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John Ford's superb 1934 film version of Philip MacDonald's novel The Lost Patrol has tended to obscure the fact that the MacDonald book had been previously filmed as a British silent picture. Coincidentally, the star of the original Lost Patrol was Cyril McLaglen, brother of the star of the 1934 version, Victor McLaglen. The story remains basically the same in both films: A British patrol in the Mesopotamian desert, pinned down by Arab sharpshooters in a tiny oasis, is decimated one man at a time before help arrives. Some cineasts have argued that the silent version was even better than the Ford remake, if only because it did not have to rely upon the florid dialogue passages written by Dudley Nichols. Lost Patrol would be filmed again as the 1939 western Badlands, and was "unofficially" remade several times after that.