Mirage, me aunt
2021-03-27 04:29I have seen a fair number of pre-Code war pictures, but I've never seen one like The Lost Patrol (1934). Directed by John Ford and adapted by Dudley Nichols and Garrett Fort from Philip MacDonald's Patrol (1927), it turns colonial action into existential parable with the surreal minimalism of Werner Herzog, mad dogs and Englishmen in the key of survival horror. The title tells you what you're in for, even before the characters know it themselves. Let's just say nobody ends this thing shouting, "Θάλαττα! Θάλαττα!"
Like so much of the best horror, it starts like no such thing. A bugle summons the roll call of the credits as snake-charmer music whirls over shots of waving palms and trudging dunes. With the Arizona desert standing in for the equally hundred and ten in the shade south of the Tigris, a title card sets the apparent tone: "Mesopotamia 1917. While the World War raged in Europe, British troops were fighting in a far corner of the world. Small solitary patrols moved over the vast Mesopotamian desert, that seemed on fire with the sun. The molten sky gloated over them. The endless desert wore the blank look of death. Yet these men marched on without a murmur, fighting an unseen Arab enemy who always struck in the dark—like a relentless ghost!" We are primed for an adventure at the edges of empire, the thin khaki line leading on the red ink of the map. And then with an unimportant little squiff of a sound out of the rolling emptiness of sand and sky, the lieutenant who kept all his instructions in his head pitches to the ground, sniper-drilled clean by daylight, and just like that the eleven survivors of this little detachment of the King's Own Hussars are adrift in the desert with no direction, lit. or fig. "A fine thing, ain't it? A patrol patrolling and not knowing where they're at! And the orders locked up in that dead kid back there." The problem of water is solved by a lucky stumble onto an oasis where dates can stand in for rations as long as the men can stomach them, but ammunition doesn't grow on trees and the loss of the horse-lines overnight establishes the logistics of their position with brutal simplicity. So long as the soldiers stick to the shelter of the small, crumbling mosque and its immediate perimeter, they're safe, but beyond the cordon of the palms—or above it—they can be picked off with impunity by an unknown number of irregulars waiting just out of sight of the shallow bowl of the dunes. They have no means of calling for help or even estimating the strength of their enemy. All they can do is hold out as long as they can; all the movie can do is observe how they behave as they're whittled down from the numbers of discipline and camaraderie to that bone of a question, how you face your dying. Who by sentiment and who by irony, who by glory and who by faith, who by compassion and who by defiance, who by hatred and who by damned bad luck. So many by empire, which always seems to be calling.
Part of the difference of The Lost Patrol is that while I recognize its absurdity, futility, and anger from other war movies of its generation, I have never seen another one set during the Mesopotamian campaign, which has the dubiously timeless distinction of being the most commercial theater of its war. The soldiers of the lost patrol haven't just been sent to die for the honor of king and country, though it never does to let the side down where the subcontinent might see. They are protecting British oil interests in the Middle East. The Ottomans didn't even consider the region strategically significant enough to map fully and here charges in the groundwork for the Cairo Conference and all those land wars in Asia that worked out as far back as Carrhae, classically where they shouldn't be and trying not to suspect it. It opens the film up to question not just the war but the imperial mechanisms behind it, and however these misgivings ghost around the edges of the men's awareness, the audience gets their drift. Gentleman-ranker Brown (Reginald Denny) calls, "Selamat tinggal!" when he wants his companions to lay off and reminisces about the golden-skinned girls of Malaya with a tropical nostalgia that wouldn't be out of place in "Mandalay," but a love of Kipling is explicitly the death of green recruit Pearson (Douglas Walton), chasing the colonial romance of adventuring in exotic climes until it catches him with a knife on sentry-go. Old sweats like MacKay (Paul Hanson) and Quincannon (J.M. Kerrigan) are no more armored by their cynical service—reminded of the time he was broken in Poona for "being drunk and disorderly, setting fire to your tent, and appearing on the parade ground with nothing on but your drawers and your topi," the latter reproves the former, "That's a dirty lie. I did not set fire to me tent"—than new Tommies by their escapism or patriotism, such as sends homesick Hale (Billy Bevan) scrambling up a palm tree from which he'll gain just enough vantage to spot the barrel-glint of the rifle that will kill him. The stiff upper lip receives the script's finest and most awful moment of black comedy when a reconnaissance pilot (Howard Wilson) alights at the edge of the oasis as if straight off a recruitment poster, impossibly fresh-faced and waving cheerily in the face of shouted warnings, Biggles to the life. He gets five steps from his crate with his swagger stick under his arm and crumples, shot straight through the silly ass: "I say—" His clever flying machine bakes uselessly in the sun, the symbol of science and civilization and a war that fielded cavalry charges against chemical weapons. Even the hard-bitten Sergeant (Victor McLaglen, in real life a veteran of the Mesopotamian campaign) finds himself reviling their unseen enemies in one breath and wondering with the next, "What's the war mean to them? Might just as well be friendly. Some are. Some ain't." His question goes unanswered, but into its silence rushes the terrible genius of the possibility that we aren't watching a war story, really, at all. Maybe the snipers are in the employ of the Central Powers. Maybe they just don't like the British off their own bat. We never find out and it doesn't change the feeling that simply by entering the desert, these soldiers have drawn their deaths to themselves, like sun-dazed Abelson (Sammy Stein) shooting at something never shown us in the stretch and shimmer of the dunes and receiving in answer the bullet of the sniper who took a fix on him from the sound. Like the men scared and second-guessing, you find yourself tracing the many-worlds of this clusterfire farther and farther back, trying to find a point where the patrol might not have been doomed. Once you've passed Jacky Fisher, the Industrial Revolution, and the East India Company, you might as well head for the stratigraphy of the Cretaceous. Too late. "Gwendolyn is napoo."
( Speak up, man. Where's your section? )
I would love to know the antecedents of this film beyond its source novel and whether it really is such a species of one, because right now it looks to me like the taproot text for everything from The Flight of the Phoenix (1956) to Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, 1972) to Predator (1987) to Neither Heaven nor Earth (Ni le ciel ni la terre, 2015) to Dunkirk (2017) to The Terror (2018). If it reminds me of any other John Ford, it's my beloved, equally intimate and elemental The Long Voyage Home (1940), but structurally, tonally, so much of it feels decades later. I suppose once again it is not that the pre-Codes were so prescient, but that the Code itself retarded the emotional growth of the movies for so long. This one's for the grown-ups, and not because of the body count. I had thought there was nothing notable about the cinematography by Harold Wenstrom, but he manages to make the vast spaces of a desert look panickily claustrophobic. The score by Max Steiner is interwoven with traditional tunes and motifs that sound like them, as might be running through the men's heads as they tell their stories and die. The Lost Patrol doesn't go as far as some of its descendants and I wouldn't expect it to, but it does care about the myth-making and limits of empires and men; it cares palpably about the small human gestures which mean so much and so little at the same time. Early on we hear the warning, "Stop looking at the moon or you'll be seeing ghosts," but in the end that's all we're left with, late-daylit. A shame that dying in someone else's desert hasn't gone out of fashion in the last hundred years. This garden brought to you by my actual backers at Patreon.
Like so much of the best horror, it starts like no such thing. A bugle summons the roll call of the credits as snake-charmer music whirls over shots of waving palms and trudging dunes. With the Arizona desert standing in for the equally hundred and ten in the shade south of the Tigris, a title card sets the apparent tone: "Mesopotamia 1917. While the World War raged in Europe, British troops were fighting in a far corner of the world. Small solitary patrols moved over the vast Mesopotamian desert, that seemed on fire with the sun. The molten sky gloated over them. The endless desert wore the blank look of death. Yet these men marched on without a murmur, fighting an unseen Arab enemy who always struck in the dark—like a relentless ghost!" We are primed for an adventure at the edges of empire, the thin khaki line leading on the red ink of the map. And then with an unimportant little squiff of a sound out of the rolling emptiness of sand and sky, the lieutenant who kept all his instructions in his head pitches to the ground, sniper-drilled clean by daylight, and just like that the eleven survivors of this little detachment of the King's Own Hussars are adrift in the desert with no direction, lit. or fig. "A fine thing, ain't it? A patrol patrolling and not knowing where they're at! And the orders locked up in that dead kid back there." The problem of water is solved by a lucky stumble onto an oasis where dates can stand in for rations as long as the men can stomach them, but ammunition doesn't grow on trees and the loss of the horse-lines overnight establishes the logistics of their position with brutal simplicity. So long as the soldiers stick to the shelter of the small, crumbling mosque and its immediate perimeter, they're safe, but beyond the cordon of the palms—or above it—they can be picked off with impunity by an unknown number of irregulars waiting just out of sight of the shallow bowl of the dunes. They have no means of calling for help or even estimating the strength of their enemy. All they can do is hold out as long as they can; all the movie can do is observe how they behave as they're whittled down from the numbers of discipline and camaraderie to that bone of a question, how you face your dying. Who by sentiment and who by irony, who by glory and who by faith, who by compassion and who by defiance, who by hatred and who by damned bad luck. So many by empire, which always seems to be calling.
Part of the difference of The Lost Patrol is that while I recognize its absurdity, futility, and anger from other war movies of its generation, I have never seen another one set during the Mesopotamian campaign, which has the dubiously timeless distinction of being the most commercial theater of its war. The soldiers of the lost patrol haven't just been sent to die for the honor of king and country, though it never does to let the side down where the subcontinent might see. They are protecting British oil interests in the Middle East. The Ottomans didn't even consider the region strategically significant enough to map fully and here charges in the groundwork for the Cairo Conference and all those land wars in Asia that worked out as far back as Carrhae, classically where they shouldn't be and trying not to suspect it. It opens the film up to question not just the war but the imperial mechanisms behind it, and however these misgivings ghost around the edges of the men's awareness, the audience gets their drift. Gentleman-ranker Brown (Reginald Denny) calls, "Selamat tinggal!" when he wants his companions to lay off and reminisces about the golden-skinned girls of Malaya with a tropical nostalgia that wouldn't be out of place in "Mandalay," but a love of Kipling is explicitly the death of green recruit Pearson (Douglas Walton), chasing the colonial romance of adventuring in exotic climes until it catches him with a knife on sentry-go. Old sweats like MacKay (Paul Hanson) and Quincannon (J.M. Kerrigan) are no more armored by their cynical service—reminded of the time he was broken in Poona for "being drunk and disorderly, setting fire to your tent, and appearing on the parade ground with nothing on but your drawers and your topi," the latter reproves the former, "That's a dirty lie. I did not set fire to me tent"—than new Tommies by their escapism or patriotism, such as sends homesick Hale (Billy Bevan) scrambling up a palm tree from which he'll gain just enough vantage to spot the barrel-glint of the rifle that will kill him. The stiff upper lip receives the script's finest and most awful moment of black comedy when a reconnaissance pilot (Howard Wilson) alights at the edge of the oasis as if straight off a recruitment poster, impossibly fresh-faced and waving cheerily in the face of shouted warnings, Biggles to the life. He gets five steps from his crate with his swagger stick under his arm and crumples, shot straight through the silly ass: "I say—" His clever flying machine bakes uselessly in the sun, the symbol of science and civilization and a war that fielded cavalry charges against chemical weapons. Even the hard-bitten Sergeant (Victor McLaglen, in real life a veteran of the Mesopotamian campaign) finds himself reviling their unseen enemies in one breath and wondering with the next, "What's the war mean to them? Might just as well be friendly. Some are. Some ain't." His question goes unanswered, but into its silence rushes the terrible genius of the possibility that we aren't watching a war story, really, at all. Maybe the snipers are in the employ of the Central Powers. Maybe they just don't like the British off their own bat. We never find out and it doesn't change the feeling that simply by entering the desert, these soldiers have drawn their deaths to themselves, like sun-dazed Abelson (Sammy Stein) shooting at something never shown us in the stretch and shimmer of the dunes and receiving in answer the bullet of the sniper who took a fix on him from the sound. Like the men scared and second-guessing, you find yourself tracing the many-worlds of this clusterfire farther and farther back, trying to find a point where the patrol might not have been doomed. Once you've passed Jacky Fisher, the Industrial Revolution, and the East India Company, you might as well head for the stratigraphy of the Cretaceous. Too late. "Gwendolyn is napoo."
( Speak up, man. Where's your section? )
I would love to know the antecedents of this film beyond its source novel and whether it really is such a species of one, because right now it looks to me like the taproot text for everything from The Flight of the Phoenix (1956) to Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, 1972) to Predator (1987) to Neither Heaven nor Earth (Ni le ciel ni la terre, 2015) to Dunkirk (2017) to The Terror (2018). If it reminds me of any other John Ford, it's my beloved, equally intimate and elemental The Long Voyage Home (1940), but structurally, tonally, so much of it feels decades later. I suppose once again it is not that the pre-Codes were so prescient, but that the Code itself retarded the emotional growth of the movies for so long. This one's for the grown-ups, and not because of the body count. I had thought there was nothing notable about the cinematography by Harold Wenstrom, but he manages to make the vast spaces of a desert look panickily claustrophobic. The score by Max Steiner is interwoven with traditional tunes and motifs that sound like them, as might be running through the men's heads as they tell their stories and die. The Lost Patrol doesn't go as far as some of its descendants and I wouldn't expect it to, but it does care about the myth-making and limits of empires and men; it cares palpably about the small human gestures which mean so much and so little at the same time. Early on we hear the warning, "Stop looking at the moon or you'll be seeing ghosts," but in the end that's all we're left with, late-daylit. A shame that dying in someone else's desert hasn't gone out of fashion in the last hundred years. This garden brought to you by my actual backers at Patreon.
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