Ten Tall Men

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.

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.

When in the brig on charges, Foreign Legion Sgt Mike Kincaid learns from a Riff prisoner of an impending attack on the outpost of Tarfa. In exchange for freedom, Kincaid and his men offer to run a series of distracting missions across the territory to keep the enemy busy until help can arrive. When he also learns that the leader of the Riffs, Caid Hussein, plans to marry Mahla, a girl from another tribe, in order to combine the two tribes against the French, Kincaid kidnaps her and flees into the desert – sparking anger and a chase from Hussein and a growing love for Kincaid in Mahla.

Featuring the chest and jaw of Burt Lancaster, this is just one of many foreign legion films that were so popular at one time in Hollywood. The plot is fairly enjoyable despite not having any great development or depth to it; it provides movement and direction sufficient to keep the audience watching without ever requiring much of them and for this reason it works. Of course this is not to say it does anything special, because it doesn't but it does do what you would expect from a foreign legion picture of the period – sand storms, heroic sacrifice, bare chested heroes, torture, attacks on forts and so on. Sadly with this territory comes the usual problems – standard acting, poor characters, obvious plotting, clunky romances and a lack of real audience engagement; for me these did limit the effectiveness of the film and just made it blend with an average crowd.

The acting is roundly average to match the material. Lancaster is sturdy and heroic with a good charisma and presence; hardly an interesting performance but appropriate for the genre I think. Support is not so good. Naturally Lawrence and Mohr are white actors in ethnic roles but the problem is that they don't perform that well on any level – Lawrence is unconvincing and Mohr is only acceptable as the bad guy. The rest of the cast provide some comic relief and generally give the film a rambling feel.

Overall this is a standard genre film, nothing more nor nothing less. Those who like the matinée feel of the foreign legion film will enjoy it as such but just don't expect it to do anything above and beyond the call of duty as the characters, plot, action and delivery are all fairly average and prevent the film from standing out from the crowd.

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

The phrase "they don't make them like this anymore" is often used in this CGI-infested age to describe extra-laden and 'authentic' Hollywood spectaculars of yesteryear but, frankly, watching this more modest, tongue-in-cheek Foreign Legion adventure, I was equally struck by just how old-fashioned (and refreshingly so) it all was – not that the sand storm sequence included here would pass muster with today's audiences! Anyhow, from the very start of the film, we have Burt Lancaster, Gilbert Roland and Kieron Moore disguised as, respectively, an Arab merchant and his two daughters!; legionnaires who are punished for daring to look twice at their Lieutenant's fiancée; an Arab chieftain who marries off his daughter to a rival Sheik to bring peace between their warring tribes and in a bid to rid their country of the 'French' infidels; the kidnapping of that same feisty daughter who, not only turns the heads of all her ten titular captors but, after several escape attempts, eventually steals the heart of tough guy Lancaster; etc. However, shot in lovely Technicolor and moving at a rapid pace, the film is an enjoyable ride through familiar territory; what was somewhat surprising, plot-wise, is that while much was made initially of the unloved Lieutenant (Stephen Bekassy) and his blonde girlfriend (Mari Blanchard), their characters virtually disappear once Lancaster's jailbird unit sets out on its mission! Despite its baffling ultra-rarity, the film is peopled by an interesting pool of talent both in front and behind the camera: Lancaster is in his third adventure flick; Gilbert Roland is his usual laid-back, womanizing Latino self; John Dehner the proverbial rotten apple in the group; George Tobias (perhaps thankfully) sacrifices himself early on; Nick Dennis and Mike Mazurki are among the rowdiest of the 'Ten'; Gerald Mohr adequately provides the required villainy; this was the second product from Norma Productions (which first partnered Lancaster with producer Harold Hecht); writer Roland Kibbee would much later go on to share directorial credit with Lancaster on THE MIDNIGHT MAN (1974; which I will be revisiting presently); associate producer Robert Aldrich would later direct Lancaster in four movies – including TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING (1977; which I'll be viewing for the first time during this ongoing Burt Lancaster tribute); and, most interestingly perhaps, this was multi-talented Willis Goldbeck's most notable directorial effort but, at least two of his screen writing credits are highly impressive indeed: Tod Browning's FREAKS (1932) and John Ford's THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962; Goldbeck's last film work)! One final note: after searching high and low for this film on account of a friend of mine who is a big Burt Lancaster fan (and recalls the star's brief sojourn in Malta in the 1970s), ironically, it was he who eventually provided me with a means to catch up with it via a surprisingly well-preserved VHS-sourced copy he acquired!