Sun 28 Jun 2015
A Movie Review by Jonathan Lewis: THE LAST OUTPOST (1935).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , War Films[2] Comments
THE LAST OUTPOST. Paramount Pictures, 1935. Cary Grant, Claude Rains, Gertrude Michael, Kathleen Burke, Colin Tapley, Margaret Swope. Based on the novel The Drum by F. Britten Austin. Directors: Charles Barton & Louis J. Gasnier.
As much as I like Cary Grant and as much as I appreciate Claude Rains, I still couldn’t find much to truly admire in The Last Outpost, a meandering romance-during-wartime melodrama.
Grant portrays Michael Andrews, a British officer captured by the Turks during the First World War. A British intelligence officer, a mysterious man who calls himself “Smith†(Rains), comes to Andrews’ rescue and frees him from Ottoman captivity.
The two men make their way through Mesopotamia, Kurdish tribesmen hot on their trail. Andrews ends up injured and back in a British hospital in Cairo, where he falls for his nurse, Rosemary Haydon (Gertrude Michael). But all is not as it seems, for Haydon is actually married to a British intelligence officer who she hasn’t seen for three long years.
By now, I’m sure you’ve figured out who that intelligence officer must be.
Based on F. Britten Austin’s novel, The Drum, the movie would probably have been all but forgotten had Grant and Rains not appeared in it. The plot is formulaic, there’s a whole lot of stock footage, and the cinematography is nothing special. If you’re looking for a World War I film to watch, you can do a lot better than this mediocre programmer.
June 29th, 2015 at 10:08 am
I watched this one a few weeks back myself. I thought the first and last part were decent but the middle descended into soap opera. you forgot to mention that the script was by Phillip MacDonald and one of the adapters was Charles Brackett.
June 29th, 2015 at 1:03 pm
I missed the ball on this one. You have to click twice on IMDb before Philip MacDonald’s name shows up, but I certainly could have listed Brackett’s name in the credits, as his name is right there where it should be, on the first page.
From his Wikipedia page:
“Brackett was president of the Screen Writers Guild (1938–1939). He was president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1949 through 1955. He won Academy Awards for scripting The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Titanic (1953), and received an Honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement in 1959. Brackett either wrote or produced an additional 39 films during his career, including To Each His Own, Ninotchka, The Major and the Minor, The Mating Season (1951), Niagara, The King and I, Ten North Frederick, The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker, and Blue Denim.
“From 1936 until 1950, Brackett worked with Billy Wilder as his collaborator on thirteen movies, including the classics Sunset Blvd. and The Lost Weekend.”
As resumes go, not too shabby!