Adam Peters (79%) The always dependable Kenneth More stars this this Indian set action adventure shot in vibrant technicolor that really goes to prove that old films can be just as entertainingly watchable as any of the stuff we get these days. This can be easily compared to the brilliant Dark of the sun, although it is a little more family friendly, much more of a matinée Saturday afternoon crowd-pleaser than a hard-edged, hairy-backed armchair- gripper. Even though this is good popcorn fun, it still has a strong political theme running through involving the beginning of the end of British rule. The support cast is strong including Lauren Bacall and the always good Herbert Lom. So it's well made, entertaining, well cast, fun, and well worth a look. What more do you need?

Balthazar-5 I have just watched this little gem for the first time since my childhood. Of course then, I didn't know much about classic cinema, it was just a ripping good yarn with funny and pointed dialogue. With the benefit of a life in cinema behind me, it is much, much better than I remember. Think somewhere midway between 'The Lady Vanishes' and Ford's 'Stagecoach'. Perhaps this should not be so surprising as the writer of the original screenplay from which this is adapted is Frank Nugent, scenarist of 'Fort Apache', 'She Wore a Yellow Ribbon' and other classic, if less apposite John Ford films. So from Nugent comes the 'army against the Indians' and from the very British situation come the characters who could easily have stepped out of a Hitchcock comedy. In fact there is a moment in the film which is almost identical to a moment in 'Lady Vanishes'. Kenneth More is handing out the guns and the lovable English colonialist, Bridie (Wilfred Hyde White perfectly cast)reluctantly takes one, and then admits that he once won something in a fairground.This is almost identical to the scene towards the end of 'The Lady Vanishes' when, again, the guns are being handed out and Naunton Wayne, as Caldicott admits to having won something at a fairground.Of course, J Lee Thompson is not Hitchcock, so there are some lesser moments, but really this is so much better than so much of the hyperbolic tedium of modern cinema.There is a lot more in this than one would either hope or expect. It's funny too!

Robert J. Maxwell I think I enjoyed this a bit more when I saw it years ago. Now that I'm so terribly sophisticated, I notice the clichés leaping out at me, fangs bared. Will the train make it, slowly creeping along the rickety bridge? Will the bus ("The Wayward Bus")? Will the car ("Murder by Death")? Will the explosive-laden truck ("Sorcerer II," "The Wages of Fear")? But, what the heck. This is a headlong adventure through the deserts and mountains of North West India in 1905. Everything shouts at you and ends in an exclamation point. The acting is outrageous. Even the fastidious Wilfred Hyde-White is outrageously fastidious. The principal heavy, Herbert Lom, sweats like a pig, an animal that he, as a Muslim, hates.There is an attempt on the part of the writers to inject some serious matters into the story. A boy of five is the surviving Prince of India, presumably a Hindu, while the villains are a radical Muslim sect. "Not all Muslims" support the bloody rebellion, as one character remarks. And the British colonials talk about how their presence is needed to "keep order" while all about them thousands of Indians are slaughtering each other. At the end, the young Prince gives a present to the hero, Kenneth More, but comment ruefully that someday he will have to fight the Brits. Largely because of Ghandi, the Brits, of course, eventually did leave India to its own devices. At the time, it didn't lead to an improvement since the Hindus and Moslems immediately went to war and finally split into two or three independent nations.This hardly matters to the colorful story of a handful of disparate men, women, and children trying to survive a three-hundred mile journey through a hostile land on a dilapidated train with one coal car and one coach. It's a generic "journey" movie that we've all seen before -- in "Stagecoach" and elsewhere, but it's a lot of fun. I love those old narrow-gauge Indian trains with their diminutive piping whistles.Do they get to the end of their journey successfully and (mostly) in one piece? Two old puff-puffs pulling my extremities in opposite directions couldn't get me to spill the beans.

bkoganbing India in 1905 was a country in transition and turmoil, the Moslems and Hindus were warring on each other and on other minority groups and everybody wanted the British out. The Congress Party was a going concern at that point and was still a vehicle for both Moslem and Hindu to work within.If every single man at arms that the British Empire could command had been stationed in India at any time, they could never have ruled such a vast area in land and population. They did it with a lot of collaboration, some of it willing, some of it a matter of convenience. Very little of what is now India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh was ruled outright by the British. They worked in collaboration with the various rulers of the many provinces, some Hindu, some Moslem.In this story, a Hindu maharajah's state is being overrun by Moslem rebels. Kenneth More as a British captain is charged with getting the small son out of the kingdom and to safety along with the child's nurse, an American played by Lauren Bacall.On a train of one coach, More, Bacall, and the child Gorinda Raja Ross flee the kingdom. Other passengers on the train are arms dealer Eugene Decker, newspaper correspondent Herbert Lom, the wife of the provincial governor Ursula Jeans, and the governor's secretary Wilfrid Hyde-White. The train is driven by Indian actor I.S. Johar and more has a small group of Sepoy troops to help out.The journey to safety is the bulk of the story of Northwest Frontier and on that journey all the people show their character. One of them will betray the others. All of them have flaws of a sort. The British really do believe in Kipling's white man's burden about keeping order among the people of India. To a greater or lesser degree they have a racial prejudice about the place. Only Bacall as an American and an outsider is seemingly free of it.Not to say that most of them aren't a brave bunch because in the crunch most step up to the plate.The story was written by Patrick Ford, John's son and others have pointed out that he borrowed liberally from his dad's masterpiece Stagecoach. The final attack on the train by the Moslem rebels is as exciting as that attack by other kinds of Indians in Stagecoach. Kenneth More as the hero of the piece is not the Ringo Kid however. John Wayne was on his own mission when he became part of the Stagecoach ensemble, More is a British officer with a mission.The various maharajahs and nawabs were all pensioned off as per the Mountbatten settlement in 1947. I'd like to think the young prince grew up and inherited his kingdom and got pensioned out of it along with a few hundred others of his class. One kingdom missed the settlement, that of Kashmir which is today the sore point between India and Pakistan.Director J. Lee Thompson was at the beginning of a great career directing some fine action films. Northwest Frontier is a fine action film and you can learn a great deal about the Indian subcontinent in the viewing of it.