Gary Cooper enacts the title role with quiet magnificence in this superb adventure tale loaded with drama, action, and mystery. The film opens with a relief column of Legionnaires crossing the desert dunes to Fort Zinderneuf. The fort seems strangely silent and a bugler is sent to
investigate. He finds all inside the fort dead, and notices a sergeant on the parapet in whose hand is a note confessing to the theft of a fabulous gem called "the Blue Water." When the column enters the fort, the body of the sergeant is gone. Next the troops hear shots outside the fort and pursue
what they think are tribal invaders. The fort suddenly erupts into flames, setting off the arsenal which destroys Zinderneuf.
In a flashback to 15 years earlier, we see three boys, the Geste brothers, at a great English mansion. The boys are cared for by kindly Thatcher, an impoverished blueblood who is so desperate to give the orphaned brothers and another child, Gillis, a good home that she secretly sells the treasured
family jewel, the Blue Water, to raise the necessary funds. O'Connor secretly witnesses the transaction and watches Thatcher replace the gem with a fake. Years later, with O'Connor grown into Cooper, his brothers grown into Milland and Preston, and Gillis bloomed into Hayward, the lord of the
manor, Huntley, appears seeking the great sapphire. To prevent Thatcher from having to admit her secret transaction, Cooper steals the phony gem, leaves a note for his brothers admitting the theft, and joins the Foreign Legion.
Cooper's great performance is given solid support by Ray Milland and Robert Preston, but Susan Hayward appears only briefly as the love interest and her performance is unmemorable. Brian Donlevy almost steals every scene he's in with a snarling performance that will scare the blazes out of any
viewer, and J. Carrol Naish's hyena-like Rasinoff is unforgettable. Great support also comes from veteran heavies Albert Dekker, Harry Woods, and Harold Huber, enacting the mutinous Legionnaires. Broderick Crawford and Charles Barton provide the comic relief as the Gestes' sidekicks.
When director William Wellman was brought in to remake the silent 1926 version of P.C. Wren's captivating story, he was instructed to follow the original almost to the letter, which he did, even using the same location, the spreading desert dunes of Yuma, Arizona, where a new Fort Zinderneuf was
completely rebuilt. Paramount executives thought it would be impressive to run the first reel of the silent version before showing the 1939 remake to reviewers, to show what sound could do to improve a classic. It was a scheme that almost blew up in their faces; some reviewers still preferred the
silent version, but most felt that the remake was superior. leave a comment
