Fill Your Canteen For A Desert Crossing

Beau Ideal (1931) Gives Once Silent Legionnaires Something To Talk About

This appears to be another of RKO's from the 1930-31 season that fell into Public Domain. It was a sequel to Paramount's very successful Beau Geste from 1926, the latter being silent with bigger names than Radio brought to bear here. The same director, Herbert Brenon, was back aboard, but he'd accomplish less doing talkers. Foreign legion stories worked better on mute setting than gab terms, desert locale not conducive to sound repro'ing. Beau Ideal creaks like stuff done seasons earlier, acting of play-to-gallery melo-dramatizing, which for me incresed fun in the relic. Noble sacrifice goes to absurd extreme, stiff upper-lip-ness order of the day, but less credible than if a Ronald Colman had been aboard. Beau Ideal was big spending on RKO's part, among higher negative costs up to then ($707K). The loss of $330K might have resolved them to give up sandpiles for a while, but along came John Ford to lead another troop into dunes for The Lost Patrol in 1934, to far more fruitful outcome than Beau Ideal.