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The Lost Patrol [VHS]

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'The Lost Patrol' is one of the few war movies whose focus is more on how a group of soldiers relates to each other than on how they offer meaningful battle to the enemy. The setting is somewhere in the deserts of North Africa presumably during the First World War. A British patrol is indeed lost. The enemy is not only unseen Arabs who pick off the Brits one by one but also the Brits themselves as their divergent personalities put them into deadly confrontations. Their commanding officer is quickly killed by an Arab sniper at the beginning of the movie,leaving Victor McLaughlin in command. As his men are picked off, he becomes first enraged, then depressed at his inability to save them. Boris Karloff has a role well suited to his penchant for playing off center characters. He plays a religious fanatic who tells his comrades that if they do not immediately accept Christ as their savior and give up the pleasures of the flesh, then they will be damned in this life and the next. As the movie progresses, the audience can see Karloff grow visibly more deranged, until the end when he literally becomes a Christ-figure who carries a cross directly toward the hidden Arabs who promptly shoot him in images laden of the original crucifixion.
The film generates much tension as the audience wonders if any of the Brits will get out alive. Further, 'The Lost Patrol' is one of the earliest examples of Arab-bashing movies that I have ever seen. The Arab snipers are presented as cruel and sadistic killers who are too cowardly to face the manly Brits face to face. Until the very end, the audience gets no more than a fleeting glimpse of their faces. Yet,it is not only the Arabs that the Brits must fear. One can argue that even if the Arabs had not existed, the internecine squabbles of the patrol might have doomed them. There are two scenes that devastate the audience. The first involves a Brit volunteer who leaves the patrol to seek help. Days later he returns on horseback, only to be shot by his own side, thinking that he was an Arab. The second concerns a Brit flier who lands his bi-plane near the patrol to help them. The flier, an immaculately dressed upper-crust pilot, is promptly shot by the Arabs. Each of these incidents lets the audience feel the rage and horror of the surviving patrol members. By the film's end,only the crusty McLaughlin is left alive. He plays dead, and it is only then that the Arabs come out of hiding. McLaughlin then takes a machine gun and slaughters them.
The ending clearly shows McLaughlin has ridden on the roller coaster of emotions that we call war. When help finally arrives, he is mute. He has seen the face of the enemy and knows that sometimes that face is us.

The Lost Patrol transports us to Mesopotamia in 1917 where a British patrol marching through the desert suffers the loss of its commanding officer to Arab fighters. It's up to the sergeant (who sounds very American) to safely guide the troops to safety. Things become rather complicated when they reach an oasis which turns out to be more of a deathtrap than salvation...
In short, the acting is really nothing special, the plot is quite interesting, while the dialogues are average and often below average. Boris Karloff's religious fanatic character was just annoying as was the sergeant's cluelessness vis-à-vis military command. As for the corporal, he seemed to be in his 90s.
In a nutshell, it's probably not a movie you would want to add to your collection, but it might, just might, provide for an evening's entertainment, and that's about it; No masterpiece here.

Victor McLaglen plays Sergeant a tough wily career soldier leading a patrol of British cavalry through the Mesopotamian desert in 1917 in John Ford's "The Lost Patrol". The young lieutenant leading the men had been killed by an unseen Arab sniper. Unfortunately he carried no written orders and did not share them with McLaglen, the next in command. As a result the patrol was lost in the sweltering desert, unaware of where to rendez-vous with the rest of the brigade.

They come upon a desert oasis where find refuge in an old and decaying mosque, water and dates. One by one however they begin to get picked off by concealed Arab gunmen. They also awake to find that their precious horses have been run off in the middle of the night leaving them stranded. McLaglen sends off two volunteers to get help. When they return being dragged by their horses, horribly mutilated, panic sets is. The creepy Boris Karloff playing psychotic religious fanatic Sanders goes off the deep end, eventually exposing himself and getting shot.

McLaglen in conversing with his men reveals his character, although never his name. His wife had died in childbirth leaving behind a son. The boy was a great source of love and pride providing him with motivation to survive the ordeal. The patrol gets winnowed down until he is the lone survivor. In a half crazed state he mows down a group of Arabs who finally reveal themselves when they think that all the Brits have been killed. The brigade finally comes to the rescue but not before the bewildered, battle fatigued McLaglen sees all his men cut down around him.

"The Lost Patrol" was one of a dozen colloborations between the talented John Ford and the gruff Victor McLaglen, many of them classics. Ford expertly manages to convey the feelings of solitude and desperation felt by the soldiers fighting for their country so far distant

That's what happening to the members of this lost patrol in the Mesopotamian desert in World War I. Victor McLaglen is the officer in command of Reginald Owen, Boris Karloff, Alan Hale, Wallace Ford, and a bunch of other fellows lost in the desert who find shelter and water at an oasis, only to become the quarry of unseen Arab snipers. Thus, they're the "lost" patrol in more than one sense of the word.

It's rather an unexpectedly interesting film because of the unabashed prejudices portrayed. Arabs are decried throughout the picture, as you might expect, but there's some pretty wild dialogue from Reginald Owen when recounting amorous exploits in his past in Malaysia, commenting on how the native women all need to be shot after 21, but that before then they were white enough for him. I was quite taken aback by that, I must say! I suppose I shouldn't be that surprised, though, because "The Lost Patrol" was directed by none other than John Ford, and there are often questionable attitudes towards non-Whites and women in his movies.

Our star Victor McLaglen, veteran of many a Ford outing, swaggers about, no trace of his later sham Irish brogue. As a matter of fact, I found him kind of sexy when his shirt was open and you could see his shell necklace. He's not that sexy when his shirt is all the way off, though. Wallace Ford--who is the same actor McLaglen rats on in "The Informer"--is his usual Joe Schmoe character; I couldn't figure out how this obvious Brooklyn accent guy got into this British regiment. But it's Karloff who takes the cake this time, as he gives an appallingly hammy performance as a religious fanatic who goes more and more over the edge as the tension mounts.

So, "The Lost Patrol" will hold your interest, but maybe not for all positive reasons. Catch it just to see how way out movies could get back in the old days.