LA BANDERA (1935)

One night on a Paris street, a man on the run collides with a drunken couple and leaves a bloodstain on the woman’s dress. This is how we know that Pierre (Jean Gabin) has killed someone. In Barcelona, his wallet is stolen; left flat without money and still, he assumes, with the police looking for him, he signs up for the Foreign Legion, which was, in cultural memory at least, the place for desperate men to get a new start in life. Pierre becomes friends with a handful of men including Fernando Lucas (Robert Le Vigan), whom all the men like, partly because he seems to have money to burn. But Pierre comes to suspect that Fernando is actually a cop on his tail and after a bar brawl, he manages to have Fernando transferred to a different company. Soon, Pierre meets and falls for an Arabian dancing girl named Aisha (Annabella) but before long Fernando is back on the scene and they briefly squabble over Aisha before the two are thrown together again defending a fort in the desert from the enemy (I was never clear if they were revolutionaries or bandits or just an enemy tribe) where their personal conflict has to take a back seat to defense and survival, and Fernando comes to see Pierre in a different light. This felt to me like a cross between Les Miz and BEAU GESTE: Javert chasing Valjean in the Foreign Legion. I have a weakness for desert adventure films of the classic era, but this one takes a while to actually get to the desert. Before that, it's a kind of noirish character study, though we never really get to know either Pierre or Fernando very well. For me, one of the big weaknesses of the film is that we know nothing about the murder that Pierre committed. He doesn't seem like the killer type, and we're led to think that the killing was justified, but we never know. This also makes Fernando's single-minded search a bit inexplicable. But I guess it's all about the archetypes. Gabin is fine but Le Vigan is even better, livelier as an actor and more interesting as a character. In the end, the story is just as much about Fernando as it is about Pierre. Directed by Julien Duvivier (PEPE LE MOKO) with an interesting visual style. Pictured from left are Gabin and Le Vigan. [DVD]