A case of what might have been - David Lean wanted to make a movie out of Richard Mason's novel, intending at one stage to star Kenneth More, but never got around to it and the project wound up being made by the team of Dirk Bogarde and Ralph Thomas. Thomas could be okay as a director, he just wasn't David Lean.
This isn't bad, and benefits from a good performance from Bogarde, who is deal as the soulful British officer who falls in love with a Japanese girl in India in 1943. Bogarde wasn't always convincing as a man in love with women - far too many performances he seems disinterested - but he tries here, and his aloofness works with the cross cultural gap (for lack of a better word).
His female co-star isn't really up to him, but it's not that fatal because she doesn't have much of a character to play - a mysterious Oriental beauty. (It was the 1950s - foreigners could sleep with white stars but they had to be exotic and die at the end.)
There is some lovely location photography in India, we don't get many World War Two stories set in India and Burma which is great, the melodrama isn't bad, Roland Lewis gives one of his best performances as Bogarde's nasty colleague, and it's quite well done. Not a classic but definitely one of Thomas' best movies.
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