Movie review - "Soldiers Three" (1951) **

After King Solmon's Mines, MGM had a new star in Stewart Granger but they didn't always give him the best vehicles - although this sounds as though it should be been ideal, a brawling knock about comedy action tale about three privates in the British army in late 19th century. Gunga Din showed how such a tale could work but this isn't in that class.

Tay Garnett is not George Stevens and Granger, Robert Newton and Cyril Cusack are not Victor McLaglen, Doug Fairbanks and Cary Grant. Granger isn't entirely happily cast as a cockney - he tries but it's a broad over the top performance (rather like his one as a French Canadian trapper in The Wild North) not very effective. They don't really give him a love interest either - a few girls pop in and out but no relationship, which was a mistake.

He has some chemistry with Newton but none with Cusack and the three of them never seem like makes. In fairness, Newton and Cusack aren't given much to do - the second half of the movie gets bored with the three of them and focuses on Granger and David Niven, who is 2 I C to the colonel, Walter Pidgeon. Presumably this was done to placate Niven, who was a bigger name than Newton and Cusack and whose role in the first half is thankless. But they give the heroism to Granger and Niven which undermines Newton and Cusack and you don't have Soldiers Three. They should have bitten the bullet and just cast Niven as someone in the lower ranks.

Indians aren't given much of a go - there is an Indian villain and his Uncle Tom relative who is into Gandhi like passive resistance (a sop to post war attitudes) - but no character of much weight or importance, certainly nothing like Gunga Din. It's also offensive all those British soldiers standing around in the 1918 prologue toasting Douglas Haig for being a great general (and would soldiers who've just finished a four year long world war be interested at all in Pidgeon's crappy reminiscences? I wish they hadn't started with this sequence because it made me wonder what happened to the three soldiers and I figured the all probably died broke and alcoholic.)

There is some decent action and the cast is consistently impressive. No colour and no location photography.