I just finished watching 'King of the Khyber Rifles'. It is only loosely based on Talbot Mundy's book which I enjoyed reading many years ago. Mundy, an Englishman, wrote sympathetically about India and its people. But in the book, Captain King was not an Anglo-Indian, but in this movie, he is and often gets called a chi-chi or a half-caste. Not politically correct, but this movie is set in 1857. This is the one of the 2 movies in which Irish-American Tyrone Power plays a likeable Indian or half-Indian character! The other movie is 'Rains of Ranchipur', which portrays a love affair between an Englishwoman and an Indian doctor.
The first half of the film is rather slow-moving. Tyrone Power and Terry Moore lack any chemistry together. Ty looks rather stiff and bored. But in the second half of the movie, he is more animated as a dashing officer who leads a charge against the lawless frontier tribes whose lands are now in Pakistan, but were part of British India till 1947. The so-called Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 forms the backdrop of this film which shows only one fictional battle in a remote part of what was north-western India, far removed from north and central India where most of the battles took place.
Michael Rennie is quite good as the upright British officer, but Terry Moore, later to be Mrs. Howard Hughes, is quite unimpressive in her role and is not all that good-looking.
The first half of the film is rather slow-moving. Tyrone Power and Terry Moore lack any chemistry together. Ty looks rather stiff and bored. But in the second half of the movie, he is more animated as a dashing officer who leads a charge against the lawless frontier tribes whose lands are now in Pakistan, but were part of British India till 1947. The so-called Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 forms the backdrop of this film which shows only one fictional battle in a remote part of what was north-western India, far removed from north and central India where most of the battles took place.
Michael Rennie is quite good as the upright British officer, but Terry Moore, later to be Mrs. Howard Hughes, is quite unimpressive in her role and is not all that good-looking.