Instant Late Show

By Christopher Porterfield

MARCH OR DIE. Directed by Dick Richards. Screenplay by David Goodman.

It is tempting to describe March or Die as this month's Catherine Deneuve movie. The French actress has appeared on-screen so often in the past year or so that one suspects scientists have discovered the secret of duplicating her mesmerizing face on lifelike robots. Perhaps not one but several indistinguishable Catherine Deneuves are moving among the film studios simultaneously, all looking lovely and mysterious, and all giving remote-control performances that are just this side of catatonia.

This time Deneuve--or is it Deneuve-1?--plays an elegant, slightly tarnished Parisienne who, rather implausibly, finds herself accompanying a detachment of French Foreign Legionnaires to Morocco just after World War I. The Legionnaires are assigned to protect a French archaeological expedition against attacks by uppity Arab tribes who seem to think they have a right to their own national treasures. Deneuve is attracted to a roguish cat burglar (Terence Hill), who is seeking refuge in the Legion from the cops. Having already lost a husband and father to war, however, she wants no more entanglements, no more feeling. To spare Hill, she throws herself at the embittered West Point reject (Gene Hackman) who commands the Legionnaires.

That's the kind of picture it is--everybody wears his world-weariness on his sleeve while gallantly enacting some ritual of self-sacrifice, preferably a futile one. The Legionnaires are a carefully assorted lot, the exotic equivalent of the cross sections found in bomber crews in World War II movies--a soulful French muscian, a what-ho English blueblood, a hulking Russian who once guarded the Czar's family, and so on. Hackman and the chieftain of the hostile desert tribes (Ian Holm) are, naturally, old and respectful friends, although somehow Scriptwriter David Zelag Goodman neglected to make them former college roommates.

Director Dick Richards never dwells on any one cliche for long, and he moves the gory battle scenes along positively briskly. March or Die manages a fairly business-like air. But its limitation as well as its achievement is that it faithfully re-creates the sand-blown Legion epics of the 1930s. It is an instant late show. And like those oldies on TV, it is dotted with lovably preposterous lines. The immaculate Deneuve, looking in a filthy casbah like a woman at a Chanel showing, coos to Hill: "You don't belong here." Hackman stands amid the devastation of a French outpost where the previous commander thought fortifications were unnecessary. "Obviously," says Hackman, eying the bleached skeletons, "he was wrong."

As the movie trudges toward Hackman's climactic stand against the Arabs, its few substantial themes are left behind in the dunes like exhausted Legionnaires. Hackman is pitted in an early sequence against a scholar from the Louvre (Max von Sydow), who believes that the recovery of a few life-enriching shards of history and art is well worth the loss of hundreds of Legion and Arab lives. "We're both in the grave business," sneers Hackman. "You dig them up and I fill them in." Later, Von Sydow seems to lose the thread of the argument and takes to sitting in corners and gazing hungrily at Deneuve.

More important, Arab Leader Holm denounces the mission of both men--the soldier as well as the archaeologist--as "a rape of our heritage." But nobody pays much attention to what Holm says after he emerges as an opportunist who is only using the colonialist issue to unite the desert tribes in his own drive for power. This is a pity. In view of some of the tacky beach-front resorts that have since been built with foreign money along the Moroccan coast, one cannot help thinking that the fellow really had a point there.

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