SOLDIERS THREE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 649, 7 December 1951, Page 21

SOLDIERS THREE

(M.G.M.) H E. BATES once said that Kipling * had never given him a moment’s pleasure. I don’t share this extreme view, though I’m no Kipling fan, have read little of him, and if Soldiers’ Three, "suggested" by his stories, is anything like typical of his flavour, feel I haven’t missed much. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised to find him come out of it the better in any comparison with the film. He might be funny. I found the film for the most part pretty dull, and I’m sure this wasn’t due only to allergy; but perhaps I should add that my 10-year-old graded it. "good." The hero of the story is Ackroyd, though I couldn’t get it out of my head that it. was Stewart Granger. After a generous measure of preliminary non-sense-fighting, boozing, and, of course, discovering a real Hollywood glamour girl in an Indian village-Ackroyd deserts to rejoin his mates, who have been sent off in a garrison party of fifty to what seems a certain death. They are already surrounded, but in great spirit, when he makes contact. [Throwing the villain down a well with a quite exasperating lack of haste, he leaves the dynamite which is to blow his mates sky-high till the fuse is only a few inches long, and then can’t decide,

Tor the iife of him, which way to toss it. MeanWhile the Colonel has also disobeyed orders and marched to the relief of the garrison, though I suspect that with Acktoyd and Co. there his forces weren’t called on for more than a bit of mopping up. It turns out that a certain amount of disobedi- | ence was reckoned on by the shrewd psychologist who’d been giving the orders, so no one is shot or court-martialled. Indeed, some _ honours are bestowed — verbally, at any rate. "Ackroyd is England," the Colonel says. Poor old England -she’s had some terrible things said about her at one time and another.