I read Simon Murray's excellent book back in the late 1970s, and so when this movie appeared out of the blue on television, late one night, I recognised it immediately despite the misleading title. I suppose they already had a movie called 'Legionnaire' but sadly this meant I watched the remainder expecting Murray to desert at any moment. It did gloss over his initial training, and the brutality of it - his parachute wings for example appear as if by magic - but it was still interesting. Unfortunately, in Hollywood fashion, they made changes - his girlfriend plants bombs for the OAS, and he agonises over the shooting of a child that wasn't in the book, but eventually it wasn't as bad as expected, and he ended up as Sergeant (Not Caporal-Chef as in real life). I just wish it had shown more of the training, the promotion courses, his earnest struggle to become a Legionnaire rather than his forays into Arab territory and his attempts to understand their culture. It's still an interesting glimpse of the Legion without the over-the-top USA dramatics such film-makers often inject.
