Ten Tall Men
Tags: cult

Plot synopsis:
After capturing an important Rif prisoner in an undercover operation, Sergeant Mike Kincaid (Lancaster) is imprisoned himself for striking a lieutenant (Stephen Bekassy) who beats a French woman (Mari Blanchard) with his riding crop for preferring Kincaid to him. Kincaid has a longstanding rivalry with the lieutenant, but the lieutenant is now in command of the company holding the city of Tarfa while the regiment is away. As the ranking officer, the lieutenant uses Kincaid's striking of him to get his revenge.
Kincaid is imprisoned alongside seven military prisoners and the captured Rif who has refused to talk, with the lieutenant refusing food and water to both Kincaid and the Rif. When his two comrades-in-arms who accompanied him on the mission, Corporals Luis Delgado (Gilbert Roland) and Pierre Molier (Kieron Moore), sneak food and water to Kincaid, he shares them with the Rif. To repay Kincaid's kindness and assuage his own guilt for telling the lieutenant about Kincaid's assignation with the Frenchwoman, the tells of an impending attack on Tarfa while the garrison is weak. The Rif believes Kincaid will escape to save himself, but he instead warns the lieutenant.
The experienced Kincaid tells the lieutenant that their only chance is to release him to lead a series of guerrilla hit-and-run attacks to delay the enemy for five days until the regiment returns. The lieutenant agrees, but only if Kincaid will testify that the idea was his. Kincaid agrees to his terms. The only men available for the mission are the seven prisoners, who receive full pardons for their crimes. His two corporals join them, raising their number to ten.
When scouting an enemy camp, the Legionnaires discover two rival tribes have joined forces, making them strong enough to take the city. Using his expertise in disguise and language, Kincaid finds out that the Rif leader, Khalid Hussein (Gerald Mohr), is marrying Mahla (Jody Lawrance) in order to cement an alliance with the other tribe. Kincaid kidnaps her to force the enemy to chase him for the five days.
Mahla begins to fall in love with her handsome captor, as Hussein pursues the Legionnaires across the desert. In the midst of the dangers, the patrol find a destroyed Legion truck containing a safe that one of the men opens, revealing a large Legion payroll. When Jardine (John Dehner) tries to get away with the payroll, he is shot, but that tells the Rifs where they are.
Kincaid is eventually captured and Mahla freed. She demands that Kincaid be released unharmed or she will not marry Hussein. Hussein reluctantly does so. Kincaid and his men infiltrate the wedding ceremony, and fighting breaks out. Mahla's tribe switches sides, and Hussein is killed.

Review: The phrase "they don't make them like this anymore" is often used in this CGI-infested age to describe extra-laden and 'authentic' Hollywood spectaculars of yesteryear but, frankly, watching this more modest, tongue-in-cheek Foreign Legion adventure, I was equally struck by just how old-fashioned (and refreshingly so) it all was – not that the sand storm sequence included here would pass muster with today's audiences!
Anyhow, from the very start of the film, we have Burt Lancaster, Gilbert Roland and Kieron Moore disguised as, respectively, an Arab merchant and his two daughters!; legionnaires who are punished for daring to look twice at their Lieutenant's fiancée; an Arab chieftain who marries off his daughter to a rival Sheik to bring peace between their warring tribes and in a bid to rid their country of the 'French' infidels; the kidnapping of that same feisty daughter who, not only turns the heads of all her ten titular captors but, after several escape attempts, eventually steals the heart of tough guy Lancaster; etc.
However, shot in lovely Technicolor and moving at a rapid pace, the film is an enjoyable ride through familiar territory; what was somewhat surprising, plot-wise, is that while much was made initially of the unloved Lieutenant (Stephen Bekassy) and his blonde girlfriend (Mari Blanchard), their characters virtually disappear once Lancaster's jailbird unit sets out on its mission!
Despite its baffling ultra-rarity, the film is peopled by an interesting pool of talent both in front and behind the camera: Lancaster is in his third adventure flick; Gilbert Roland is his usual laid-back, womanizing Latino self; John Dehner the proverbial rotten apple in the group; George Tobias (perhaps thankfully) sacrifices himself early on; Nick Dennis and Mike Mazurki are among the rowdiest of the 'Ten'; Gerald Mohr adequately provides the required villainy; this was the second product from Norma Productions (which first partnered Lancaster with producer Harold Hecht); writer Roland Kibbee would much later go on to share directorial credit with Lancaster on THE MIDNIGHT MAN (1974; which I will be revisiting presently); associate producer Robert Aldrich would later direct Lancaster in four movies – including TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING (1977; which I'll be viewing for the first time during this ongoing Burt Lancaster tribute); and, most interestingly perhaps, this was multi-talented Willis Goldbeck's most notable directorial effort but, at least two of his screen writing credits are highly impressive indeed: Tod Browning's FREAKS (1932) and John Ford's THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962; Goldbeck's last film work)!
One final note: after searching high and low for this film on account of a friend of mine who is a big Burt Lancaster fan (and recalls the star's brief sojourn in Malta in the 1970s), ironically, it was he who eventually provided me with a means to catch up with it via a surprisingly well-preserved VHS-sourced copy he acquired!.
Burt Lancaster, plays Sgt. Mike Kincaid, a French Foreign Legionnaire, who, while in a military stockade, learns of an impending attack on the city proper while the main garrison is away.
Further they kidnap Mahla (Jody Lawrance) a tribal princess, which prevents the evil Khalif Hussein (Gerald Mohr) from caring out his attack.
The entire film is fun to watch as great actors like Gilbert Roland, Kieron Moore, George Tobias, John Dehner and Mike Mazurki establish a wonderful and fun filled afternoon of creative enjoyment.
Since he is in charge of the mission, Marvin also realizes that his life also depends on them too and pointed out that fact to his superiors.In the movie Ten Tall Men, Burt Lancaster says almost the same thing: "The main reason we're going to do it is we have no other choice.
I'm going to see to it that the next man doesn't let him down." Only difference is that Lancaster has two corporals to back him up while Marvin has the MP sergeant to help him out plus the men under Lancaster's command are not facing a death sentence or long imprisonment for murder.
This film dates from Burt Lancaster's swashbuckling period when he was trying to inherit Errol Flynn's mantle as Hollywood's leading action hero.
"The Flame and the Arrow", for example, is a disguised remake of Flynn's greatest hit, "The Adventures of Robin Hood", with the story transferred from England to Italy, and "The Crimson Pirate" is in the same tradition as Flynn's "The Sea Hawk".It has long been an Anglo-American jibe that the Foreign Legion is the greatest fighting force in the French Army "because it has no Frenchmen in it", and the exploits of the Legion have always been popular with film-makers.
Although many Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were opposed to European colonialism, such opinions were rarely reflected in Hollywood films- "The Hurricane" from the late thirties is an exception- and "Ten Tall Men", which is set during the Rif War of the 1920s, takes a firmly pro- French position.
In that film Peck plays a US cavalry officer who commands a small force tasked with holding off the Indians for long enough to allow reinforcements to reach a garrison threatened with attack.
Here Lancaster plays Mike Kincaid, an American- born sergeant with the Legion, who commands a small force (the "ten tall men" of the title) tasked with holding off the Rifs for long enough to allow reinforcements to reach the threatened city of Tarfa.
(Kincaid himself has been imprisoned for striking an obnoxious Lieutenant in defence of a lady).The main difference is that "Only the Valiant" took this scenario seriously, whereas "Ten Tall Men" is, by and large, a comedy, or at least a comedy/action hybrid.
As part of his plan to foil the raid on Tarfa, Kincaid kidnaps Mahla, the beautiful fiancée the of villainous Rif leader Caid Hussein and, inevitably, the two end up falling in love.
Equally inevitably, Mahla is played by an American actress, Jody Lawrance, rather than a Moroccan one."Ten Tall Men" is a better film than "Only the Valiant", which even Peck acknowledged as one of his weakest, precisely because the latter treats an implausible scenario seriously, whereas the former takes a very similar scenario and treats it in a more light-hearted manner.
As a swashbuckling hero Lancaster was not in the same league as Flynn- he was to achieve more later in his career when he reinvented himself as a serious actor- but here he is charismatic enough to keep the film watchable, with the aid of some well-handled action sequences.
When in the brig on charges, Foreign Legion Sgt Mike Kincaid learns from a Riff prisoner of an impending attack on the outpost of Tarfa.
In exchange for freedom, Kincaid and his men offer to run a series of distracting missions across the territory to keep the enemy busy until help can arrive.
When he also learns that the leader of the Riffs, Caid Hussein, plans to marry Mahla, a girl from another tribe, in order to combine the two tribes against the French, Kincaid kidnaps her and flees into the desert  sparking anger and a chase from Hussein and a growing love for Kincaid in Mahla.Featuring the chest and jaw of Burt Lancaster, this is just one of many foreign legion films that were so popular at one time in Hollywood.
Of course this is not to say it does anything special, because it doesn't but it does do what you would expect from a foreign legion picture of the period  sand storms, heroic sacrifice, bare chested heroes, torture, attacks on forts and so on.
Those who like the matinée feel of the foreign legion film will enjoy it as such but just don't expect it to do anything above and beyond the call of duty as the characters, plot, action and delivery are all fairly average and prevent the film from standing out from the crowd..
"The Sahara - - years ago, land of the Riffs, the Foreign Legion-and adventure".
More known for writing credits that include the likes of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Sergeant Rutledge, Willis Goldbeck here instead jumps into the directors chair for this fun Burt Lancaster led desert adventure piece.
Also starring Jody Lawrance, Gerald Mohr and John Dehner, the film finds a cast rightly not taking things too seriously.
The plot sees Sergeant Mike Kincaid (Lancaster all teeth and pectorals) lead nine Legionnaires on a deadly mission to delay a Riff attack on a desert fort.
Whilst on the trek Kincaid learns that the Riff leader Khalid Hussein (Mohr) is planning to marry Mahla (Lawrance) so as to unite two once opposing tribes.
So, to prevent the marriage, Kincaid kidnaps Mahla and the troubles for the Legionnaires are about to get much much worse.It's easy to dismiss the all round acting as being rather poor, but with the material and the obvious tone the makers were going for, it all sits rather well.
In those last years before the French finally cleared out of North Africa, Foreign Legion films seem to have been popular with the movie going public.
Ten Tall Men is a typical example of such a film.
Even though ultimately and soon the French would be driven out of the area the Foreign Legion patrolled before the decade ended.Burt Lancaster is a sergeant of American background in the Foreign Legion and typically we don't know what drove him to join.
His two corporals are Gilbert Roland and Kieron Moore and a bit of lese majeste involving Mari Blanchard got these guys some stockade time.
But Burt with that smile and those pecs is the guy for the job.None of the players in Ten Tall Men took this one real seriously and neither should we.
Ten Tall Men is like a combination of The Desert Song and The Road To Morocco without songs.Don't believe me, well check out the end and you can't tell me The Road To Morocco didn't inspire that..
When French Foreign Legionnaire Kincaid (Burt Lancaster) is told of an impending attack on the outpost of in North Africa while he is imprisoned.
In return for his freedom he and his men will distract the enemy until help arrived.However he learns that the treacherous leader of the Riffs plans to marry Mahla, a girl from a rival tribe in order to create an alliance against the French.
Kincaid kidnaps her and takes for the desert where both fall for each other.Burt Lancaster was the tough, compassionate and dashing soldier several years before From Here to Eternity.The plot nicely shot in Technicolour does have a hint of being shot in a Hollywood back lot rather than a desert.
It also has a whole heap of campness especially with a bare chested Lancaster about to be tortured.Its purely a film of its time with a light plot, broad humour, a clunky romance where the white soldier kidnaps the Arab princess and inexplicably fall in love.
The 38 Year Old Burt Lancaster.
An impressive 38 year old Burt Lancaster appears in this mediocre film.
Although there is no one film that I like about Lancaster, he was impressive at 38..
The French Foreign Legion movie usually ranked as one of Hollywood's most enjoyable sub-genres, and this is a good though undistinguished example of it.
If it doesn't quite match 1953's "Desert Legion," it's probably because of a tongue-in-cheek tone which sometimes seems a bit juvenile, and because of an unconvincing leading lady -- Jody Lawrance -- who seems more North Hollywood than North Africa.
However, Burt Lancaster shone in this kind of adventure and you don't have to wait long before he has his shirt off in a bathtub scene.
If like me you prefer adventure movies that entertain and that don't have to engage the brain then this is probably right up your sand dune.
Most of today's audience will also notice there's no cgi cartoonery that has to be in every film made nowadays.Swashbuckling Legionnaire Burt Lancaster gets out of jail on the understanding he will delay by 5 days the naughty Riff's attack on their stronghold at Tarfa, picking 9 men fairly good and true to help.
Although Lancaster initially seemed to me to be missing Nick Cravat he turned in some fine non-acrobatic comedic moments – as the supposed father to 2 ugly daughters, dodging Princess Mahla's bullets, and one of my favourite split seconds from any film ever made is when he lustily roars out "Murderers!" to the aghast wedding party.
But what the red blooded Mike was supposed to see in Mahla was beyond me though as she wasn't a very friendly lady - even at the end if she'd ever said I Love You to Lancaster I'd take it to mean Take That!So, it's nothing heavy and has absolutely no significance at all – but every few years it's a pleasant time passer for me, 97 minutes of witty and romantic middlebrow entertainment.
This is a typical Hollywood action-adventure movie of the 1950's.
It is a vehicle for Burt Lancaster to show case his sly romantic, tongue in cheek comedic, and of course his bravura talents.
This film also has a bunch of well known Hollywood character actors, most as reprobate Legionnaires who are sent on a mission to delay the Riff from attacking the town of Tarfa.
Producers: Harold Hecht, Burt Lancaster.Copyright 5 November 1951 by Halburt Productions, Inc. A Norma Production, released by Columbia Pictures Corp.
97 minutes.SYNOPSIS: Foreign Legion Sergeant Mike Kincaid (Burt Lancaster) and nine comrades-in-arms undertake to stop a Riff attack on the desert city of Tarfa.
Mike captures Mahla (Jody Lawrance), a Riff princess whose marriage to Hussin (Gerald Mohr) will ally two Riff tribes against the French.COMMENT: A Foreign Legion romp with Burt Lancaster and company pretending to be legionnaires, alternately incredibly brave or playfully skittish.
Burt Lancaster makes an efficient looking sergeant, and Kieron Moore a somewhat less adequate corporal.
Burt Lancaster is a sergeant in the French Foreign Legion, head of a pack of madcap ne'er-do-wells including some of the leading lights among the supporting players of the 40s and 50s.
For added thrills and laughs, there is Mari Blanchard in a canary yellow dress and a fluffy hair do of the same tint.Lancaster and his men capture a Riff prisoner and bring him back to Lieutenant Kruger in temporary charge of the base at Tafra.
One foreign accent sounds much like any other to Hollywood's ears, and it's as well that the mean guy should be a German because 1951 was only six years after the end of World War II and we still hadn't forgiven the Nazis.
(Gasp.)" The ending is a Donneybrook in the enemy camp, so comic it could be Bing Crosby and Bob Hope instead of Lancaster's men.
Burt Lancaster is at his best here.
"3 Men in White" director Willis Goldbeck's "Ten Tall Men" is a rip-snorting adventure in the Errol Flynn tradition about recklessly brave heroes and slimy villains running loose in the dunes.
Basically, the Roland Kibbee & Frank Davis screenplay, based on a story by James Warner Bellah and Goldbeck, is a French Foreign Legion escapade against murderous desert tribes that want to wipe out the French.
Nevertheless, this is fast, furious and frivolous nonsense with Lancaster in command at all times supported by Gilbert Roland and Kieron Moore.
This Columbia Pictures release is in glorious color and the cast is first-rate."Ten Tall Men" opens with French Foreign Legion Sergeant Mike Kincaid (Burt Lancaster of "All My Sons") masquerading as an Arab merchant.
Kincaid trudges along a desert trail with his two veiled daughters, in reality Corporals Luis Delgado (Gilbert Roland of "Camille") and Pierre Molier (Kieron Moore of "Mine Own Executioner") in disguise waiting to catch an enemy Rif warrior.
Not surprisingly, while Kruger is interrogating the Rif prisoner that Sergeant Kincaid provided him, Kincaid is making time with DeLatour.
Predictably, Kincaid winds up in the clink with his Legionnaire buddies, Londos (George Tobias of "Objective, Burma"), Mouse (Nick Dennis of "Spartacus"), and Roshko (Mike Mazurkia of "Murder, My Sweet"), and learns from the Rif prisoner that Tarfu is going to be wiped out.
Kincaid tells Kruger about the enemy plans and insists that he can save the garrison as well as the town if Kruger will give him ten men.
Naturally, Kruger has his doubts and cannot spare the manpower so Kincaid settles for men in the stockade.Our heroes descend onto the enemy camp deep in the desert by an oasis.
Instead, they discover that the tent belongs to a beautiful girl, Mahla (Jody Lawrance of "Mask of the Avenger"), who is not only about to marry Khalif Hussein (Gerald Mohr of "Invasion, U.S.A.") but also unite two tribes intent on running the French out of Morocco.
Kincaid and his men snatch Mahla and Hussein and company pursue them.
The commandant of the Foreign Legion orders Lieutenant Kruger to administer full honors to Kincaid after he pins on the medal.
Kincaid gives the medal to Mahla and tells her that it belonged to his mother.Fistfights, shoot-outs, horse chases, and more enliven this adventure film.
The diminutive Frenchman who plays Lancaster's orderly is future "Hogan's Heroes" star Robert Clary making his film debut.
Despite the presence of Burt Lancaster, this is a very ordinary sort of French Foreign Legion film.
You certainly WON'T be reminded of "Beau Geste" when you see "Ten Tall Men".Lancaster plays a trouble-loving sergeant.
Much of the rest of the film consists of Lancaster and his men running from the pursuers.I assume that if you love the colonial system, you will be more favorably disposed towards this film.
As for me, the deciding factor for not loving the film had much more to do with the very pedestrian nature of the movie.
Not a terrible film--just not a good one either.By the way, look for Robert Clary (of "Hogan's Heroes" fame) in a small part as one of the natives.