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9 out of 9 people found the following comment useful :- Riffraff Beau Geste., 24 November 2001 Author: dbdumonteil
"La bandera" is one of Julien Duvivier's most famous movies,but it seems a bit dated now.People who saw a version of "Beau Geste" cannot help but be struck by the similarities between the two stories:the "legion etrangere" ,as a way out when the police is hot on your heels.But whereas Beau Geste characters are noble,distinguished and chivalrous,Duvivier's hero and his mates are riffraff .The main character,played by Gabin ,is a good guy who committed an unpremeditated murder.The best part of the movie ,in my opinion,is the description of the fort,the barrack-rooms,the brothel .Here,the hero falls in love with a morrocan girl.There's the rub:she's played by Annabella (who was Tyrone Power's wife) who does not look like a North African,not at all,hence the necessity to make her up outrageously ,with ugly results.Like in "Beau Geste",the Arabs are the baddies,period.The courageous legionnaires always call them "les salopards" (the bastards).Duvivier achieves a real tour de force here:we never see the enemy when they attack the little fort!The poisoned water is a good dramatic idea and the final echoes Edith Piaf's song "le fanion de la légion".However,"la bandera",with its military stereotypes, does not equal Duvivier's other pre-war works "la fin du jour" ,"carnet de bal" , "la belle équipe" or "pépé le moko" ,the latter taking place in North Africa too.
6 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :- Birth of the Great Gabin, 12 January 2007 Author: Darroch Greer (darroch@sodbusterpictures.com) from Los Angeles, CA
If you like your meat salty and undercooked and have already tasted the treat that is Jean Gabin on film, this is about as early as you can step back in his career and still get a satisfying meal. He is marching toward his roguish best in this foreign legion romance, and the locations and decor are alluring, even in the faded print I have on DVD. I'm guessing this might be the first film in which he performs his slow burn to explosion, and MAN is this scene -- in close-up -- great! I don't know much about the beginnings of the poetic realist movement in French cinema, but Duvivier was one of its main practitioners, and this is a precursor to his great PEPE LE MOKO, where the powerful, rash man is driven to destruction by love. Though not as accomplished as the later Gabin romances PORT OF SHADOWS, THE HUMAN BEAST, or LE JOUR SE LEVE, LA BANDERA has its charms. In addition to a great role and performance by Gabin, there is a strong supporting cast including Raymond Aimos, Pierre Renoir, and the indispensable Gaston Modot. Recommended!
2 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :- ragged glory, 4 May 2009 Author: tomquick from illinois
I read La Bandera a year or two ago and finally hunted down the DVD. It's pretty faithful to Mac Orlan's text (Dumarchais? IMDb must be putting on airs). This adventure yarn is better than a lot of his pirate stories, but still doesn't rise much above an adolescent's fantasy of the Spanish Foreign Legion. I especially liked Gabin - young, athletic, dumb and out of control. The love story with Annabella seems tacked on and out of the blue, but it's true to the text it's taken from.The random stupidity of racing through the desert on Model A flatbeds after phantom snipers and gun-runners rings truest. This film is not on a humanist/moralist level with La Grand Illusion or Paths of Glory. It's an existential image of war-as-it-happens. The settings are stark, bright and always exposed. Sudden death is intertwined with the boredom of the barracks.
2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :- Legionnaire's Disease, 26 January 2007 Author: writers_reign from London, England
*** This comment may contain spoilers ***
Duvivier, Gabin, what's to be bad, right. W - e - e - ll, I have to say right off that this could have been better; Gabin had already appeared in an earlier Duvivier entry, Maria Chapledaine and within a couple of years he would score really heavily in Duvivier's Le Belle equipe and Pepe Le Moko - in fact you could argue that this is something of a dress rehearsal for Pepe given that in both films Gabin winds up in North Africa escaping a criminal past in France. Most of the faults are in the script. After a brief opening sequence in Paris - which anticipates Le Jour se leve with Gabin starting the film by ending a life - we switch abruptly - and for no satisfactory reason - to Barcelona where Gabin has his pocket picked with nothing more made of it. Then he enlists in the Spanish Foreign Legion and this is where the story really starts - again there is a foretaste of Pepe Le Moko in that a relentless cop, Robert Le Vigan, clearly mistaking Gabin for Jean Valjean, hounds him as he would be hounded in the Casbah. Top-billed Annabella doesn't really convince as an Arab dancing girl anymore than the instant attraction and marriage between her and Gabin. Another poster has pointed out the ludicrousness of having a well OUTSIDE the fort which makes it that much easier for the enemy to pick off the Legionnaires as they venture outside lest they dehydrate. On the other hand this IS a Duvivier film and Duvivier WAS a genius so there are moments to savour and as I've said before even an off-form Duvivier is light years better than Godard on the best day he ever had.
2 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :- An orientalist, colonialist misadventure, with one or two small redeeming features, 29 January 2006 Author: netwallah from The New Intangible College
A loose and baggy French orientalist romance, in which tough guy Pierre Gillieth (Jean Gabin) flees Paris after killing a man in the midst of a violent disagreement, winds up in Barcelona, where he decides to join Spain's Foreign Legion. He and a bunch of other colourful guys do so, and wind up somewhere in North Africa, wearing the tasseled caps of Spanish soldiers and hanging out in an exotic bar where the beautiful dancer Aisha (Annabella) and Gillieth fall in love instantaneously and they marry. She's sparky and irrepressible and he's solid and happy, until the scarily jolly bad guy, actually a cop, shows up and disturbs the escape plan. Fortunately, the Legion needs 24 volunteers to hold off an uprising, and nobody is expected to survive, and of course both Gillieth and the cop go, and everybody dies except the two of them, and just as the relief arrives, Gillieth takes the last bullet, leaving the cop, who has relented, to declare his friend's heroism and deliver the bad news to Aisha, who has a close-up in which her huge eyes fill with tears and her lips tremble and she turns away. The film is mostly awful, a nasty piece of European colonialism, complete with a merciless and faceless enemy. The scenery is interesting, the dialogue mostly tepid, Gabin predictable, leaving only Annabella to stand out, with her exotic dances and her filmy gowns and her enchanting smile for Gabin and the curious henna markings on her forehead and chin.
2 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :- Les Miserables meets Beau Geste, 13 May 2004 Author: patherto from Frostbite Falls, MN
I grabbed La Bandara because it reunited Jean Gabin and Julien Duvivier, whose Pepe le Moko is a noir masterpiece. I'll give it a few points because Gabin is in it, but the clumsy plot, cheap sets and the ludicrous Annabella making like an Arab princess put the film on my `to sell' shelf. If you watch it, you'll find yourself asking, why didn't the idiots build the fort *around* the well, instead of a deadly few yards away from it. And why use tin roofs in the middle of the desert? But by then the sheer perversity of contrivance that makes up the script should numb you to any further contemplation.
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