KING OF THE KHYBER RIFLES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 769, 15 April 1954, Page 22

KING OF THE KHYBER RIFLES

(20th Century-Fox) Four things greater than all things areWomen and Horses and Power and War... IPLING, of course, wasn’t K thinking of Tyrone Power, but if we make that one slight correction the couplet stands as a pretty succinct summary of the box-office recipe for this latest’ CinemaScope extravaganza. If it proves a good recipe, as here presented by the Anamorphic lens and Stereophonic Sound, then I’m farther — the box-office norm than I thought was. The story-a somewhat free and easy adaptation, not of Kipling, but of Talbot Mundy-takes us back to one of those heroic passages in our Imperial history that Hollywood loves so much (they respond so well to Technicolor). It is 1857. Down in the sweating ports of India cases of the new Enfield rifles and their ambiguously greased cartridges are being unloaded for the Sepoys and soldiers of the Queen. Up on the North-West Frontier, mad mullahs and other wallahs are already in-

flaming the populace in the bazaars. In Peshawar, the garrison is sitting on a volcano; but they are stoics, these sahibs. However hot and bothered they may be underneath, on the surface they remain calm. The barracks resound as usual to the regulation bugle-calls, squadrons of lancers wheel-~and trot, despatch riders come and go, and Highlanders in anamorphic kilts blow lustily on their stereophonic bagpipes. Even the General’s daughter thinks nothing of dashing off to town, solo side-saddle, without so much as a hiya to the ayah. But history is on the march in the hills and the tribesmen of the Pass are flocking to the standard of Khurrum Khan, a turbanned trouble-maker with an impeccable, if menacing, accent. Between the sahibs and the threat posed by Khurrum Khan stands Captain King (Tyrone Power). He’s not King of the Khyber Rifles yet-after all, the darned things are still in their packing-cases down in Karachi or Calcutta. But if Khurrum is the pride of Afghanistan, King is the pride of the other ’alf. It is, however, not an unmixed pride. King is a frightfully decent chap, gets on jolly well with his men, even speaks their lingo. He’s handsome, too, and he hasn’t been a day in the mess before the General’s daughter is making Khy-

ber passes at him. But, to let you into the dark secret-though a chap hates to say this kind of thing about a chap -he’s not quite pukka. It turns out that he’s, as you might say (if you follow me), er, chichi. In fact, he’s a half-Afghan, or an Afridi — half-some-thing, anyway. What’s more, he is really half-brother to Khurrum, and, dash it all, who wants to share quarters with a half-caste, anyway? But enough of these vulgar fractions, there is the set-up. Captain King is a man of Two Worlds, pulled in two directions, and there’s that great wide screen to show the tug-of-war on. On the whole it’s a dull showing. A wide screen, unless it presents us with a reasonable solid story, only magnifies its own banalities, and King of the Khyber Rifles comes about 35 years too late for me. It’s the kind of thing one used to read in Chums (less the soppy bits), and I doubt if the North-West Frontier rates much space in Chums these days. As for Terry Moore, the General’s daugh-ter-as Kipling said (forgetting what he’d said before), a woman’s only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke. Where Miss Moore is concerned I’m ready to settle for half an ounce of tobacco.