The Last Outpost

David Lean is the great authority on this film, an extraordinary preparation for Lawrence of Arabia as well as The Bridge on the River Kwai.

It’s set in Kurdistan and the Sudan during the Great War, has Claude Rains as an M.I.3b officer behind the lines (he mentions Allenby in Palestine) and Cary Grant as a uniformed captain in the armoured cars, Kurds and Fuzzy-Wuzzies are the opposing forces, there is an American woman in Cairo between the two men, the argument is furiously complicated (not to mention the interpolated footage of Cooper & Schoedsack), so that the critics may be excused (F.S.N. of the New York Times, for example), despite the authorship of Philip MacDonald with Charles Brackett for the adaptation.