NORTHWEST FRONTIER

When lists of the great directors are being drawn up the name of J Lee Thompson is always noticeably absent, (even lists of great British directors tend to ignore him). Perhaps that's because Thompson's films were never meant to be taken too seriously and were certainly never meant to please the critics but he was a great director of crowd-pleasing entertainments of which NORTH WEST FRONTIER is one of the best. It was the middle film in a trio of great action/adventure yarns that began with ICE COLD IN ALEX and concluded with THE GUNS OF NAVARONE.


The North West Frontier is, of course, in India; the warring factions in this case are the Muslims and the Hindus and the Muslims are determined to kill a young Hindu prince so it's up to Kenneth More and Lauren Bacall to get him to safety which means a train journey across some very dangerous terrain, and this is one of the greatest of all 'train' movies. The train itself is something of an old jalopy; the driver is the wonderful IS Johar and the other passengers are Wilfred Hyde White, Ursula Jeans, Eugene Decker and a brilliantly cast Herbert Lom and there are several great set-pieces as good as any in action cinema. So if J Lee Thompson isn't Welles or Tarkovsky or Kubrick, he was, nevertheless, very much his own man and I would be much happier watching NORTH WEST FRONTIER over and over again, if stranded on a desert island with a projector and a suitably large screen, than anything by those giants of cinema.