I'd also like to point out that the race roles in the film, while possibly not passing the Malcolm X test,  were seriously sympathetic for the time;  the black cook was actually quite strong (his little Caucasian buddy was the clown here),  and the Chinese were (excepting Wing Toy) mostly played by (gasp!) actual Asians!  Imagine the most powerful character in a 1927 film being Chinese, and being played by a Chinese actor...that's pretty great.

To me, this was the perfect choice with which to celebrate William Boyd's birthday.

Check out my musical Cliff Edwards birthday post on my music page, HERE

Hot on the heels of my celebration of Tyrone Power's birthday this week, in which I wrote about Power's amazing turn in the red coat (albeit in the British army in India),  I want to wish Gary Cooper a happy birthday as well!  It's fun to have the opportunity to celebrate two incredible actors, and each in connection to the scarlet.

In the fantastic Northwestern North West Mounted Police,  Gary Cooper plays Texas Ranger Dusty Rivers, on assignment in Canada,  on the trail of the murderer Jacques Corbeau (played by the blunt-faced character actor George Bancroft).  As it turns out,  Corbeau is one of a trio of Métis (also called half-breeds in the film) revolutionaries,  intent on rebelling against the British Empire and starting an independent government.   Historically, though the Métis are the descendants of European settlers and aboriginal Canadians, they have no recognised status (unlike relatively pure-blooded natives);  in fact,  by some definitions, currently half of Canada are Métis, as at least 50% are of mixed blood.  At the time in which the film is set it was apparently a clearer distinction, as evidenced by the real-life North-West Rebellion upon which this film was based. 

Marshall Rivers reports the the fort where the Canadian Mounties are stationed,  just in time for Corbeau to join with the Métis rebel Louis Riel (now a schoolteacher) returning some years after having failed in his first attempt at insurrection (the Red River Uprising, also known as the First Riel Rebellion).  There Rivers meets the super-Mountie Sergeant Jim Brett, played by the very cool Preston Foster The situation becomes quite fun when there are sparks between Dusty and Sergeant Brett's love interest, the regional nurse April Logan (played by the majestic Madeleine Carroll).  The natural alpha male tension is already highly charged,  but here is where the fun really begins!  Between this love triangle and the upcoming insurrection, there is plenty of plot to be worked,  but it never becomes too much.  I was impressed by the level of brutality shown here,  as well as by the general humanity of the characters.

Directed by Cecil B. DeMille,  this was his first colour feature, as well as Cooper's.  The Technicolor is gorgeous (as it usually was in the movies of the time),  and it seems to have been created to make the Canadian Mountie look his best.  The script was fun and pretty tight,  though there were a few lagging bits,  mostly related to the romantic scenes.  What I enjoyed most was the fun banter between Texas Ranger Rivers and the Mounties.  Some fun Uncle Sam vs "The Queen" comments zinging back and forth.  The actors seemed like they were having quite a bit of fun! 

Although this is technically Cooper's vehicle,  I think the guy that shines best is Preston Foster.  He's so amazingly masculine and driven that his uncompromisingly honourable and courageous Sgt. Brett never strikes a wrong note.  In fact,  it took a guy with Cooper's presence for Foster not to run away with the whole thing! 

As it stands,  they made a good pair,  each trying to out-hero the other.  That camaraderie is very exciting to watch.  It's a good choice for a birthday party!  This is one of the best Mountie-related movies that I've yet seen.  The Mountie mythos is given it's full due,  right down to 'always getting their man'.

Of course,  like the "regular" western,  there are sociopolitical issues inherent to the story that might, for some, make it difficult to watch.  Lots of people of many cultural backgrounds died to create modern America and,  it seems,  Canada,  and those stories are filled with conflict and moral ambiguities.  The British Empire spawned a lot of those stories and issues, as all empires tend to do.  I,  for one,  don't let myself get involved with those issues;  I take the story as it is, and I roll with it. North West Mounted Police is quite an exciting story to roll with!

As a fun side note,  the fiddling tradition of the Métis is becoming more well known amongst lovers of folk music.  There is a wonderful documentary on the subject, called Medicine Fiddle,  and it can be viewed by clicking on the image to the right.  It's an interesting sound, very similar to other Canadian fiddle styles, but with its own flavour.  Unfortunately the folkies in America have taken it on, so it will be ruined soon...experience it while you can.

Learn about the first Riel Rebellion HERE
Learn about the second Riel Rebellion HERE

Those are the stiff-upper-lip words that begin the brilliant novel King of the Khyber Rifles,  written in 1916 by the legendary London-born adventure writer Talbot Mundy.  Mundy was famous for his tales of the British Raj (Raj means "reign" in the Hindi language), during their occupation of the Indian subcontinent and Afghanistan during the rule of Queen Victoria.  Inspired by real-life titans, such as the polymath and polyglot, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, his books are the proto-typical ripping yarns;  his stalwart adventurers faced the dangers inherent in trying to control that wild and culturally diverse region.  Like Rudyard Kipling,  Sax Rohmer and H. Rider Haggard,  his stories are from the British perpsective,  but like Haggard,  Mundy leaned slightly more toward the east.

The protagonist of the novel is Captain Athelstan King,  an agent of her majesty in what was at that time northern India (now Afghanistan and Pakistan) during the first world war. As in reality, the war was in mid-swing during the novel,  and the Germans and Turks were determined to foster unrest in the tribal areas to further burden their British opponents.    As with such writers as John Buchan, tales of the Empire's military struggles across the globe were very popular among British youth.  That seems to be a traditional subject at the time,  as both the Boer and Crimean wars generated their own exciting literary output;  this new war, being called "the war to end all wars" did so on a grand scale, and would continue to inspire both prose and film for decades to come. 

Without a doubt Mundy's most famous and popular book,  it was first filmed in 1929 as The Black Watch,  starring Victor McLaglen and Myrna Loy (and, apparently, it had uncredited early parts for John Wayne and Randolph Scott).  It was directed by John Ford,  and though a relatively early work (he already had dozens of movies under his belt by this time),  it has all of the taut drama and action that make his stuff worth seeking out.  Initially released as a silent,  it was a talkie,  and thankfully so;  there are so many wonderful scenes that really benefit from the many regional accents in the story.  McLaglen really shines in this one, and the bravura performance that he would later bring to Gunga Din shows it's roots very clearly here.   The Talbot Mundy animus rings throughout.

Tyrone Power is the lead in the later (and greater) version of the story, appropriately titled King of the Khyber Rifles.  Though Power was on the final stretch of his career when this was released in 1953,  his vigour and intensity had diminished not even a tiny bit.  His adventure movies of this period are some of his most interesting and nuanced.  Here,  as the serious-minded (one could even say stern), Athelstan King,  Power burns like a wildfire.

Now, for lovers of the book,  it would be a mistake to come to the film thinking that they're the same animal.  Though they share some of the same cosmetic features,  the film has been altered to a pretty large degree.  It has been transformed into the film version,  which is fine,  and I believe the changes make it more suitable for the simpler needs of the cinematic experience,  where visuals and greatly delivered dialogue oftentimes do the work of a novel's detail and complexity of plot.  Apropos of my earlier comment, the film is a bit more Rudyard Kipling to the book's H. Rider Haggard,  which,  in this case,  is a good thing.

Power's King is a half-caste;  his father was English,  and his mother was an Afghan Muslim.  Thus, he speaks the Pashto language of the Afghan tribal people,  and he is friendly to them...so long as they are subordinate to British rule.  King, after all, is the Queen's man.

The villain of the story (though ENTIRELY different from the novel),  is the "fanatical"  tribal bandit Kurram Khan,  who,  along with the Islamic Mullahs in the mountain areas, is fomenting rebellion in the people of the hills...by any brutal means necessary.  He is portrayed here by the brilliant Guy Rolfe,  who, it seems,  played more villains than anything else, by far!  In fact,  in the same year as King of the Khyber Rifles,  he played the baddie in another orientalist fantasy,  The Veils of Baghdad (as the evil Kasseim),  as well as Prince John in Ivanhoe, the year before!  It goes without saying that his villain's soliloquies are maniacally well-practiced and insidious.  He's very much the Osama Bin Laden of the piece,  and much like that real Mujahid,  his martial excesses are telegraphed to the audience in the form of a goggle-eyed,  power-mad (hehehe),  inhuman monster...with no normal human reason for opposing the Empire.

I was very impressed by the detail of the film,  and by the nods to local colour and detail.  The Pashto language, like Dari,  the other most common language in Afghanistan,  is  somewhat similar to the Farsi language spoken in Iran.  I understand a good deal of Farsi, as well as urdu and Arabic,  and it seems to me that the dialogue of the tribal characters in the film was appropriate,  if not entirely correct.  I also noticed a few regional colloquialisms used, which were gratifying;  King says of a defector from Kurram Khan's ranks as wanting to "eat British salt",  meaning that he wished to earn his sustenance in the service of the Empire...a folk expression heard as far away as the Punjab.

I was also impressed by the philosophical challenges to imperialism throughout the movie.  Athelstan King, as the son of a Muslim woman,  is treated quite poorly by the political infrastructure and by it's agents.  He's denied invitations to officers' parties, and even loses a roommate when a fellow officer learns of his racial (and possibly spiritual) mix.   The positive portrayals of Muslims in this film are a pleasant surprise, in spite of some stereotyping,  as well as the complexities of the local political perspective.  Not to drag contemporary politics into a simple movie review,  but the moral problems raised by this simple adventure story are very timely to the issues that the United states and Britain still face in that part of the world.  It shows how the presence of a foreign element, determined to change and control an area, can create increasingly more hostile insurrections and challenges to that outsider influence.

Still,  King of the Khyber Rifles is very much,  in the end,  a tale of the Empire; it stands firmly in the tradition of films like the afore-mentioned Gunga Din, Oliver Reed's The Brigand of Kandahar (1965), Rock Hudson's Bengal Brigade (1954), Gary Cooper's Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Raymond Massey in The Drum (1938), and of course, Errol Flynn's 1950 classic,  Kim.   Like the western film, which shares many of the same sociopolitical issues,  we manage to set aside our problems with the reality of the thing,  and get into some great action well told!

The director of this amazing picture is the somewhat ironically-named Henry King.  King was an amazing critter in his own right, having over a hundred acting roles under his belt from the early days of film, as well as a long and prolific career as a director.  Besides King of the Khyber Rifles,  King directed Tyrone Power in such amazing movies as The Untamed (1955),  Prince of Foxes (1949),  The Black Swan (1942),  and  The Sun Also Rises (1957),  as well as such great actors as Errol Flynn, Eva Gardner, Spencer Tracy,  Gordon MacRae, Cameron Mitchell, and (in my opinion) most effectively with Gregory Peck, who did many of his best films with King.

Honestly,  with the possible exception of Errol Flynn,  I can't think of a more well-rounded actor for action pictures of his era than Power;  his gravitas, masculinity and charm are possessing,  and that leadership vibe, so often lost to today's actors, are his in spades.  His characters are people that one would follow "once more, unto the breach",  and his King of the Khyber Rifles is no less so.  It's a Powerhouse film that you shouldn't live without!

Also, for them that are interested both in the regions of India and Pakistan as well as in detective fiction,  I have an article about the various home-grown sleuths from various South Asian countries.  You can read it HERE.