The Unvanquished

Directed by Alain Cavalier, the 1964 French-Italian film noir L'Insoumis (The Unvanquished) is set during the final phase of the Algerian War. Alain Delon plays Thomas Vlassenroot, a deserter from the French Foreign Legion at the time of the 1961 uprising. When a former lieutenant now working for the OAS asks him to abduct the lawyer Dominique Servet (Lea Massari), Thomas accepts. Caught giving the captive water, he ends up in a shootout with his OAS comrades and flees, after which they begin hunting the pair down. The screenplay drew on real events: the 1962 kidnapping of a young French lawyer in Algeria by the OAS and her release after four days by one of her captors. The production was troubled — Delon was injured during filming, French censors demanded cuts that damaged the film's integrity, and audiences reacted coolly to its subject matter.