This was an Academy Best Picture nominee starring Gary Cooper, but neither of those details drew me in as much as the peculiar title. What makes it more peculiar is that the film focuses almost equally on three Bengal lancers. It turns out that the title was lifted from a book with a different plot and characters, much like Blade Runner was.
Cooper plays Lieutenant McGregor, a Canadian serving in the British Army in colonial India. He becomes well acquainted with two lieutenants new to his unit: Forsythe (Franchot Tone) and Stone (Richard Cromwell), the latter being the estranged son of their colonel (Guy Standing) and newly commissioned. Alas, Stone has yet to cultivate sufficiently responsible behavior and ends up a hostage for incipient rebel leader Mohammed Khan (Douglas Dumbrille), who overestimates the colonel's sentimentality. Fortunately, McGregor is only so ruly himself and can persuade Forsythe....
I'm sure a story like this would never be told today. For starters, even Brits at the time didn't glorify imperialism that much. Heck, Hitler loved it for that very reason. And modern filmmakers are reluctant to vilify Islamic South Asians against European heroes.
On that note, there's a great deal of, er, whatever you'd call the equivalent of blackface. I don't just mean the scenes in which soldiers grease their skin and attempt to pass for natives (with mixed results); probably fewer than half the "real" natives were played by people of Indian descent. Quite a few were the other kind of Indian -- Paiute, to be precise -- and even they didn't get big roles.
But if you can get past the political aspects, there's a pretty compelling story in play. Much of the time, it's fun to see the main trio bounce off each other, with Forsythe being especially sardonic. The colonel is long thought to have a heart of, well, stone, not least toward his son, but Major Hamilton (C. Aubrey Smith) defends the man's hard-won military commitment, and we can see both sides. Even Khan is fairly charming in his own right, until he resorts to grisly if mostly undepicted torture. We have him to thank for the oft-paraphrased "We have ways of making men talk."
And then there's the action, predominantly at the climax. It gets exciting for '30s fare. I see why it's compared to Gunga Din and paired on the DVD with Beau Geste.
Overall, I enjoyed TLoaBL in spite of myself. I'd recommend a few less controversial films in the subgenre over it, but if you're into a lot of oldies, you may well want to get around to this one.
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