March or Die (Dick Richards, 1977)

 

Dick Richards’ March or Die is something of an oddity – a British-financed French foreign legion picture made in the late seventies, its cast encompassing Hollywood respectability (Gene Hackman), the European mainstream (Terence Hill) and arthouse class (Catherine Deneuve, Max von Sydow). The film reflects these competing resonances, with Hackman’s character often lost in dark brooding built on brutally hard-won life lessons and a keen sense of political realities, while Hill’s provides doses of exuberant anti-authoritarianism, and Deneuve (whose character is an object of fascination to all the male principals) embodies the tangled romantic perspectives that have always accompanied tales of the legion (in a nice touch, an old woman who spends the day wordlessly lost in her thoughts might be, on the basis of what we’re told of her back story, Marlene Dietrich’s character from von Sternberg’s Morocco). The core plot engages critically with the imperatives of colonialism, with Hackman’s Major Foster unenthusiastically drafted to protect an archaeological dig led by von Sydow’s Professor Marneau, knowing that the Arabs view the project (the proceeds of which will be shipped back to France) as mere plunder and that if things go bad, his men will be hopelessly outnumbered: when this proves correct, it makes for some truly eye-filling scenes of conflict, with the Arab leader El Krim unleashing wave after wave of fresh attacks on the wretched soldiers. The fact that El Krim is played by Ian Holm (with a crime-boss-like veneer of philosophical brutality) sums up some the film’s limitations; it’s also evident that those separate strands I mentioned don’t always easily coalesce (Hill’s breeziness belongs in a different filmic universe from Hackman’s tightly-wound, implication-heavy self-reflection). Nevertheless, the overall impact is more satisfyingly bracing than you might expect, notwithstanding a final scene packed with tired notions of ambiguously evocative closure.