The Lost Patrol

A shot rings out, the captain falls and with him dies the knowledge of his unit's mission. Now a stalwart sergeant takes charge as he and his men try to escape the surrounding, unseen snipers who felled their captain. They hole up at an oasis in a land that, a Bible-toting soldier notes, was once the Garden of Eden.

Filming in the searing Arizona desert, John Ford guides this powerful tale of men and mortality set in World War I Mesopotamia. Victor McLaglen, who would claim the following year's Best Actor (1935) Oscar as Ford's protagonist in The Informer, plays the sergeant. Boris Karloff is the religious firebrand whose zeal turns to feverish madness. And the unforgiving terrain is as much an enemy as thesnipers it conceals. Once Eden. Now a hell.