The Lost Patrol

 John Ford's The Lost Patrol (1934) is a grim, disturbing little picture that seems caught between two genres.  The film's title is literally accurate:  a group of 12 British soldiers reconnoitering a vast tract of sand dunes gets lost and the men are killed by unseen Arab snipers described in an opening title as "ghosts."  The premise is worked-out with brutal logic down to the last man.  The narrative is uncompromising and, indeed, single-minded and there's no fat on these bones -- the picture clocks in at 74 minutes.  Ford, and his scenarists, seem conflicted about the point of these proceedings:  is this supposed to be chummy adventure movie, set in an exotic locate along the lines of the later Gunga Din or are we watching a dead-end anti-war movie on the order of Journey's End? Elements of both types of picture uneasily coexist in The Lost Patrol:  there's plenty a gruff horseplay and the soundtrack features jaunty military marches incongruent with the desolate vision that the film presents of sunstruck men, harassed by an implacable and unseen enemy, slowly going mad with fear.  Victor McLaglen as the Sergeant and commanding officer is surprisingly restrained.  There are some comical enlisted men, lifers in the military, who playfully josh with one another but end up with their eyes gouged out and the lips peeled from their faces.  Boris Karloff is on hand to supply horror elements to the film:  he plays a religious fanatic who claims that the sea of sand is really the Garden of Eden (the film is set in 1917 in Mesopotamia) and who simpers in his trademark fashion:  his preternaturally deep and resonant voice is a weird match with the insane whimpering and pleading words that he speaks.  There's a poet who speaks in blank verse (quite effectively in fact) and a naive young man from the upper class who has joined the army because he admires the works of Kipling  -- needless to say, he doesn't survive for long.

The plot is non-existent -- the movie simply sets up a situation and lets it play out inexorably.  The men's horses are dying of thirst and the Sergeant doesn't know where they are in the wasteland of wind-sculpted sand-dunes.  After a man is shot off his horse and buried in the white, shifting sands, a horse collapses from the heat and has to be shot.  (We see the soldier tenderly rubbing water from his canteen on the dying animal's nose.)  In extremis, the patrol finds an oasis with water and a crumbling mosque.  There they are besieged by the unseen Arabs who snipe at them and drive off their horses.  The desperation of the situation is evidenced by a classic "reversal of fortune" scene:  one of the men, climbs a palm tree with great effort, surveys the landscape and notes that he see something -- in the next second, a sniper shoots him out of the tree ("right through the head," a wondering soldier says.)  The two comic enlisted men are sent to find the river.  They return with their faces cut off tied to horses -- and, in fact, get shot down by friendly fire.  A plane circles the besieged mosque and, then, lands.  But when the pilot steps out of his biplane, the hidden snipers gun him down.  Sarge rips the machine gun off the plane and, later, uses it to massacre the seven or eight Arabs who are besieging them -- they make the mistake of showing themselves only be slaughtered according to the film's implacable logic.  By this time, Karloff has gone mad and carrying a big wooden cross marches across the dunes like some sort crusader -- he's killed right away.  Sarge is the last survivor.  After he machine-guns the Arabs, the camera pans to the side and we see a column of cavalry coming to the rescue, riding over the mountainous dunes.  Sarge looks at the graveyard where he has buried his men under sabers that catch the sun and gleam in the shadow of the mosque.  He has a haunted look.  But the film ends with a merry military march tune playing on the soundtrack:  is this supposed to ironic? Or are we take the musical cue seriously as a sort of  happy ending?

The acting is first-rate and Karloff, of course, is particularly effective as the religious maniac.  There is a poetic speech by a soldier who recalls the native maidens of Java -- of course, in a movie like this, when someone delivers himself of a poetic soliloquy a bullet to the head is not long in arriving to dispatch the poor fellow.  Curiously, the picture resembles some of Walter Hill's more desolate films, particularly the doomed patrol of National Guardsmen in Southern Comfort or the men besieged in the abandoned steel mill by a vicious, mostly invisible, mob of criminals in Trespass.  Hill's movies have more sociology in them, however, and more psychology and, of course, they're longer.  This movie is a distilled blast of deadly heat and rage.  As they used to say in capsule movie reviews in Parents magazine, a periodical that I pored-over for its ratings, the movie is "excellent of its kind."  It is, of course, what it is.