Cinema: Horatio Algeria

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Lost Command, an Errol Flynn movie made without Errol Flynn, looks like one of those war pictures they used to print on bubble-gum cards.

It needn't have. The 1960 bestseller (The Centurions) by Jean Larteguy described with a certain politico-military sophistication how French colonels, beaten in Indo-China, applied terrorist tactics to the struggle for Algeria. From this epic theme, Director Mark Robson has derived one of those big bad action pictures in which the explosions look frighteningly real but unfortunately don't kill off the actors fast enough.

The Flynn of the flick is a dashing colonel of les paras (Anthony Quinn) who. is presented as a square-jawed Horatio Algeria. He organizes his regiment to fight a brush-fire war, and with the hesitant assistance of an aide de camp (Alain Delon) who falls in love with a rebel belle (Claudia Cardinale), he conducts a brilliant but brutal campaign in the interior. In the end he wins a general's stars but loses his self-respect.

Quinn, who has played in a lot of B-numbing movies recently, acts as if he painfully shared the loss. Or maybe he just looks worried because the bangs, booms, blats and blooies on the sound track are so loud that the spectators can hardly hear what he is saying. But if he is saying what the script says ("Out of the trucks and take cover, men!"), he ought to be glad they can't.