More 'brown-face', pro-British, anti-Indian shenanigans around the Khyber Pass but Henry Hathaway's action flic "The Lives of a Bengal Lancer" is also beautifully acted and directed and has been unjustly forgotten over the decades. Gary Cooper, Franchot Tone and Richard Cromwell are the young officers fighting off the pesky Afridi tribesmen and C. Aubrey Smith and Sir Guy Standing, (as he was billed), are their older commanders.
It's basically just another western set on the Northwest Frontier and, however politically incorrect it might seem today, must be judged on the time in which it was made. What distinguishes this from similar movies of the period is the interplay between its central characters, (Cromwell is the green-around-the-gills son of Standing's commanding officer etc), the way Hathaway handles the 'domestic' scenes and from some very fine work from the cast, (even Cromwell is good in this one). Indeed this is something of a classic and it deserves to be better known.
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