in talks with Lester to play a role. Lester was scouting locations in Spain to stand in for Afghanistan and was about to start casting when there was a change of management at United Artists and the film was cancelled. Muir later wrote "I think the unfortunate loser was John Alderton. If ever it was a case of the right actor finding the right part and then losing it through no fault of his own with was John." The British film industry was in crisis at the time due to the withdrawal of American finance. By March 1970 the project was cancelled. Lester said it "came about at the time when the film industry began to collapse within itself. A sort of implosion. It’s a very expensive project, a period film where at one point 13,000 of the British Army have to retreat in January from Kabul into India, being attacked by hordes of Afghans. It’s not the sort of thing that you can do on a shoestring... To do it properly it would be a very expensive film; and I don’t think one should do it improperly. " Lester later said, "it came in that very bad year for United Artists when they wrote off 90 million and cancelled nearly everything." After the failure of The Bed Sitting Room Lester did not make a film for five years. In August 1971 Stanley Baker was attached as producer with Lester still to direct. However, the film was not made. Lester admired Fraser's writing and later hired the author to write the screenplay for The Three Musketeers (1973). This launched Fraser's scriptwriting career and he and Lester collaborated on the one film (to date) made from a Flashman novel, Royal Flash (1975). Diabolique magazine argued that Flashman would have been a better introduction to the character. In 2015, Variety reported that 20th Century Fox was developing a movie adaptation of the Flashman novels, with Ridley Scott and Peter Chernin producing. References 1969 British novels Flashman novels Novels about the Great Game Afghanistan in fiction Barrie & Jenkins books First Anglo-Afghan War