Ten Tall Men

This film dates from Burt Lancaster's swashbuckling period when he was trying to inherit Errol Flynn's mantle as Hollywood's leading action hero. "The Flame and the Arrow", for example, is a disguised remake of Flynn's greatest hit, "The Adventures of Robin Hood", with the story transferred from England to Italy, and "The Crimson Pirate" is in the same tradition as Flynn's "The Sea Hawk".

It has long been an Anglo-American jibe that the Foreign Legion is the greatest fighting force in the French Army "because it has no Frenchmen in it", and the exploits of the Legion have always been popular with film-makers. Although many Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were opposed to European colonialism, such opinions were rarely reflected in Hollywood films- "The Hurricane" from the late thirties is an exception- and "Ten Tall Men", which is set during the Rif War of the 1920s, takes a firmly pro- French position. Morocco was still a French colony in 1951, and the producers may have thought that an anti-colonialist stance would not go down well in the French market.

The film has something in common with the Gregory Peck Western "Only the Valiant" which appeared in the same year. In that film Peck plays a US cavalry officer who commands a small force tasked with holding off the Indians for long enough to allow reinforcements to reach a garrison threatened with attack. Here Lancaster plays Mike Kincaid, an American- born sergeant with the Legion, who commands a small force (the "ten tall men" of the title) tasked with holding off the Rifs for long enough to allow reinforcements to reach the threatened city of Tarfa. In both cases the small hand-picked force is largely recruited from the inmates of a military prison. (Kincaid himself has been imprisoned for striking an obnoxious Lieutenant in defence of a lady).

The main difference is that "Only the Valiant" took this scenario seriously, whereas "Ten Tall Men" is, by and large, a comedy, or at least a comedy/action hybrid. (In common with a number of films which tried to combine humour with adventure, the Bob Hope vehicle "The Paleface" being another example, there is a surprisingly high death toll). As part of his plan to foil the raid on Tarfa, Kincaid kidnaps Mahla, the beautiful fiancée the of villainous Rif leader Caid Hussein and, inevitably, the two end up falling in love. (It seems to be a widely-held belief in Hollywood that the quickest way to a woman's heart is to kidnap her). Equally inevitably, Mahla is played by an American actress, Jody Lawrance, rather than a Moroccan one.

"Ten Tall Men" is a better film than "Only the Valiant", which even Peck acknowledged as one of his weakest, precisely because the latter treats an implausible scenario seriously, whereas the former takes a very similar scenario and treats it in a more light-hearted manner. As a swashbuckling hero Lancaster was not in the same league as Flynn- he was to achieve more later in his career when he reinvented himself as a serious actor- but here he is charismatic enough to keep the film watchable, with the aid of some well-handled action sequences. 6/10

This is a great movie for just watching and enjoying. No overwhelming drama, no thought to guess the plot or who-done-it, just good old fashioned entertainment. Burt Lancaster shines in a way only he can. The jokes are funny, lines memorable (mamasita, what a rap she gave me... Khassein is a lump of evil smelling goat cheese) the girls are pretty and it rolls along as you "listen to the squeaking of the little mouse". Just enjoy yourself, if you miss a few minutes in the kitchen it won't throw you off the plot. It's great to see REAL actors displaying their craft in a time period when talent was more important than looks, bra size and CGI. If you want drama, go find Wuthering Heights and get your fill.

In those last years before the French finally cleared out of North Africa, Foreign Legion films seem to have been popular with the movie going public. Ten Tall Men is a typical example of such a film. Even though ultimately and soon the French would be driven out of the area the Foreign Legion patrolled before the decade ended.

Burt Lancaster is a sergeant of American background in the Foreign Legion and typically we don't know what drove him to join. His two corporals are Gilbert Roland and Kieron Moore and a bit of lese majeste involving Mari Blanchard got these guys some stockade time. Still they and others break out and hear of both an impending attack by the Riffs while the regiment is away on their post. It will be at the conclusion of a marriage between Jody Laurence the daughter of one sheik and Gerald Mohr another sheik. Once these tribes are united nothing stands in their way.

What to do but kidnap the daughter and hold her until the regiment returns. That proves easier said than done and once done a lot harder to tame this desert wildcat. But Burt with that smile and those pecs is the guy for the job.

None of the players in Ten Tall Men took this one real seriously and neither should we. Ten Tall Men is like a combination of The Desert Song and The Road To Morocco without songs.

Don't believe me, well check out the end and you can't tell me The Road To Morocco didn't inspire that.

An impressive 38 year old Burt Lancaster appears in this mediocre film. He was a perfectionist when it came to working with ambitious amateurs who had more aspiration than talent. Although there is no one film that I like about Lancaster, he was impressive at 38.

Breezy Technicolor hokum from Burt Lancaster's second phase between his first few films as a tough guy and his later work as a serious actor as a grinning, thigh-slapping action hero leaping across the sceen as the fifties answer to Douglas Fairbanks; well matched by Jody Lawrence's spunky young heroine

When I originally encountered this film on TV aged about ten when I took it all very seriously, only later realising George Tobias's constant refrain "My father, my mother, my brothers, my sisters" was actually a running gag.