Plot
In the final moments of the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu, a weakened French garrison anticipates a last assault by communist Viet Minh troops.
The garrison commander, Basque Lt. Col. Pierre-Noel Raspeguy (Quinn), has called central headquarters for reinforcements. Headquarters sends only a single plane load of French paratroopers, under the command of Major De Clairefons. Despite Raspeguy's attempts to provide covering fire, the paratroopers are slaughtered as they land. Major De Clairefons is killed when his parachute drags him into a minefield. Raspeguy is enraged that General Melies (Jean Servais) sent only one plane, and further believes that Melies intends to make Raspeguy responsible for the entire debacle at Dien Bien Phu.
The Viet Minh overrun the French, with the survivors captured and imprisoned. Among Raspeguy's friends are military historian Captain Phillipe Esclavier (Alain Delon), Indochina born Captain Boisfeures (Maurice Ronet), surgeon Captain Dia (Gordon Heath) and Lt Ben Mahidi (George Segal), an Algerian-born paratrooper who turns down a Viet Minh leader's (Burt Kwouk) offer for preferential treatment because he is an Arab. Raspeguy's leadership keeps the men together in their captivity. When released after a treaty between the Viet Minh and France, Raspeguy leads his men in demolishing a delousing station that they see as a humiliation.
Upon his return home to Algeria, Ben Mahidi is disgusted at the treatment of his people, especially when his teenaged brother is machine gunned by the police for spraying graffiti in support of independence from France. He deserts from the army to join the rebels of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), becoming a guerilla leader.
Upon his own return from Indochina, Lt. Colonel Raspeguy starts a relationship with Countess Nathalie De Clairefons (Michèle Morgan), widow of the Major who died while trying to reinforce Raspeguy's garrison. The Countess' military contacts result in Raspeguy being given command of the new 10th Regiment of Parachutistes Coloniaux, serving under General Melies in the Algerian war.
The General briefs him that the command is his last chance in the military; if his Regiment fails, Raspeguy's career is finished. Raspeguy recruits his comrades in arms from Indochina and trains his battalion with unorthodox methods such as using live ammunition on an assault course to encourage speed and initiative.
Soon after beginning counter insurgency operations in both urban and rural environments, Esclavier falls in love with Mahidi's sister Aicha (Claudia Cardinale) who is loyal to the FLN and uses her friendship with Esclavier to smuggle explosive detonators. The previously naive Esclavier begins to have a new view of his nation's conduct, as the FLN rebels and French parachutists try to outdo each other in breaking the rules of war.
Read more about this topic: Lost Command
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)