It’s set in 1917 in Mesopotamia-modern-day Iraq-where a squad of British soldiers on horseback is separated from its company and set adrift with little water, no sense of direction, and no defense against the local snipers who pick them off with a derisive impunity. The blank uniformity of the desert sets a bleak tone of existential cruelty in John Ford’s strikingly modern, quasi-absurdist First World War drama, from 1934.
