Simply A Masterpiece

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

A lot of fun.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

The film follows undercover agent Dick Powell (Whit) as he tracks down fictitious Nazi Martin Brunner as portrayed by Stephen McNally (Reicher) in the French Foreign Legion in Indo-China. I assume that McNally's character is based on real life high ranking Nazi Alois Brunner and the story is a fictionalized interpretation of where real life Brunner may have gone. Incidentally, the real Brunner never got caught. Can Dick Powell track down and capture McNally, or does this story foretell the actual truth of how Brunner may have evaded his searchers? The film begins in a documentary style with clips from the Nazi war trials before it turns its attention to the plight of one particular high-ranking Nazi who has evaded capture. We follow the leads that place him in Indo-China, and that's where we meet our cast, all of whom give good performances. My favourites are McNally and Carol Thurston, who plays devious Vincent Price's (Van Ratten) servant girl, Li-Ho-Kay. Oh yeah, she's handy with a knife.The film seems to tie itself up rather too neatly but it is an interesting journey - there is suitable tension throughout the film as well as intrigue as to what will happen. We are taken into the world of the Vietnamese freedom fighters, who, as a separate issue, win a victory in the end, a few years later.

1948 and US agent Whit Corbett is given a mission to track down Nazi war criminal Martin Brunner . It is believed Brunner has fled to French Indo-China to join the French Foreign Legion . The French meanwhile have a problem in the country where the Viet Mink are waging a war of national liberation In order to get the best out of this film it's necessary to suspend all disbelief . We're given a short history lesson on the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial where 30 Nazis were found guilty of crimes against humanity - all except one Martin Brunner who has disappeared from the surface of the planet and the entire resources of American , British and French intelligence have no luck in finding . Their task isn't helped by the fact he hasn't been photographed since 1935 and as agent Corbett finds out there's a good reason : " After Hitler and Himmler Reicher was the third highest ranking Nazi . All this leads to a couple of serious questions 1 ) Have the allies tried looking in South America where all the real life Nazis like Josef Mengele and Adolph Eichmann were hiding 2 ) Hitler and Himmler or indeed any other Nazi didn't mind being photographed so why is Brunner different ? No doubt he looked in to a crystal ball and saw he'd be a fugitive so decided to forsake any photo opportunities . Either that or the film wouldn't have worked but you do get the impression the producers could have come up with a better way round this plot point As it stands the film plays out almost as much as you expect it with the American good guy and a Nazi bad guy who conveniently has met Brunner joining the Legion at exactly the same time . It does play up to the myth that erstwhile Nazis joined the Legion to escape from war crimes . There is some truth in this but the truth of this myth in painfully over stated such as in novels The Devil's Guard by George Robert Elford which purports to be a true story but was very quickly debunked . Perhaps ROGUES REGIMENT is the one piece of fiction that started off the myth ? An uneasy mix of war movie and film noir with a political slant it's not a very good film in its own right but one thing that is fascinating is the politics . The French are fighting the native population and they're portrayed as being communist stooges . There's also a scene where a French officer studies a wall chart on Viet Minh tactics but later on there's a scene where a Viet Minh leader states that " My friends ? Huh The Viet Minh are not such easily fooled , we may free our selves from [ our French masters ] only to be devoured by the red ones " and this astonishing and prescient line could have changed the whole course of history where Vietnam would 25 years later would have been an obscure exotic country rather than a metonym of bloody folly followed by inglorious defeat

A lot of post war politics gets mixed up in Rogue's Regiment, a story about a manhunt for an escaped Nazi war criminal. The plot takes a lot from the Orson Welles classic, The Stranger.But when Edward G. Robinson is hunting Orson Welles and tracks him to Connecticut he's in the comfort zone of the good old USA even if he doesn't know that Welles is whom he seeks. But Dick Powell as an Army Intelligence Officer tracks his man all the way to Southeast Asia and has to join the French Foreign Legion in order to smoke him out.Which brings us to the point that Rogue's Regiment can lay claim to the fact that it's the first Hollywood motion picture to talk about the Vietnam War. It wasn't Vietnam then, it was French Indochina where the French are rather foolishly trying to reestablish colonial control. A whole lot of history might have changed in the 20th Century if they had realized colonialism was dead. The rebels were called the Viet Minh then and they were making life very tough for French troops outside their outposts. Six years after this film was made, these same French Foreign Legionaires and regular French Army troops would be surrendering at Dienbienphu. But that's getting way ahead of this story.The Foreign Legion has been the host to all kinds of criminals and other assorted riff-raff since its founding. They ask no questions when you enlist and Germans, some of whom might have been occupying France, are enlisting. It's here that our man hopes to find anonymity and here to where Dick Powell tracks him down.With the able assistance of French Intelligence Officer Marta Toren who is working a case of her own, Powell ferrets his man out. In fact he uses the same gambit that Robinson does in The Stranger. There's another well known Nazi in the Legion company and Powell uses him as bait.Such folks as Stephen McNally, Vincent Price, Edgar Barrier and James Millican fill out the cast in this story set in the then exotic locale of Indochina. Carol Thurston who played the tragic Tremartini in Cecil B. DeMille's The Story Of Dr. Wassell also set in Southeast Asia plays another exotic female in love with the wrong guy.Though Rogue's Regiment gets a little silly at times, Powell gets captured by the Viet Minh and escapes rather too easily, almost like one of those serials, still the film is generally good. And being a first to talk about the war in Indochina, Rogue's Regiment is a historic milestone of a film.I doubt though that the folks at Universal Pictures thought they were establishing a milestone.

One of the few Foreign Legion films that takes the Legion out of the desert. The Legion was instrumental in the conquest of Indochina in the 1880s, and fought a bloody, futile war in a vain attempt to retain it, from 1946-54. In the late 40s, the French government prohibited sending conscripts to serve in Indochina, so the Foreign Legion was greatly expanded. A major falsehood presented by the film is the great effort made by former SS enlistees to conceal their past, since the French were said to execute any they discovered. The reverse was in fact true, and the French actively (though covertly) sought out and recruited former Wehrmacht and SS men. For the first time in the Legion's history, large enlistment bonuses were paid and former officers and senior noncoms were advanced to sergeant upon completion of training and a short probation period. Jobs were hard to come by in postwar Germany, and the French eagerly made use of this large pool of disciplined, fully trained professional killers. Just the thing for a dirty, distant, unpopular war.Dick Powell joins the Legion to find a wanted SS war criminal. Despite the above, most of the movie is quite realistic and fast moving. There are good action, and even training sequences, and the atmosphere is appropriately gritty and depressing. The legionnaires are depicted with American M1 rifles. This was accurate in the early part of the war. Ironically, these were later replaced by inferior and obsolete French equipment.An interesting mix of war movie and film noir done reasonably well.