Beau Ideal (1931)
** (out of 4)
Pervical Christopher Wren's sequel to Beau Geste has John Geste (Ralph Forbes) joining the French Foreign Legion after his love Isobel (Loretta Young) informs him that their friend (Frank McCormick) has joined. Pretty soon Geste finds himself in the desert and accused of leading a mutiny that he had nothing to do with. BEAU IDEAL has pretty much been forgotten today and if someone has heard of it it's probably because of how poorly it did when it was originally released. The film's quality also has a pretty low reputation but I didn't find the movie all that bad, although there's clearly something missing from it. The entire film has an incredibly strange structure that starts off with the two friends in the bottom of a dungeon and then we flashback to when they were children and then we flash-forward to a sequence between jumping yet again. I'm really not sure what the point of this was as it really adds nothing to the film and it also seems that more footage is missing. The film runs 80-minutes and while watching it I really wondered if perhaps it originally ran a lot longer but the studio cut it down before release. There are so many side plots that happen yet seem to never be mentioned again. The film also has some pretty bad moments that could become a cult classic if people actually watched the film. One example is the poor acting during the opening sequence and another happens during the mutiny in the desert. Both of these scenes are so poorly done that they will bring laughs when they're meant to be dramatic. Forbes isn't too bad in his role but he's certainly far from memorable. Young is pretty much in thankless cameo and it's funny seeing her working with the director again after the abuse he gave her on LAUGH CLOWN LAUGH.
** (out of 4)
Pervical Christopher Wren's sequel to Beau Geste has John Geste (Ralph Forbes) joining the French Foreign Legion after his love Isobel (Loretta Young) informs him that their friend (Frank McCormick) has joined. Pretty soon Geste finds himself in the desert and accused of leading a mutiny that he had nothing to do with. BEAU IDEAL has pretty much been forgotten today and if someone has heard of it it's probably because of how poorly it did when it was originally released. The film's quality also has a pretty low reputation but I didn't find the movie all that bad, although there's clearly something missing from it. The entire film has an incredibly strange structure that starts off with the two friends in the bottom of a dungeon and then we flashback to when they were children and then we flash-forward to a sequence between jumping yet again. I'm really not sure what the point of this was as it really adds nothing to the film and it also seems that more footage is missing. The film runs 80-minutes and while watching it I really wondered if perhaps it originally ran a lot longer but the studio cut it down before release. There are so many side plots that happen yet seem to never be mentioned again. The film also has some pretty bad moments that could become a cult classic if people actually watched the film. One example is the poor acting during the opening sequence and another happens during the mutiny in the desert. Both of these scenes are so poorly done that they will bring laughs when they're meant to be dramatic. Forbes isn't too bad in his role but he's certainly far from memorable. Young is pretty much in thankless cameo and it's funny seeing her working with the director again after the abuse he gave her on LAUGH CLOWN LAUGH.