The Lost Patrol

John Ford’s horror hallucination, which begins with Kipling but is positioned towards Borges (and the search for Weapons of Mass Destruction). Wandering the Mesopotamian desert after their directions die along with their leader, WWI British legionnaires find refuge in an oasis. The idyll is short-lived, one by one they’re picked off by unseen snipers -- the "Garden of Eden" described by the outfit’s Bible-thumper (Boris Karloff) turns out to be "the devil’s own backyard" suggested by the traveling sensualist (Reginald Denny). Douglas Walton recalls his mother’s heartbreak right before waking up with a shiv in his spine, Billy Bevan takes vigil atop a palm tree just long enough to spot the glare of the rifle pointed at his skull; the Sergeant (Victor McLaglen) survives only to illustrate both "the asinine futility of this war" and "the unspeakable joy of killing Arabs." The central horror isn’t in the cast-whittling sense of abstract menace, or even in Karloff’s gleeful Lon Chaneyisms (capped by the striking glimpse of the mad prophet carrying his cross into the hail of bullets). To Ford, horror is a disintegrating community, where people cling to palliatives (religion, military codes, fleshy memories, families that don’t really exist) like lifesavers and the void quivers in the soldier’s sun-stroked gaze. Still, Ford can’t help kid the ineptitude under the characters’ imperial stiff upper lip: "I say, you chaps," gurgles the patrol’s would-be rescuer after skipping right into enemy fire. Despite Max Steiner’s bagpipes and bugles insisting on blessing the Queen, Ford complicates the plot’s jingoism -- McLaglen’s climactic machine-gun ejaculations aren’t an officer’s fierce triumph, but a dead man’s scabrous spasms. Kurosawa absorbed the whole venture (it can be felt in the saber-graves of The Seven Samurai and in the entirety of The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail), Ford himself would visualize Denny’s wistful monologue about Malayan girls as the first movement of The Long Voyage Home. Adaptation by Dudley Nichols. With Wallace Ford, J.M. Kerrigan, Alan Hale, Brandon Hurst, and Sammy Stein. In black and white.