Warwick Productions enjoyed a hit with Zarak so they decided to reheat many of the same ingredients for a similar tale. Once again, Victor Mature is a bandit leader on the North West Frontier in colonial India who battles against the British – only he’s really a goodie, he’s just been blamed for an attack on a British outpost which he didn’t do. The real person responsible – an evil Indian prince (Walter Gotel, familiar as the head of the KGB from many a Bond film) – then creates more mischief by ordering a raid to kill Mature’s wife, child and people, triggering off a frontier war. And once again, Mature has a British rival whom he comes to respect, and dies heroically at the end killing the real baddie.
The British love to admire their opponents - worthy adversaries pop up all the time in British Empire movies. They also love to bring up the thuggee cult, the suppression of which was a great way to justify occupying India, so Gotel is turned into a thuggee as well, just for good measure to remind people how evil he is (even though it’s never really used as a story point).
Having said that, this is an entertaining adventure tale, with a strong performance from Mature, who does tormented and brooding very well (it’s a shame he never played more villains). John Gilling’s direction is very vigorous – he does particular well at action scenes of which there are many. And the production values are very high.
It’s less successful in other areas. The script isn’t the strongest (Gilling rewrote a Richard Maibaum draft), mainly consisting of characters rushing from one action sequence to another. Mature and the British just seem to realise they’ve been played without doing much investigatory work.
It’s also undercast apart from Mature. Warwick always used to have a British co-star to support their American lead, but here the British co-star is split between two: Antony Newley (second billed – he was under contract to Warwick) plays a sergeant who gets involved in the action and Norman Woodland is the officer in charge.
Newley’s role could have been removed from the movie entirely; he just sort of joins in willy-nilly (he does help Mature escape from prison but that could also have been accomplished by the Anne Aubrey character). He does a bit of comedy schtick which is mostly irritating - although there’s a funny bit where he tries to requisition some dynamite prior to the final battle and the supply clerk won’t give it to him without the right form – this felt very true! Woodland is a fine actor and gives a good performance, but the part would have been better with someone who had more star power.
Anne Aubrey plays Woodland’s daughter, whose boyfriend is killed by Mature’s enemy early in the piece (a big shock, actually). She seems to develop a crush on Mature but this is disappointingly not developed – a bit of miscegenation would have done the film wonders. (She never romances Newley either.) Aubrey’s performance is pretty terrible – she’s not in the league of earlier Warwick starlets like Janet Leigh or even Anita Ekberg - so she's a flaw. But as I said it has rousing action and moves along at a fair clip.
No comments:
Post a Comment