A Bandeira

If you like your meat salty and undercooked and have already tasted the treat that is Jean Gabin on film, this is about as early as you can step back in his career and still get a satisfying meal. He is marching toward his roguish best in this foreign legion romance, and the locations and decor are alluring, even in the faded print I have on DVD. I'm guessing this might be the first film in which he performs his slow burn to explosion, and MAN is this scene -- in close-up -- great!

I don't know much about the beginnings of the poetic realist movement in French cinema, but Duvivier was one of its main practitioners, and this is a precursor to his great PEPE LE MOKO, where the powerful, rash man is driven to destruction by love. Though not as accomplished as the later Gabin romances PORT OF SHADOWS, THE HUMAN BEAST, or LE JOUR SE LEVE, LA BANDERA has its charms. In addition to a great role and performance by Gabin, there is a strong supporting cast including Raymond Aimos, Pierre Renoir, and the indispensable Gaston Modot. Recommended!

"La bandera" is one of Julien Duvivier's most famous movies,but it seems a bit dated now.People who saw a version of "Beau Geste" cannot help but be struck by the similarities between the two stories:the "legion etrangere" ,as a way out when the police is hot on your heels.But whereas Beau Geste characters are noble,distinguished and chivalrous,Duvivier's hero and his mates are riffraff .The main character,played by Gabin ,is a good guy who committed an unpremeditated murder.

The best part of the movie ,in my opinion,is the description of the fort,the barrack-rooms,the brothel .Here,the hero falls in love with a morrocan girl.There's the rub:she's played by Annabella (who was Tyrone Power's wife) who does not look like a North African,not at all,hence the necessity to make her up outrageously ,with ugly results.

Like in "Beau Geste",the Arabs are the baddies,period.The courageous legionnaires always call them "les salopards" (the bastards).Duvivier achieves a real tour de force here:we never see the enemy when they attack the little fort!The poisoned water is a good dramatic idea and the final echoes Edith Piaf's song "le fanion de la légion".

However,"la bandera",with its military stereotypes, does not equal Duvivier's other pre-war works "la fin du jour" ,"carnet de bal" , "la belle équipe" or "pépé le moko" ,the latter taking place in North Africa too.

The Spanish Foreign Legion this is set in was founded in 1920 modeled on the French one to be an international vanguard to crush an uprising by Berber tribes of the Riff mountains in Spain's Protectorate of Northern Morocco. They called themselves the Bridegrooms of Death, 10,000 killed in its first 20 years. Francisco Franco was first Deputy Commander, then Commander, it was said, could terrify murderers with just a glance. It has never been as international as the French, usually 90% native Spanish, in the multinational mix in its history an ex-Texas Ranger, Australian undertaker, Cambridge law student, Polish count, Sikh from India. It acquired a reputation for brutality, in training and combat, worse than the French.The film's climax was based on an actual incident. The actual Legionnaires filmed here a year later went into the Spanish Civil War on Franco's side,, few surviving. It crushed an uprising in the Spanish Sahara in 1957-1958, left there in 1976, served in U.N. Peacekeeping missions, with NATO in Afghanistan. Reports by two British deserters of brutality in the 1980's led NATO on admitting Spain in 1987 as conditions to curb mistreatment, not to accept recruits from member nations. It was closed to non-Spanish in 1987, opened again in 2000, draws non-Spanish recruits from Africa and Latin America, and garrisons two fortress enclaves on the Moroccan cast, Mellila and Ceuta, dating from the 1500's the Spanish consider their soil Antonio Banderas' character Galgo in the third Expendables movie sings and talks about being in the Legion.

I read La Bandera a year or two ago and finally hunted down the DVD. It's pretty faithful to Mac Orlan's text (Dumarchais? IMDb must be putting on airs). This adventure yarn is better than a lot of his pirate stories, but still doesn't rise much above an adolescent's fantasy of the Spanish Foreign Legion. I especially liked Gabin - young, athletic, dumb and out of control. The love story with Annabella seems tacked on and out of the blue, but it's true to the text it's taken from.

The random stupidity of racing through the desert on Model A flatbeds after phantom snipers and gun-runners rings truest. This film is not on a humanist/moralist level with La Grand Illusion or Paths of Glory. It's an existential image of war-as-it-happens. The settings are stark, bright and always exposed. Sudden death is intertwined with the boredom of the barracks.

I grabbed La Bandara because it reunited Jean Gabin and Julien Duvivier, whose Pepe le Moko is a noir masterpiece. I'll give it a few points because Gabin is in it, but the clumsy plot, cheap sets and the ludicrous Annabella making like an Arab princess put the film on my `to sell' shelf. If you watch it, you'll find yourself asking, why didn't the idiots build the fort *around* the well, instead of a deadly few yards away from it. And why use tin roofs in the middle of the desert? But by then the sheer perversity of contrivance that makes up the script should numb you to any further contemplation.