An interesting little Hammer offering story wise. You'd think the red coats of the British Army would be the heroes of this Raj story set in 1850. But as it turns out in a welcome twist, they're more the villains, doing the colonial nasty on the local tribespeople, made up generally of black-faced English actors.

Had to laugh at the indignant shock of a couple of reviewers here expressing amazement that more Indians didn't feature in the cast. This is a Hammer production made in around 1964/65 and as such was made on the smell of an oily rag in England. For goodness sake, check out those vintage painted back drops of the castle in the mountains. There is absolutely no Indian location footage and in fact, footage was "borrowed" from a couple of other films to round out the battle scenes. Before we get all lathered up about the casting in a 55 year old "B" grade supporting feature, let's also remember that a bare 3 years before, it was perfectly acceptable for Alec Guinness to play an Arab in Lawrence of Arabia. In fact a couple of years after this, Lawrence Olivier played the Mahdi in Khartoum with little criticism.

As mentioned the only really stand-out feature of this film was the anti-colonial perspective of the British Raj. The villains of the piece were the senior British Officers who fitted up a fellow officer Case for a court-martial, because besides supposedly having "a touch of the tar brush", he had also had an affair with another officer's wife. He ends up running with the local rebel alliance, though their leader, Eli Khan (an hilariously black-faced Oliver Reed), is also depicted as being somewhat cruel and untrustworthy.

It all ends up in a gloriously romantic tragedy of near -Shakespearean proportions, as bodies litter a paper-mache cave hideout and accusing fingers are afterwards pointing in the British establishment direction. Cue the casting credits for this little oddity. I'm sure the production only ever had pretensions to being a support feature, but I give it a 5 for trying something a little different with the story line.

Had too stop watching this movie as it's set in India, but contains no Indian actors or actresses.What a disgrace!

Hammer Film returned to India (at Elstree Studios) with this production, but this time the project lacked the punch "The Stranglers of Bombay" (1959) had. It is a moral tale about ethnic pride, patriotism, military honor and love, but surprisingly it lacks passion. While John Gilling handled the story with vivid action scenes, as he did in previous adventure films he made for Hammer, his rather literate script proved too ambitious to be fully developed in 78 minutes. The previous Hammer attempt to describe India under British rule was a darker story by American scriptwriter David Zelag Goodman, dealing with evil followers of goddess Khali, but in this occasion Gilling directly entered the political field and added an adultery subplot with passable results. On the acting side, while Ronald Lewis is at his usual adequate efficiency level as hero, Oliver Reed is bland and noisy in the role of a ruthless rebel chief, easily overshadowed by Yvonne Romain as his wicked sister. (As she had left for Hollywood to work with Samuel Fuller, beautiful "Stranglers" actress Marie Devereux is sorely missed here). Gilling would turn out his best works for Hammer a year later, when the remarkable "The Plague of the Zombies" and "The Reptile" were released.