Lost Command
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Movie Reviews of Lost Command
Movie Review: A cut above
Summary: 4 Stars
Lost Command was a cut above the usual '60's flicks. The post-WW2 French empire was in decline - Indochina to Algeria. After viewing this show, one could see why the rebellions were inevitable. Even the French political leaders would give the go ahead for the military to use whatever force necessary to get the job done quickly - then threaten the men following their orders. The soldiers were a mixed lot - levels of brutality and mercy varied. Anthony Quinn did a remarkable job in his role - a nice change from Zorba the Greek type characters. While not having the dazzling visual techniques of recent war movies, this was entertaining and demonstrated the dirty business required in fighting insurrections - and the futility. All in all, well done!Movie Review: A Gem
Summary: 4 Stars
This an extremly well edited film. It is the only movie that I know of that covers this period. I first saw it when I was a grunt in Vietnam. All of my fellow combat Marines loved it!Movie Review: Good movie
Summary: 4 Stars
We have enjoyed watching this movie. It is well done. It respects the history and the actors are very good.Movie Review: Ambitious but compromised
Summary: 3 Stars
Mark Robson's ambitious Lost Command is one of those films that has all the right intentions and a formidable array of talent but doesn't quite get it right. It's bold subject matter for a Hollywood epic - the increasingly unwinnable French war to hold onto its colony in Algeria after their humiliating defeat at Dien Bien Phu led to them losing Vietnam, something even the French didn't want to see movies about - but in its need to make an unpalatable war palatable to a mainstream audience it never quite gets the balance right.
Things start promisingly enough with the French flag being blown up and paratroopers landing in a minefield at Dien Bien Phu (a scene largely thrown away behind the opening credits) before being captured by the Vietnaminh and being released in disgrace. His regiment disbanded, Anthony Quinn's Colonel Raspeguy, a working class Basque soldier who worked his way up through the ranks but is still regarded as a useful animal and an even more useful scapegoat by his superiors, finds himself without a command unless he's willing to take a brigade of outcasts to Algeria to end the insurrection by any means necessary. Naturally, once there he discovers that the leader of the rebels is one of his former paratroopers while his two Captains take very different approaches to dealing with the locals as the atrocities on both sides start to escalate.
Knowing his right-wing political views, Alain Delon is curious casting as the conscience of the film, the unit's military historian, though he has more to work with than Maurice Ronet's brutally pragmatic moral opposite number, but, not being able to tempt Omar Sharif to play the role, there's a disastrous bit of miscasting as the Algerian paratrooper-turned-FLN leader: George Segal with cocoa beans smeared on his face doing what sounds like Peter Sellers' Indian doctor routine before veering off into a bad Welsh accent. Still known as a dramatic actor at the time, he does his best but he's no more convincing as an Arab than Sharif was as a Nazi in Night of the Generals. You can only guess what Tunisian-born-and-raised Claudia Cardinale thought as his onscreen sister...
As a retelling of then recent events, it covers most of the bases - the `Lizards' torture suspects and kill villagers in reprisals (albeit offscreen) while the rebels use women to bomb soft civilian targets - and it ends on a note of moral abdication from one character and a note of solidarity for the rebels from another (more in sympathetic thought than deed), but it's a film that seems as torn as Delon's character as to quite what it wants to be or believe in, falling into a no man's land as part old-fashioned studio war movie, part underdeveloped political/moral drama. The Spanish locations don't always convince, especially with the desert standing in for the jungles of Vietnam (complete with Cantonese-speaking Burt Kwouk as a Vietnaminh officer) while Franz Waxman's score veers more to the Spanish bullrings than the French legions or Algiers casbah. It's certainly a brave film to make in 1966, but compared to the power and immediacy of Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers that's not quite enough to make it more than just worth a look.
Movie Review: Lost in Shadow
Summary: 3 Stars
This movie was shot in Spain, and it was being filmed just before the classic Gillo Pontecorvo behemoth THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1966). It was released first but it has been overshadowed by the more popular epic for over 40 years. One of the problems it had was that the actual history regarding the Algerian fight for independence received the "Hollywood" treatment--complete with well-known actors and a "Love Story".
THE LOST COMMAND (1966) was directed by Mark Robson, who had given us several powerful films 20 years earlier, like CHAMPION (1949), HOME OF THE BRAVE (1949), BRIGHT VICTORY (1951) and THE HARDER THEY FALL (1956). The year before COMMAND, he directed the fine war film, VON RYAN'S EXPRESS (1965). Robson, in the twilight of his career directed mainstream fluff like THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1967), and EARTHQUAKE (1974).
Anthony Quinn played Lt. Col. Pierre Raspeguy, a Basque peasant who rose in the ranks to a commander of paratroopers. We are introduced to him just as the Viet Minh are overrunning his company at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in Indo-China; soon to become Viet Nam. Emerging from a POW camp, Quinn loses his command.. We are treated to a back story scene as Raspeguy returned home for a visit to his family and his village. We see more than a trace of Alexis Zorba during those scenes. Soon in France, he is romancing a widowed Countess de Clairfons (Michelle Morgan), who cannot seem to resist his earthiness. Through her aristocratic intervention, he is offered another command of paratroopers, and sent into the fray in Algeria.
Quinn was able to gather many of his old troops around him, including Alain Delon and Maurice Ronet. After arriving in Algeria, Raspeguy discovered that his primary advesary was a former officer of his in Indo-China, Lt. Mahidi (George Segal). Segal had to struggle a bit with the dark pancake make-up and the French accent, but generally he was effective. Claudia Cardinale played Aisha, Mahidi's sister, providing the love interest for Delon. She, too, although woefully miscast provided adequate eye candy.
There are three large scale battle scenes in the movie, and they are handled very spectacularly. When the 10th Paratrooper Battalion arrived early one morning in the city of Algiers, declaring martial law -there are marvelous echoes and similarities to Pontecorvo's film. LOST COMMAND does serve as an interesting companion piece to BATTLE OF ALGIERS, for it deals a lot with the battles in the mountains, where historically much of the revolt actually happened. Then the FLN took to the city streets, and their terrorist bombings cajoled the international press into covering their struggle.