I read La Bandera a year or two ago and finally hunted down the DVD. It's pretty faithful to Mac Orlan's text (Dumarchais? IMDb must be putting on airs). This adventure yarn is better than a lot of his pirate stories, but still doesn't rise much above an adolescent's fantasy of the Spanish Foreign Legion. I especially liked Gabin - young, athletic, dumb and out of control. The love story with Annabella seems tacked on and out of the blue, but it's true to the text it's taken from.
The random stupidity of racing through the desert on Model A flatbeds after phantom snipers and gun-runners rings truest. This film is not on a humanist/moralist level with La Grand Illusion or Paths of Glory. It's an existential image of war-as-it-happens. The settings are stark, bright and always exposed. Sudden death is intertwined with the boredom of the barracks.
The random stupidity of racing through the desert on Model A flatbeds after phantom snipers and gun-runners rings truest. This film is not on a humanist/moralist level with La Grand Illusion or Paths of Glory. It's an existential image of war-as-it-happens. The settings are stark, bright and always exposed. Sudden death is intertwined with the boredom of the barracks.