Rogues' Regiment (1948)

Director: Robert Florey
Writer: Robert Buckner, based on a story by Robert Buckner and Robert Florey
Stars: Dick Powell, Marta Toren, Vincent Price and Stephen McNally

Index: The First Thirty.

Back to regularly scheduled programming, Price’s next film proper after Up in Central Park is a picture that tries to be every different film genre all at once. It doesn’t work, which might explain why this is criminally underseen and unavailable outside the grey market, but it is a particularly fascinating attempt.

As the opening credits roll, it’s obviously a French Foreign Legion movie, which is backed up by those very words showing up under the title on the movie’s poster. And it is, but not in the usual way. This is a far cry from Beau Geste.

For a start, the very next scenes involve the burning of the bodies of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun outside their bunker in Berlin in 1945. It might seem historical to us but it was notably topical for 1948, being only three years on. It’s only two years after the Nuremberg Trials, our next stop, to watch in archive footage, the fate of the leading Nazis to survive the war. One, however, also sentenced to death, isn’t there.

We know that they’re talking about Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, and that he was probably already dead at his own hand, his remains found and identified in 1973. Here, though, he’s Martin Bruner, the commandant at the Dachau concentration camp, and he’s in very good health but being sought by half the world for his crimes against humanity.

Given that I’m watching Rogues’ Regiment in a VHS rip of a TV broadcast, I didn’t grasp that the Nazi trusted to burn Hitler’s body was the same man, sans moustache, who’s on a train to Saigon to join the Legion in the next scene. It meant that I took this to be a suspense picture as well, which it’s really not, even though the fact that Bruner has never been photographed except for once from behind does maintain a sense of suspense in the film’s internal logic.

Bruner is one of three men in the carriage, going under the alias of Carl Reicher. He’s in black, as is Dick Powell, a sardonic American right out of film noir called Whit Corbett, but the third man is in deceptively angelic white. He’s played by Vincent Price but unnamed for a long while, as if to build tension, especially given his attempt at a subtle German accent. We do learn eventually that his name is Mark Van Ratten, without any believable reason for the delay in revealing that.

It shouldn’t shock to find that Powell soon turns out to be a U.S. intelligence agent who’s in search of Bruner, and they sign up together without either rumbling each other. It should not remotely shock to find that Price isn’t as he seems either, at least not entirely.

He was born in Shanghai, or so he claims, to a father who dealt in Cambodian antiquities, but he pretends to be Dutch and comes out as German to Reicher. Realising some but not all of the truth, he has Reicher visit an Arab he knows who can remove SS tattoos without a trace, so clearly he’s a Nazi sympathiser.

It turns out that he’s also a gunrunner who’s supplying arms to the Việt Minh during their struggle for independence from the French. At this point Saigon is in French Indochina and a war was raging. This seems to be the first film set during the First Indochina War and it casts a number of talented Asian American actors in Asian roles, including Philip Ahn and Richard Loo. Sadly, however, Li-Ho-Kay, who works for Price in undetermined but sinister fashion, is a clearly American actress, Carol Thurston.

So, this is serious stuff, even though we saw credits for Orry-Kelly’s gowns for Miss Toren and the writers of the songs she sings. So this is a French Foreign Legion Nazi hunt musical? Sure, because she’s Lili Maubert, who not only sings at Le Petite Tonkinoise, in both English and German, but does so as an undercover French agent. Not bad for a Swede, huh? This was her second English language role, after Casbah.

With Dick Powell playing the gruff good guy and Marta Toren his believable contact and far more unbelievable romantic interest—we find ourselves asked to buy into this lounge singer and secret agent happily leaving it all behind for the hay of Corbett’s Nebraska farm; hey, if they need excitement, they can always drive up to Omaha!—and Stephen McNally the face of evil and brutal amorality, that leaves Price as the character with the most promise of an actual story arc. It doesn’t arrive and he ends up a lot closer to black than white than a true war profiteer should, but it is something.

Just in case we found ourselves settling into this Nazi hunt within the Legion, we shift into outright war movie, then P.O.W. movie, then escape movie. Given that it had already found its way into five genres—Foreign Legion, film noir, thriller, romance and musical—adding a further three seems a little overkill. We could even add adventure, mystery and drama if we wanted to be expansive. It’s easier to find the genres it doesn’t move into!

Oddly, there isn’t any horror, given that the director, Robert Florey, was well known for his horror movies, like Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Beast with Five Fingers, even if they are far from representative of his entire career. It isn’t science fiction or fantasy either, though I would have believed the romantic angle more if it was a fantasy dream sequence as Corbett lay dying, Bruner free from his grasp. This was the era of the Production Code though, and I’d not want to see the Nazi win.

The filmmakers clearly didn’t either and the final scene, ridiculous fantasy hayride aside, is Bruner being hanged back at Nuremberg, as a cartoon underline to the trials’ closure of that despicable era. It does its job, starkly enough, without delving into psychology the way that later, far more powerful films did, like The Man in the Glass Booth.

This would have been a far better picture if it had figured out what it wanted to be, rather than a string of scenes that led up to that one moment. Robert Buckner wrote it in the wake of the absence of Bormann from the trials and the realisation that many ex-Nazis—with one notable moment in this film highlighting that there may be a difference between those who served because they had to to survive and the die hards who did so because they wanted to—were serving in the French Foreign Legion as a sort of escape.

Price is the character who explains the title, namely that the abundance of former Nazis in the Legion is called “the Fourth Reich” by the Germans but the far more applicable “Rogues’ Regiment” by the French. While that was quite the pivotal moment, he gets too few of them in a film that needed more focus.