“Le Sergent X is a film expressly built around Ivan Mosjoukine, an actor of extreme importance in the silent era, but whose star was then inexorably setting. After a disastrous transfer in Hollywood, the actor had come back to Europe, to Berlin, but with the films produced by German studios he did not recover the consensus of his years in Paris; to further worsen his débacle, now sound had become an irreversible phenomenon, and with it the problem of language, either French or German, which Mosjoukine was not capable of speaking fluently, and mastering.

The protagonist of the story was of course a Russian officer, Sergeant X, who – as written in the programme of the time – ‘swept away by a story of love and sorrow, sees his lost love, the son who has not recognised him and whom he will never seen again disappear in the misty blue mountains of the Great Atlas…’.

Made in Nice in the double version, the film passed from Strijewskij’s hands to Volkov’s, sometimes indicated as its supervisor, or in other instances – as in Italy – as its director. Before arriving at the final title, the film changed name more than once: at first Les isolés, then Vive la Legion!, and again Le desert”.

Vittorio Martinelli