‘There are three types of men: the living, the dead and those at sea.’
Plato

Pierre Schoendoerffer’s feature film, Le Crabe Tambour (Drummer Crab) was an adaptation of his novel, published in 1976, which had been awarded the Grand Prix du Roman by the Académie française.⁽¹⁾ This complex and philosophical tale of sailors, based around a man’s insane quest and colonial nostalgia, was a big commercial success. It was, however, no small task for Schoendoerffer to impose his views of the world on the France of the 1970s, still half-heartedly anti-establishment and desiccated by the after-effects of the pseudo-subversive tropism born of the events of May 1968. What was Schoendoerffer’s world? A lost and idealised one, countercultural, where the moral values of honesty and honour took precedence over all other considerations; a very ‘old France’ universe, somewhat dilapidated, where institutions such as the Catholic Church still possessed genuine prestige and authority within society.

Schoendoerffer (an army volunteer in Indochina in 1952, taken prisoner at Dien Bien Phu in 1954), featured the military in his films as a means of reaching out to mankind in its purest condition, and of asking questions about the extent of its moral choices: ‘I elected to show the military in my films . . . What really interested me in the military condition was that it was a profitless society, with a degree of internal ruthlessness and a strict organisation; this gave me the chance to cut away the “humdrum daily detail” that is of no interest to me.'⁽²⁾ The director had already repeatedly addressed the world of the soldier (The 317^th Platoon (1964), based on several episodes in the war in Indochina) and he would return to the theme, notably with A Captain’s Honour in 1982, on the war in Algeria, followed by Dien Bien Phu in 1992.