BEAU GESTE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 39, 21 March 1940, Page 20

BEAU GESTE

(Paramount) This is, briefiy, a silent classic which has been given a voice. The original film of 1926 vintage (also produced by Paramount), has been re-made with painstaking care and a big new cast, but in the process of producing a relentlessly faithful copy of the original they have somehow lost most of its spirit. Perhaps that spirit could never be recaptured these days. Perhaps we have grown up too much and become too blasé and disillusioned to accept without question the mock heroics and mawkish sentiment which moved us to such enthusiasm when P. C. Wren wrote his novel of the French Foreign Legion in. 1924 and when Herbert Brenon followed it with his large-scale spectacle two years later. The large-scale spectacle is still there in the new talkie, and those scenes of desert warfare are the best things in it. But Ronald Colman, the original Beau, is not there; he is replaced by Gary Cooper. It may be noted here that Paramount are now prepared to admit in a foreword that the film does not pretend to give an accurate picture of life in the Foreign Legion. They should also, while they were at it, have admitted that it does not pretend to give an accurate picture of Englishmen. For if any Hollywood star can claim to be a typical American, surely it is Gary Cooper-his whole reputation has been built up on those lines, with stories of the Wild West and the Mr. Deeds type of thing-and yet here we have the lanky cowboy called on to play probably the most pukka sahib in the whole of English fiction. Much as I admire Gary Cooper when he’s an American, I simply can’t swallow this. That’s not patriotism, it’s simply common sense, as I see it. To a lesser degree, the same can be said of Ray Milland and Robert Preston. They are more English, but not much more believable, as the other "stout fellahs" of the Geste family, who. behave with such embarrassing manliness and brotherly love toward one another and with such objectionable smugness toward their cousin, whose only offences, as a lad, so far as one can’ see, were that he wore spectacles and considered it dangerous for small boys to operate on one another with pen-knives. However, when they have grown up and joined the Foreign Legion for the noblest of motives (to shield an aunt),

the Geste brothers have to take more than a taste of bullying themselves, from the hands of a sadistic sergeant. Brian Donlevy gives a ripe interpretation of this role, which was made famous by Noah Beery. Those picturegoers who are not old enough to remember the previous "Beau Geste," and those who are simply out for an evening of synthetic emotion and blood and thunder, will find this a technically efficient, handsomely produced, and satisfactorily exciting melodrama. I'd have been happier about it myself if they'd called it "Mr. Deeds Goes To Morocco." Interesting sidelight: The brutal French Sergeant Lejaune of the ori§ginal story now becomes a_ Russian named Markoft.