La Bandera (1935)

It was the immense popularity of P. C. Wren’s novel Beau Geste (first published in 1924) that led to a short-lived craze for legionnaire-themed films in the 1930s.  In the five years that preceded William A. Wellman’s celebrated film adaptation of Wren’s novel (with Gary Cooper in the title role), French cinema had pretty well minded out the genre, the best examples being  Jacques Feyder’s Le Grand jeu (1934), Jean Grémillon’s Gueule d’amour (1937) and, most famously, Julien Duvivier’s La Bandera.  Of these, Duvivier’s film is the one that panders most shamelessly to the contemporary fad for sand and uniforms, and for that reason it is far more valuable for what it says about public tastes and attitudes of its time than as a historical document.  This might also explain why it has not stood the test of time as well as the director’s other great films - Pépé le Moko (1937), La Belle équipe (1936), etc.

La Bandera marked an important milestone in the career of its lead actor, Jean Gabin.  Previously, Gabin had been associated with lightweight melodramas and comedies, populist ephemera that offered the actor little scope to develop his craft and even less chance of enduring fame.  When Gabin learned that Duvivier was planning to adapt Pierre Mac Orlan’s best selling novel La Bandera (published in 1931), he immediately saw an opportunity to create his own screen image and lobbied hard for the director to give him the part.  Duvivier agreed, but on condition that Gabin took the role of Pontius Pilate in his preceding film, his Biblical epic Golgotha (1935).  The star of that film, Robert Le Vigan, would also appear in La Bandera, playing the main supporting role.  For the part of the beguiling Moroccan girl, Aïscha, Duvivier cast one of the best-known French actresses of the decade, Annabella, whilst Pierre Renoir (the older brother of the famous director Jean Renoir) was given a substantial supporting role as an eye-patch-wearing legionary captain.   

La Bandera is a classic of French cinema but it has one serious failing - poor visual effects and an over-reliance on back-projection.  Lacking the resources of the Hollywood blockbuster, Duvivier had to make some painful compromises which undermine the film’s realism and weaken the power of its story.  Although a large chunk of the film was shot on location and gives a convincing taste of life in the foreign legion, much was shot in the studio, and the deadness and confined nature of the 1930s soundstage sets jar painfully with the spectacular location sequences.  The biggest eyesores are the pick-up studio shots, where a small group of actors are required to deliver a few crucial lines of dialogue in front of a risible back-projection.  Almost as bad is the sequence at the end of the film, where the legionnaires come under an aerial attack whilst holed up in a ramshackle defensive post.  Some more dire back-projection and a spate of painfully theatrical deaths does tend to dampen the drama and poignancy of the moment somewhat.  

Fortunately, the film has many strengths to compensate for its technical shortcomings.  Gabin’s performance alone virtually salvages the film and his portrayal offers a refreshing departure from the kind of bland heroism that tended to predominate in this kind of populist exotica.  The character that Gabin plays here is the one with which he would become most associated for the rest of the decade, that of the flawed working class hero who is propelled towards an inescapable tragic fate by forces beyond his control.  No other French actor of this era evokes the spirit of poetic realism more palpably than Gabin, so it was inevitable that after this stunning debut (all his previous films deserve to be forgotten) he would be invited by director Marcel Carné to play the doomed hero in Le Quai des brumes (1938) (another Mac Orlan adaptation) and Le Jour se lève (1939).

Whilst La Bandera is unquestionably Jean Gabin’s film, it is worth paying tribute to the contributions from his equally talented co-stars.  To today’s politically correct mindset, the sight of Annabella blacked up as a Moroccan girl is uncomfortable viewing at first but, like Gabin’s character, it is not long before we succumb to her charms.  With his penchant for playing double-dealing villains, Robert Le Vigan is a far more appropriate casting choice for the part of the duplicitous Lucas, and it is a testament to his skill as an actor that his portrayal is far from one-dimensional.  Just as we cannot unequivocally sympathise with Gabin’s character, neither can we entirely dislike Le Vigan’s - both characters are victims of the circumstances in which they find themselves.  Equally, Pierre Renoir transcends the familiar archetypal depiction of a legion officer and instead offers a far more nuanced and humane portrayal, with what is easily one of his finest screen performances.

Despite the technical limitations, Duvivier’s direction shows considerable flair and inventiveness and, in some ways, La Bandera is a surprisingly modern film for its time.  Whilst the director would in later years be written off as being too conventional, too unwilling to take risks, his early films show a surprising amount of experimentation and are far from being safe and conventional.  Duvivier’s inspired, even daring, use of camera motion in La Bandera bears this out admirably, prefiguring the ubiquitous handheld camerawork in today’s action films.  Another innovative (albeit slightly less successful) touch is an eerie dream sequence in which a montage of the main character’s memories are flashed onto a back-projection screen behind a recumbent Gabin, who is visibly tormented by his nightmare experience.  The darkness and cynicism that pervades most of Duvivier’s subsequent films can be felt in La Bandera, notably in its shocking opening and closing sequences (many of Duvivier’s films start with a punch and end with a kick).  The film may have been based on another author’s work, it may be slanted a little too obviously to a popular fad for legionary escapism, but for all that La Bandera is quintessential Duvivier, one of his most poignant meditations on man’s inability to take control of his own destiny and live the life he dreams of.  In Duvivier’s dark world, we are all instruments of Fate.

© James Travers 2002

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