|
John Ford's coruscating desert hallucination, opening like Kipling and modulating toward Borges. Mesopotamia, 1917, "nothing but sand, plenty of it." Directions for the British cavalry outfit perish along with the lieutenant, the oasis the men stumble into has water and a crumbling mosque and dunes that hide Arab snipers. The teenage sentry (Douglas Walton) recalls his mother's heartbreak shortly before receiving a shiv to the spine, the watchman atop the palm tree (Billy Bevan) lives long enough to spot the gleaming rifle pointed at his skull. The Garden of Eden hoped for by the Bible-thumper (Boris Karloff) turns out to be "the devil's own backyard" described by the wandering sensualist (Reginald Denny), the sergeant (Victor McLaglen) has the deranged last word on "the asinine futility of this war." Horror to Ford rests not in the cast-whittling, abstract sense of dread, but in a disintegrating community in which people cling to palliatives (religion, military codes, fleshy remembrances, families that don't really exist) like so many lifesavers and the void quivers and undulates in the soldier's sun-stroked gaze. The bagpipes and bugles of Max Steiner's score herald a nobility readily uncercut—in the stark view of Karloff's mad prophet carrying his cross toward a hail of bullets, or in the ineptitude swept under the imperial stiff upper lip. ("I say, you chaps," gurgles the patrol's savior after skipping right into enemy fire.) The mirage of jingoism, with McLaglen's climactic machine-gun ejaculations not so much an officer's vengeful triumph as a zombie's scabrous spasms. "Ah, man, 'tis the soul of a poet you have." The coda has consequences for The Steel Helmet and Seven Samurai. With Wallace Ford, J.M. Kerrigan, Alan Hale, Brandon Hurst, and Sammy Stein. In black and white. --- Fernando F. Croce |