Owned release: The 2008 Universal A&C box. This is on disc 11.
Acquired: Feb. 2013, Amazon.
Seen before?: Once from this disc - June 26, 2017.
Lotta creak and lotta corn in this one - the thing about the Charles Lamont A&C films (as opposed to say, the Charles Barton films, which feel a bit tighter on the whole) is that they seem to wear their second-handedness without shame. Lamont is under no illusions about what's being made here, and he's trusting the expertise of his stars to put over a script that mostly contains everything you'd expect from a first draft whose parameters contain "Foreign Legion," "desert" and "Arabs." It's a weak adventure B-picture that just happens to have two extremely funny people wandering through it, laying waste to everything they touch. This is tweaked by the opening narration, which begins with grand pomposity, rhapsodizing about the merciless desert sun and the brave men of the Foreign Legion, before deflating to mention two boys "the Foreign Legion would like to forget."
A famous George Carlin bit has him arguing that anything can be made funny, and while he was talking about offensive or shocking humor, the same can be said about the sort of boilerplate concepts on display in Foreign Legion. It's about committing to the bit - the mirage bit, for instance, probably played flat on paper, but when you mix in Lou's four-stage disbelief at the ice cream soda in front of him, or the brief attempt to sit back down on the missing stool in hopes that it will rematerialize, or Bud's ecstatic reverie upon finding an actual oasis... well, it kills. Lou misfiring a machine gun could in theory be good for a couple chuckles, but the bit runs and runs, gathering more absurdity with each passing minute, turning it into a gleeful dose of destructive anarchy. There's fewer laughs in the material involving the Arab villains, mostly from the necessity of having to keep an element of danger in the narrative (and also, yeah, kinda racist), but even so there's some amusing flourishes of marginalia, like the emcee at the slave-trade auction descending into pure auctioneer gibberish or the His and multiple Hers towels briefly glimpsed as a background gag in the climax as the boys drive a car through a harem bath. They're dumb jokes, but they work because the involved parties were committed to them.
Here's where the canniness comes in - "selling the bit" is also the whole point of the narrative. The story hinges on A&C's involvement in a crooked wrestling scam run by a Mafioso type. The conflict arises when one of the wrestlers, an enormous man-mountain named Abdullah the Assassin, refuses to commit to the bit he's signed on for and lose to his opponent. He then buggers off back home to Algiers, and the boys have to follow him at the behest of the Mafioso, who has a lot of money riding on the match. After a series of misadventures, they fall into the clutches of an evil sheik who is also of course a cousin to Abdullah. Bud and Lou are sentenced to be torn limb from limb by the sheik's wrestlers, Abdullah and another fellow played by Tor Johnson, but Abdullah reveals to Lou that he's ready to go back to America and will help them escape by rigging the wrestling match - by deciding, at last, to sell the bit that he couldn't bring himself to do before. That commitment to wholehearted fakery in the name of entertainment saves the day, even as the ruse that saves the day - the "Boston routine" - is a cheap and obvious ploy. The people making these films... they were smart cookies in my opinion.
Also, there is a catfish who wears false teeth and spits water in Lou's face. Just felt like that needed to be mentioned.
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