The Last Outpost (1935 film)

Plot

In Kurdistan during World War I, Michael Andrews (Cary Grant) is a British officer captured by Kurds, imprisoned, and awaiting execution. The local Turkish commander (Claude Raines) helps Andrews escape and confides that he is a British intelligence officer (initially "Smith," later named as John Stevenson) in disguise. The two set out to warn friendly villagers of a pending Kurdish attack. After a difficult river crossing, and after Andrews flirts with a married tribal woman, Stevenson returns to espionage. Andrews, who has hurt his leg, goes to Cairo for medical treatment. There, Andrews falls in love with his nurse, Rosemary Haydon (Gertrude Michael), who ultimately refuses Andrews by saying she's secretly married to an unnamed man she'd known briefly a few years before.

Andrews transfers to the Sudan, where his patrol takes over a fort after finding that its troops had been massacred. Meanwhile Stevenson goes back to Haydon—revealed as his wife—who confesses her love for Andrews. Stevenson requests a transfer to the Sudan to confront Andrews. Shortly after Stevenson reaches the fort, thousands of African tribesman attack it. Realizing that a handful of men can't hold the fort, Andrews, Stevenson, and their troops set out over sand dunes and eventually enter the jungle with the tribesmen in hot pursuit. British troops appear out of nowhere, deus ex machina, defeat the tribesmen, and rescue Andrews. Stevenson, mortally wounded in the battle, dies a hero's death, presumably leaving Andrews free to marry widow Haydon.

Cast

Nomadic footage

The Last Outpost borrows stock footage from earlier productions, notably Merian C. Cooper's 1925 silent ethnographic documentary Grass—A Nation's Battle for Life. The spectacular river-crossing and mountain-climbing scenes are a genuine record, filmed by Cooper, of traditional Bakhtiari migrations in Iran.

Critical response

Writing for The Spectator in 1935, Graham Greene gave a mixed review, describing the first half-hour of the film as "remarkably good" and the remaining 40 minutes as "quite abysmally bad". Greene praised the direction and camerawork of the first part as employing a "fine vigour to present a subject which could not have been presented on the stage", and he praised the acting of both Rains and Grant. The second part of the film (after Grant's character descends the mountain pass to Cairo and Rain's character returns to fight the Kurds) Greene described as "padded out [...] by the addition of a more than usually stupid triangular melodrama of jealousy and last-minute rescue".