Tuesday’s Overlooked Movies: North West Frontier (1959)

Film poster, with U.S. release title

North West Frontier (also known in the U.S. as Flame Over India) has several ideal ingredients for a good story—a small, diverse group of characters brought together in close quarters on a dangerous journey across forbidding territory, with both outside and inside threats to contend with along the way. If any of that sounds familiar, yes, this is a film that has often been compared to Stagecoach, and referred to as “the British version of a Western.” Those familiar elements are all employed well, and the more exotic setting makes an interesting twist on the story.

The film is set in British-occupied India, in 1905, where Moslem rebels are bent on killing a six-year-old Hindu prince, the heir of the people opposed to the rebels. The task of smuggling the boy out of a besieged garrison town and across hundreds of miles of hostile territory to safety is assigned to a plucky British officer, Captain Scott (Kenneth More). The last train has gone, but Scott manages to find a small, dilapidated old engine, nicknamed “Victoria,” in which to make their escape. Victoria, who is just about as much a character in the film as anyone, leaks water and steam in all the wrong places, requires much loving care from her devoted engineer Gupta (I.S. Johar) and has a habit of letting off her whistle unexpectedly at just the wrong moment, but she’s the only option. Besides a couple of native soldiers under Scott’s command, a handful of civilians are along for the ride—the young prince’s governess, American widow Mrs. Wyatt (Lauren Bacall), the British governor’s wife, Lady Wyndham (Ursula Jeans), an elderly diplomat (Wilfrid Hyde-White), an arms manufacturer (Eugene Deckers) and a Dutch newspaper reporter (Herbert Lom).

Their journey is fraught with perils, from dynamited railway lines and a damaged bridge to the bands of rebels on their track. Personally, I think the passengers in Stagecoach had an easier time of it—they mainly had to sit tight until the big battle, which didn’t come till late in the film. The passengers of North West Frontier have a much closer acquaintance with sweat, grime and bullets, as they take an active part in several fights and the effort to keep Victoria rolling. Meanwhile, the atmosphere inside the coach is occasionally strained by personal and political differences among the occupants. Eventually it becomes apparent that someone on the train also has designs on the young prince’s life. The audience becomes aware of this fact before the other passengers, adding further to the tension.

There’s plenty of humor running through the film as well, to balance the more serious elements. I.S. Johar steals every scene as Gupta the engineer, with his devotion to his beloved Victoria and his delightful mangling of the English language (if you got a kick out of the “Ten watch” scene in Casablanca, you’ll love listening to Gupta). Wilfrid Hyde-White’s Mr. Bridie also adds a lighter touch of quintessentially dry British humor, and proves unexpectedly valiant in tight places as well. And the cinematography is striking through the whole film—the location shots were filmed in Spain, standing in for India, in deserts and mountains that are barren and yet bleakly beautiful, in their way.

The romance which naturally develops between Captain Scott and Mrs. Wyatt is nicely understated; it doesn’t feel tacked on or in the way of the main story. It’s nice, for a change, to begin with characters who are already somewhat acquainted and get along well instead of starting off by despising one another, although they do have their differences along the way. My one quibble with the movie is with Lauren Bacall’s hair—why did filmmakers of the ’50s and ’60s insist on historically inaccurate loose hairstyles for women in period films? In the early scenes Bacall wears an elegant and period-correct updo, but once the train journey starts her hair is worn loose. (Personally, if I were travelling across the desert in a stuffy railway coach I’d want my hair up off the back of my neck anyway.) My mom says that her light-colored dress stayed much too clean, considering everything she went through on the trip, but to be fair, on second viewing I did see a few stains.

North West Frontier is available on DVD, on Netflix Instant, and is currently viewable on YouTube. This is an entry for Tuesday’s Overlooked Movies, a weekly blog event hosted by Todd Mason.