The Drum

The Drum (1938) is an oddly muted piece of British propaganda, a film extolling the virtues of Imperialist rule over India's northwest frontier -- the territory near the Khyber Pass that is now Pakistan.  Directed ineptly by Zoltan Korda, the movie is a big-budget Technicolor production, although most of its imagery is monochromatic, the dusty beige mountains and clay brick towers of the arid foothills to the Hindukush.  The picture was largely made in Chitral, a mountain province in oday's Pakistan and a title thanks the Mehtar (the hereditary ruler) for his generosity -- Chitral was nominally a sovereign territory but subject to the Raj's suzerainty so that the impoverished mountain province was a puppet kingdom to the British.  (The film seems to be set in the twenties -- the villain fought with the Turks at Gallipoli).  The interior shots were obviously made in London and some of the landscapes show the equally barren mountains in northern Wales. 

The movie is based on an adventure novel by A.E.W. Mason, the chap who wrote The Four Feathers and it's the sort of stuff that was dated when the film was produced.  In a skirmish, British troops, (they are Scottish Highlanders) encounter machine-gun fire.  This is alarming because it may tip the balance of power in the Hindukush.  A British agent played by Roger Livesy has learned that rebellion is stirring among the mountain folk.  He travels with his Scottish regiment to Tokot, a friendly principality, where he meets the ruler and his son, Prince Azmir, played by Sabu. (He was 14 years old at that time.) The friendly ruler is assassinated by his brother (or, perhaps, merely wounded and imprisoned -- the film is so poorly made this plot point is confusing).  The evil brother, played by Raymond Massey, is stirring up the Muslims to a fanatical uprising.  He's not a Believer himself, choosing to place his faith in the machine guns that are being smuggled into the mud-brick city.  Prince Azmir flees to Peshawar where he had various adventures and is tracked by assassins working for Massey's rebel warlord.  The evil brother plots to lure the British to a banquet so that the regiment can be machine-gunned.  The hero, Carruthers, learns of the plot.  But, for reasons hard to explain, he leads his men to the banquet anyway.  Meanwhile a large army of British troops is marching from Peshawar to the relief of the endangered regiment in Tokot.  They come a little too late -- there's a big battle in the palace when the British are ambushed and, then, another big battle in the city as the army arrives.  Sabu is helping the British and sounds an alarm on a sacred drum.  The rebels are defeated and Sabu is set up by his Imperial protectors as the new ruler of the regime. 

The movie is a mess.  None of its plot points cohere.  Roger Livesy, playing Carruthers attends the feast even though he knows an ambush is going to occur.  Livesy has a beautiful wife (Valerie Hobson) but she's just an elegant prop and mostly serves as a foil for elaborate and hypocritical praise of her beauty by Massey's villain.  Sabu's role is underwritten and he really doesn't figure into the action in any major way -- when he sounds the drum, it doesn't mean anything:  the big climactic battle is already underway.  Rescuers come too late to avert the war and, so, all the derring-do amounts to nothing.  Although the film might be perceived as racist, or, at least, a full-throated defense of Imperialism, the picture doesn't really seem offensive -- this is because of two factors:  Livesy's role as leading man and Korda's utterly inept editing.  Livesy always seems embarrassed on screen -- he's like a burly sidekick who has suddenly been inexplicably promoted to leading man.  (This is his charm in the much better and more ambitious Powell - Pressburger films in which he features, The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp and A Matter of Life and Death.)   Livesy mumbles and has a strangely husky voice -- he always sounds smitten with stage-fright.  He's not spectacularly handsome and seems inordinately modest and unassuming.  In fact, he's more than a little bit dull and stodgy -- you can't figure out why the spectacularly beautiful Valerie Hobson is with him.  (She can't figure out the role either and simply ends every scene with him in a romantic clinch, avoiding the need for any speechifying.)  There's no fire in Livesy and, therefore, no conviction -- hence, the casually racist aspects of the film seem harmless.

Korda has no idea how to edit film.  The movie seems a slide-show with some of the slides jumbled-up and out-of-order.  He doesn't establish place and jumps between sets in a bewildering way.  Bad guys skulk around, the Brits enjoy whiskey and water, and there's no sense for how the images are related.  We can't tell the distance between locales where actions are taking place.  Furthermore, shots are mismatched -- when someone goes through a threshold you think they are going inside.  The next shot reveals that they have gone out of the building. People enter from directions that don't seem consistent with where we earlier saw them.  Space is all disorganized.  The battle scenes seem randomly cut and the action sequences don't build to any kind of climax. 
By contrast with rousing American films on this same topic (Lives of the Bengal Lancer and Gunga Din), the British picture seems to be morose, ashamed, and lacks all conviction.  I'm not sure this is entirely due to Korda's incompetence.  There is a distinct undercurrent of futility in this film, a sense that the Imperialist project is not worth the energy and violence necessary to sustain it.  The poor editing suggests that the British simply don't know where they are at any given time and the motto of this action film -- "It could have been worse" -- is pretty dispiriting.  Livesy seems mildly depressed throughout the whole film and its climax, the Raj appointing a 14-year-old boy as its imperial stooge is not exactly cause for celebration.