During the mid-1930's Hollywood would boast two profitable lines in epics. The box-office success of Henry Hathaway's The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), in which Gary Cooper put down a native uprising on the North West Frontier of India, resulted in a veritable vogue for imperial epics in which almost every major studio would make a contribution to this newfangled form.
Warner Brothers would counter with 1936's The Charge of the Light Brigade. The film offered a tiger hunt , a wild horse drive and had Errol Flynn leading the climatic charge which was unforgettably staged by second-unit director B. Reeves Eason.
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| A fiver on the last one off the left. The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) |
Fox presented Wee Willie Winkie in 1937 and it was here that a seasoned before her years Shirley Temple brought forth peace to the Indian North-West Frontier under the astute direction of one John Ford. Simultaneously. Universal delivered with The Sun Never Sleeps (1939) and RKO called and responded with 1939's Gunga Din, an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's own epic work.
Even Republic Pictures, home of Gene Autry and Captain Marvel, contributed Storm Over Bengal (1938). These Indian adventures, whose location work was not uncommonly shot in California's Lone Pine area in Inyo County hosted gratuitous action sequences and would also lend a brand-spanking new wrinkle with its exotic form of escapism. But their unrelenting insistence on a racial hierarchy headed by a white man, their implicit and at times explicit justification of the British Imperial presence in India and Africa tended to reinforce the political status quo.