Beau Geste (1939)

(On Cable TV, May 2022) I have the opposite of a soft spot for the colonialist adventures that were so popular in Hollywood during the late 1930s. Few films have earned as much seething hatred as the one I still hold against colonialist celebration Gunga Din (1939), and finding out the cruelty against horses that made The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) possible did not help me warm up to the subgenre. At the time, Americans loved to use the British example as a way to affirm the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon colonizer (keep in mind: 1930s and the rise of ethno-nationalism across the west…) and the idea of staging wide-scale battles between a small number of white protagonists and faceless hordes of non-white antagonists was nothing short of irresistible. Now, I’m being slightly too hard on Beau Geste for the hideous faults of its cousins – after all, it’s a film that spends a lot of time in dignified British sets, then sends its protagonist through a harsh apprenticeship in the French Foreign Legion and a finale that can’t be described as a happy one. But in the end, the climax remains a bunch of white people in a fort fighting off hordes of non-white people coded as inferior and no number of shenanigans about blue diamond theft is going to erase that. Cary Cooper is his usual stoic, imperturbable, bland self here – he was much funnier when excerpts of his performance we reused in the 1977 farce The Last Remake of Beau Geste. While this version (among many) of Beau Geste is more tolerable than many other colonialist adventures, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s all that enjoyable. But, hey, if it’s your thing, or if you like Cooper better than I do…