milestone of a film.

I doubt though that the folks at Universal Pictures thought they were establishing a milestone.

One of the few Foreign Legion films that takes the Legion out of the desert. The Legion was instrumental in the conquest of Indochina in the 1880s, and fought a bloody, futile war in a vain attempt to retain it, from 1946-54. In the late 40s, the French government prohibited sending conscripts to serve in Indochina, so the Foreign Legion was greatly expanded. A major falsehood presented by the film is the great effort made by former SS enlistees to conceal their past, since the French were said to execute any they discovered. The reverse was in fact true, and the French actively (though covertly) sought out and recruited former Wehrmacht and SS men. For the first time in the Legion's history, large enlistment bonuses were paid and former officers and senior noncoms were advanced to sergeant upon completion of training and a short probation period. Jobs were hard to come by in postwar Germany, and the French eagerly made use of this large pool of disciplined, fully trained professional killers. Just the thing for a dirty, distant, unpopular war.

Dick Powell joins the Legion to find a wanted SS war criminal. Despite the above, most of the movie is quite realistic and fast moving. There are good action, and even training sequences, and the atmosphere is appropriately gritty and depressing. The legionnaires are depicted with American M1 rifles. This was accurate in the early part of the war. Ironically, these were later replaced by inferior and obsolete French equipment.

An interesting mix of war movie and film noir done reasonably well.

"Rogues' Regiment" is very unusual film - more ways than one. Billed an action, adventure and mystery, this is a preview look at Vietnam and the Vietnamese War. It takes place during the French Indo-China colonial period which lasted until 1954. The French pulled out of the country on May 7, 1954, after a four-month siege by communist-led rebels of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu.

So, there's more than a little history surrounding this film. It portrays the French Foreign Legion in the Vietnam of the late 1940s. And, it shows some ambushes of French units. I know of only one other film that has scenes about the French Army and defeats in Vietnam. That is the 2002 film that starred Mel Gibson, "We Were Soldiers Once... and Young." So, considering that this movie came out in 1948, the film is somewhat prescient of the failure and withdrawal of the French in 1954, and then of the Vietnam War and American involvement a decade after that.

But for its prophetic historical notes, the plot of this film is about an American undercover sergeant joining the French forces in Indo-China in the hopes of discovering the last notorious Nazi official from World War II, to bring him to justice. In this film, the character is Martin Brunner who is disguised as another legionnaire, Carl Reicher. Dick Powell plays the American, Whit Corbett.

Another historical aside is that from well before WW II Germans had been joining the French Foreign Legion, and many of the NCOs at the time of the war were German. The Nazis had tried to infiltrate the legion with recruits, and the French discovered the plot. Even after France's defeat, the Legion operated as the Free French and worked to purge itself of any Nazis. So, now, in the post-war period, former German soldiers who weren't Nazis were joining the French legion in Indo-China. But that made it a logical place for Nazis as well who fled Germany to hide out for several years.

Another element of this film is that an arms smuggling operation existed that supplied the Vietnamese with weapons of war. The bad guy playing the part of Mark Van Ratten here is Vincent Price. Märta Torén plays Lili Maubert, who is an undercover contact for Corbett But she's also an acquaintance of Van Ratten. This film has some interesting twists. Considering that it was all shot in California and on Universal studio lots, the film does well in looking like Vietnam.

The cast all give good performances. Torén was a Swedish actress who was being billed as the next Ingrid Berman. She is 21 at the time of this movie and she would make some good films. But just nine years later she would die of a brain hemorrhage in her native Stockholm, Sweden. Here are some favorite lines form this film.

Lily Maubert, "What does Col. Mauclaire think?" Whit Corbett, "Same as you do - that I'm fishing for whales with a bat pin. But he'll help with the bait."

Lily Maubert, "I wish I could help you too." Whit Corbett, "You're doing that, just letting me look at you."

Whit Corbett, "You know, this is my last job for the Army. In another three months, my time will be up and I'll be going home - to a place called Nebraska. I've got a farm there - a hay farm. It's very quiet and might even be a little dull, after what we've been doing. But it's also a wonderful life in another way. And, for excitement, we can always drive the jeep up to Omaha.

Lily Maubert, "Are you making love to me?" Whit Corbett, "I'm trying to. Why, does it amuse you?" Lily, "No, no, it doesn't. I think I like it very much - if you mean it."

Lily Maubert, "What is hay?" Whit Corbett, "Hay? That's the stuff you make when the sun shines."