A French Foreign Legion film with a World War Two backdrop - Jean Paul Belmondo is a legionnaire whose platoon is mostly wiped out by Germans, while trying to retrieve six million in old bullion. There are only five survivors, which makes the film cheaper, as they try to get the money back. Belmondo wants to take the money for himself while Michel Constantine wants them to Do the Right Thing.
Act two has Belmondo lock Constantine in a bank and dealing with a banker and his wife, who gives the film some female glamour. Act three involves the emergence of a German soldier who used to sleep with the wife.
The director was Henry Verneuil, a good, solid commercial director who knows how to keep things moving. Belmondo is perfectly cast as a legionnaire lacking in scruple, determined to make some money, a man's man with an eye for the ladies, strutting around in his singlet with a machine gun being tough and cynical, etc.
The film is astonishingly cynical - the only person interested in doing their duty is Constantine. Belmondo wants the cash, as does his sidekick; there's a fat cowardly soldier, a cowardly bank manager, the manager's trampy wife, and a German officer. Constantine shoots dead Belmondo's ally; he Belmondo ends up teaming up with the wife and German and killing Constantine. Then he and the German double cross each other. A bank manager electrocutes himself urinating on a live wire.
The visuals are great - trucks, desert sand, blue seas, old African buildings etc. There's lots of double crossing and people going after money though some script issues - how did Belmondo on foot track down the German in a tank? I get that the German read the map wrong... but how did Belmondo know where to find him?
But on the whole this is a no nonsense heist film very much in the vein of Kelly's Heroes and Three Kings.
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