Das letzte Fort (1928)

At the center of the story are three men who once had a great deal of bad luck with women and therefore decided to prove they were still “real men” in a man’s world of adventure, combat, and exotic places. In the Syrian desert, they find the coveted “great adventure.” There, they join several Arabs who are to defend a fort with fierce determination against the advancing French colonial troops. For a long time, however, little happens there beyond the daily routine, and the boredom is nerve-racking and exhausting for most of them. That changes abruptly one day when Yvonne Leblanc, the daughter of the French Major Leblanc, who is being held prisoner at the fort, enters it. She intends nothing less than to free her father, and believes the best way to achieve this is to turn the men’s heads. A fierce rivalry soon develops among the fort’s three Europeans: Lieutenant Brand and the two soldiers, Croff and Gestino. Sexual desire spreads among the starved mercenaries, and soon all standards of civilization are forgotten. Croff, a particularly brutish man who tries to rape Yvonne, and his buddy Gestino behave more and more like savages. At one point, they even gamble for the seductive Frenchwoman. Faced with the threat of his two comrades assaulting her, Lieutenant Brand soon feels compelled to protect Yvonne. In time, he falls in love with her. Brand is also the one who eventually helps her escape with her father, but at the last moment his sense of military duty awakens again, and he stays behind in the final battle against the charging French, at the side of his unrestrained and brutalized comrades, to fall alongside them.