La Bandera (film)

"La Bandera" is an episodic film of 1935 directed by Julien Duvivier which was based on a novel by Pierre Mac Orlan. It typifies the genre of a Foreign Legion tale, and introduced the French actor Jean Gabin.

Plot

Gabin plays Pierre Gilieth, a Frenchman who early one morning in Paris is taking his drunken girlfriend Jacqueline, played by Claude May, down the street when a man comes out of the shadows and stabs her. "It's blood!" she says, and as she collapses the camera pans upward to the street sign which reads "Rue St-Vincent". The film cuts to his peering through Venetian blinds in Barcelona. A fat detective follows him around town, and his pocket gets picked by fellow Frenchmen.

Now at the end of his resources, having been rejected as a sailor on a merchant ship, he decides join the Spanish Foreign Legion on seeing a placard. The story is just before the Spanish Civil War, as the top of the placard reads "Spanish Republic" and "Law of 17 July 1934". Many of his fellow legionnaires have joined from destitution (and their pay will be five Pesetas), but the Frenchman Fernando Lucas, played by Robert Le Vigan, has money not only for cigarettes but for barhopping, saying that the money was sent by his mother and that the reason for his joining the legion was his desertion from the French Army. But Gilieth is wary of him, and when Lucas drops some sort of identification card which he quickly hides, he tries to pick his pocket in the night to read it but fails.

Thus Gilieth feeds a newspaper clipping that he had been carrying around which announced a 50,000 Franc reward for the capture of the culprit of the "Crime of Rue St-Vincent" to the swine in the base pen. He beats up Lucas. As the "bandera", or company-size unit of legionnaires is ready to move south, Gilieth is able to convince his captain to have Lucas remain. Indeed, once the "bandera" departs, the detective from Barcelona comes and talks to Lucas.

Gilieth rather abruptly marries Aisha la Slaoui, a native who is portrayed by Annabella in "brownface" with marks on her forehead and chin. Their wedding ceremony involves their mutually making a cut in their mate's forearms and licking blood from it.

But an uprising needs to be put down, for which task both Gilieth's and Lucas' banderas will be required. Upon his arrival, Lucas informs Captain Weller, played by Pierre Renoir, that he doesn't have to take part in combat because he is a police spy as shown on his identification card. The captain is furious, and tells him to leave the men alone, and that as he is not a real legionnaire he should depart.

Wishing to get away from Lucas, Gilieth plans to escape with her to her people in the south, to become one of them, once he can deal with Lucas; until that time, he commands her to lie about her love for him and to entertain Lucas, even doing whatever he asks until he tells her who he really is. Lucas tries to get Aisha to leave Gilieth and be his woman. Gilieth confronts them together and tells Aisha to spit in Lucas' eye. She does. Then he tells Lucas to come with him outside to settle this like men.

There he admits that he killed the man who stabbed his girlfriend, and tells that he has given up his notion of escape with Aisha. Lucas attacks him with a knife but Gilieth is able to wrest it from his hand. He then shows two cartridges, telling him that he will first shoot Lucas and then himself during combat which will take place soon.

No legionnaire volunteers to be one of the twenty-four who are to hold a small outpost in advance of the main force until the captain says that he will command it himself. Immediately they all do, except Lucas, who pauses a moment. The sergeant then picks the first twelve on the left and on the right, which includes the main cast. On being notified that he's going to fight, Aisha gives Lucas a coin, one of her jewelry pieces, to remember her by.

The scene which follows has many of the stereotypes of this "genre", of which the most important is that no Moroccan combatant is ever depicted; they are presented as supremely concealed snipers. Plot elements involve poisoned water and men who try to get to a safe supply but who only get shot for their valor. A fighter plane appears and several of the unit get shot either by “friendly fire” or, as the legionnaires surmise, by an enemy pilot. The only two who remain are Gilieth and Lucas as the main force charges up the hill, their machine guns blazing to sweep the enemy from their positions.

Yet at this moment of victory, Gilieth gets shot by a sniper, leaving Lucas to answer the roll call of the twenty-four with "Killed in action" for all except for Gilieth, who was "Promoted on the battlefield to corporal and killed in action". He himself is "Present". Returning to Aisha, he gives her back her coin, saying that Gilieth died remembering her.

External links

* [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0026095/ IMDB listing for La Bandera]