esrosedotblog

BUSHWAH

Today's NYTimes Best Film was

Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935)

After using this 'Best' list for awhile, one begins to infer a method to the sometimes apparent madness of individual selections.

There has to have been a sort of forced choice system for genré films. Within that, there must have been a quota for older, colonial, epic, adventures and this has to have fallen into the niche.

Gary Cooper and Franchot Tone (I used to like him a lot. He died early) improbably play rebellious Bengal Lancers; a batallion of peacekeepers in colonial India.

Cooper was a looker and there is a very long sequence with him shirtless (for those who care). Buff.

It starts a bit slow and we didn't like the characters very much.

And the values are skewed off our standards here.

It is not unlike what you still see today in Iraq. Westerners trying to keep the evil wogs in line, don't you know?

John did his indignant walkout very early and I almost ditched the film but then stayed with it.

It got better as the action increased.

This is the kind of film that Abbott and Costello and The Three Stooges had so much fun with. It is eminently mockable. And I have seen too many mocks.

"We have ways of making men talk" is an actual line.

Well they do. Bamboo shoots under the nails set afire. Ouch. Two out of three do not talk though.

It is interesting to note that where today we would see the nails coming off and burning, here, it required actual acting to convey the horror of it. I like this old-fashioned method.

The film does have a lot of good character actors: C. Aubrey Smith, Akim Tamiroff, J. Carrol Naish and others. Fun to watch that way.

At best this is a 3 out of Netflix5 but I will give it a 2.