Desert Legion

While searching in the Algerian desert for a bandit, a Foreign Legion patrol is led into an ambush. The sole survivor is Captain Lartal who, after being wounded, recovers consciousness to find someone has taken him to the gates of the Legion post.

In solving the mystery, Legionnaire Alan Ladd discovers a lost city, the beautiful Arlene Dahl and a villainous Richard Conte.

Desert Legion is a romantic desert fantasy (photographed in Technicolor) with a dreamy feel like Lost Horizion. The fabled city of Mardala is sort of a shangri-la, a place where a red-haired Beauty lives. This is quite an entertaining picture and as I have a hankering for for old-fashioned predictable outdoor action movies with a cartoon-like villain and a heroic stalwart hero amidst the desert landscape. It can be a bit too languid in pace, and needed a pick me up mid-way, but it's entertaining on the whole. There's a tense spear throwing sequence. It ends with an exciting action finale.

Desert Legion was Alan Ladd's second film after leaving his nurturing studio of Paramount. It was hoped he would get better parts by his agent and wife Sue Carol. But sad to say this was the run of film he got.

It's a typical action potboiler with Alan Ladd in the French Foreign Legion on patrol and in pursuit of a local Algerian bandit who no one can seem to locate. On patrol one day after a couple of raiders, Ladd and his patrol are surprised by reinforcements who come from out of nowhere and everyone is killed, but Ladd. He wakes up and finds desert princess Arlene Dahl nursing him back to health. The next thing he knows he's back at Legion headquarters with this wild tale of a lost city in the desert.

Ever since Universal made Arabian Nights with Jon Hall and Maria Montez they had these middle eastern sets and so you could depend year after year on one or two pictures with that setting. So on this one shot deal Alan Ladd got to do Desert Legion with those same sets.

Maureen O'Hara in her memoirs said no one thought she was more ludicrous cast in these films as a redheaded Middle Eastern princess. But I will say that Desert Legion did provide some explanation why redheaded Swede Arlene Dahl was in North Africa.

Had this film been done a decade earlier it might have made great material for a serial. It has all the ingredients and you just write a bunch cliffhanger semi-climaxes and it would have done well.

Looking like he's having a great old time is Akim Tamiroff as Ladd's sidekick who deserts with him to find this lost city. Richard Conte however just doesn't come off as an Arab.

Desert Legion is the kind of film Alan Ladd should have been done with at his stage of life and career.

The legion étrangère has always been a topic that makes people dream.Lots and lots of movies were made ,not only in France.Here,the most famous are probably Duvivier's "la bandera" and Jacques Feyder's "le grand jeu".Twas also one of Edith Piaf's favorite subjects of song (le fanion de la légion,mon légionnaire). This is a pretty ridiculous movie.At the beginning,I was thinking it was a remake of Pierre Benoit's "l'atlantide"(two most famous versions being Pabst 's (1932)with Brigitte Helm-Metropolis- ,and Edgar G Ulmer's (1963))It was certainly influenced big-time by Benoit's book.The blond officer lost in the desert who's taken in by a beautiful lady from a mysterious city of the sands,we've seen that movie before. After,Joseph Pevney and Pierre Benoit go different ways.THe director,abetted by unimaginative scriptwriters ,turn what could have been a trip into the fantastic element,à la "thief of Bagdad" or "lost horizons",into the run-of -the- mill hero-heroine-villain.The rest is so predictable :you can see where the characters are up to from a mile off."Desert Legion" fills its quota of treasons,duels,torture,and glamour.The setting is not impressive, a two-bit cardboard desert city,and for good measure,exotic dances.

French Foreign Legion Captain Paul Lartal (Alan Ladd) travels to the hidden city of Madara in Northern Africa after a request for help he receives from local princess Morjana (Arlene Dahl). He met the woman under mysterious circumstances after his regiment suffered a deadly ambush at he hands of Omar Ben Calif's bandit gang. Lartel is convinced that Calif is in Madara under an undercover personality.

"Desert Legion" is an unpretentious adventure film with a fine cast, great color, acceptable settings and lots of action.

Alan Ladd doesn't add much to his carrier with his movie but it doesn't hurt it either. Arlene Dahl was made for Technicolor and plays her part fine. But perhaps the most interesting role is that of Richard Conte as Crito in one of the usual villain characters he played decently so often (no surprise there). The spears duel between Ladd and Conte is a highlight of the film most of all because of its originality back in 1953.

Light entertainment but enjoyable if you like adventure films.

Another trip to the ex-village sexton/film buff yielded a pleasant evening of movie talk and viewing – in this particular case, the former being more rewarding than the latter in view of the fact that the 25-year old print of the obscure Alan Ladd vehicle DESERT LEGION was so washed out as to belie its having been originally shot in "glorious Technicolor"! Indeed, the only color scheme prevalent throughout the screening was a reddish hue that, more than anything else, is a tell-tale sign that a celluloid print is well past its "best before" date. But, as if that was not disheartening enough, the film kept sticking in the projector, making the image jump up and down, requiring our host to make his expert manual interventions a handful of times. For better or worse, the film we were watching was a routine star actioner that even I was unaware of before seeing its worn poster proudly displayed during the latest exhibition of such rare items held regularly for the public by our host. The script requires the viewer to accept diminutive Ladd as a formidable Legionnaire who possesses the only credentials to capture a renegade Arab rebel (played by one of the least likely actors suited for this role, Richard Conte!) that has been preying on their sentries and save the mythical Shangri-La-like community of Medara, buried deep within the desert, from his evil clutches. For support, Ladd only has his old, tale-spinning buddy Akim Tamiroff, while the inevitable love interest is provided by Arlene Dahl – with Universal clearly believing that the audience would not have anyone but another statuesque Arabic redhead (a' la Maureen O'Hara) for a leading lady!! Despite the intermittent sprinkling of intriguing ideas – Ladd is abducted by the mysterious Dahl and taken to her hidden abode in clear imitation of Pierre Benoit's much-filmed "L'Atlantide"; the two confrontations between Ladd and Conte are both unconventional in nature and setting: in the arena with the two contestants sharing one spear between them and, the climactic one, atop a mountain's rock-face – this particular mix, unfortunately, fails to rise to any particularly memorable or even satisfactory level…which makes the possibility of a future revisit via superior elements highly improbable!