Concerned less with the usual preoccupations of war films – elaborate battle sequences, complicated military strategies – than with revealing the cracks and fault lines created under pressure, The Lost Patrol examines the psyches of a small, isolated group as they break down under stress. Boris Karloff, in one of his best roles, plays a deeply religious soldier slowly driven mad as fellow members of his patrol, lost deep in the desert, are eliminated one by one by unseen Arab gunmen. Conditions on location – the film was shot in Arizona in August – were almost as brutal as the ones depicted, intensifying the air of paranoia and desperation that pervades the film.