I think I enjoyed this a bit more when I saw it years ago. Now that I'm so terribly sophisticated, I notice the clichés leaping out at me, fangs bared. Will the train make it, slowly creeping along the rickety bridge? Will the bus ("The Wayward Bus")? Will the car ("Murder by Death")? Will the explosive-laden truck ("Sorcerer II," "The Wages of Fear")? But, what the heck. This is a headlong adventure through the deserts and mountains of North West India in 1905. Everything shouts at you and ends in an exclamation point. The acting is outrageous. Even the fastidious Wilfred Hyde-White is outrageously fastidious. The principal heavy, Herbert Lom, sweats like a pig, an animal that he, as a Muslim, hates.
There is an attempt on the part of the writers to inject some serious matters into the story. A boy of five is the surviving Prince of India, presumably a Hindu, while the villains are a radical Muslim sect. "Not all Muslims" support the bloody rebellion, as one character remarks. And the British colonials talk about how their presence is needed to "keep order" while all about them thousands of Indians are slaughtering each other. At the end, the young Prince gives a present to the hero, Kenneth More, but comment ruefully that someday he will have to fight the Brits. Largely because of Ghandi, the Brits, of course, eventually did leave India to its own devices. At the time, it didn't lead to an improvement since the Hindus and Moslems immediately went to war and finally split into two or three independent nations.
This hardly matters to the colorful story of a handful of disparate men, women, and children trying to survive a three-hundred mile journey through a hostile land on a dilapidated train with one coal car and one coach. It's a generic "journey" movie that we've all seen before -- in "Stagecoach" and elsewhere, but it's a lot of fun. I love those old narrow-gauge Indian trains with their diminutive piping whistles.
Do they get to the end of their journey successfully and (mostly) in one piece? Two old puff-puffs pulling my extremities in opposite directions couldn't get me to spill the beans.
There is an attempt on the part of the writers to inject some serious matters into the story. A boy of five is the surviving Prince of India, presumably a Hindu, while the villains are a radical Muslim sect. "Not all Muslims" support the bloody rebellion, as one character remarks. And the British colonials talk about how their presence is needed to "keep order" while all about them thousands of Indians are slaughtering each other. At the end, the young Prince gives a present to the hero, Kenneth More, but comment ruefully that someday he will have to fight the Brits. Largely because of Ghandi, the Brits, of course, eventually did leave India to its own devices. At the time, it didn't lead to an improvement since the Hindus and Moslems immediately went to war and finally split into two or three independent nations.
This hardly matters to the colorful story of a handful of disparate men, women, and children trying to survive a three-hundred mile journey through a hostile land on a dilapidated train with one coal car and one coach. It's a generic "journey" movie that we've all seen before -- in "Stagecoach" and elsewhere, but it's a lot of fun. I love those old narrow-gauge Indian trains with their diminutive piping whistles.
Do they get to the end of their journey successfully and (mostly) in one piece? Two old puff-puffs pulling my extremities in opposite directions couldn't get me to spill the beans.