Every moment Errol Flynn is on screen in this film sparkles with his undeniable panache. Every moment he is off screen (which is most of the movie) is either a bore or a puzzlement. Kipling's dialog works just fine on the page, but on screen there is no feel whatsoever that real people would talk in such a manner. What flows on the page is stilted when forced into the mouths of actual people. Dean Stockwell does as well as one can imagine with the title role, but everything he says sounds as written as the Declaration of Independence, not the spontaneous remarks of a boy. (The same applies to every character, actually.) The direction is flat and incredibly unimaginative for a major studio release. Scenes which could have had real dynamism are played in flat tableau. Sequences of physical action are staged as badly as a high-school play. (Was there no experienced stunt coordinator available?) Beautiful footage of India is interspersed through more prevalent scenes of largely cheap-looking soundstage sets. (A walk through an Indian train station shows not one speck of dirt or debris or trash on the floor, no sign of dust or even worn paint!) The rear-projection shots of principles on soundstages in front of Indian scenery are worse than the cheapest serials of the time. And nothing substantial happens! The spy games being played consist mainly of doing things through complicated means that could have been much more effectively done straightforwardly. The dramatic action of this film could have been condensed into a twenty-minute short, and the 113-minute running time of the feature would not have felt like 1,113 minutes. The only saving grace is the splendid work of Errol Flynn, who almost manages the impossible task of making Mahbub Ali a real and realistic person instead of a spout for the pouring out of novelistic and archaic dialog. Flynn seems to me to be at the height of his powers here, if slightly (and only slightly) past the height of his beauty. I rejoiced every time he (far too rarely) returned to the story. The rest of the time, I watched the screen with one eye and the clock with the other.