Beau Geste

Beau Geste (1966)

The World's Immortal Adventure!

Brothers Beau, John and Digby Geste join the Foreign Legion, where they fall under the rule of tyrannical Sergeant Markoff. Beau and John are assigned to Fort Zinderneuf, where Markoff tries to break their spirit, aware of a dark family secret concerning a fabulous jewel one of them carries. As tensions rise, Arabs attack the fort and rivalries must be thrown aside in a desperate battle for life.

Date of release
1966-09-02
TMDB
5.6 / 10 (11)
Runtime
1h 43m
Genres
Drama, War, Action
Director
Douglas Heyes

Casting

Interesting facts

Beau Geste is a 1966 American adventure film based on the 1924 novel by P. C. Wren filmed by Universal Pictures in Technicolor and Techniscope near Yuma, Arizona and directed by Douglas Heyes. This is the least faithful of the various film adaptations of the original novel. In this version, there are only two brothers, rather than three, and there are no sequences showing Beau's life prior to his joining the Legion.

Production

Gene Kelly was originally set to produce and direct under his contract with Universal. He called the book "a minor 20th century classic... we're not updating it." When he left Universal to make a movie at 20th Century Fox the film was produced by Walter Seltzer under his deal with Universal.

Seltzer said the budget would be $4 million, $2.5 million for production, the rest for prints and advertising:

Unlike the two before, we have no stars as such. We're betting on unknowns. Well, that's a misnomer; they're known but they're not stars. Certainly not superannuated ones... [Because we want] To attract the young audience – who constitute roughly 80% of the moviegoing public.

Among the changes from earlier versions included:

changing the sergeant into the character Dagineau – "we show what evil motivates him", said Seltzer, "we've made him more – or less – than just a black villain";

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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