The film was shot at Movie Flats, just off route 395, near Lone Pine, California, north of the road to Whitney Portals. You can still find splashes of cement and iron joists plastered across the rocks where the sets were built. And you'll recognize the area from any Randolph Scott movie.<br /><br />I won't bother with the plot, since I'm sure it's covered elsewhere. The movie stars three athletes -- Fairbanks fils, who must have learned a good deal from his Dad -- Grant, an acrobat in his youth -- and MacLaughlin, a professional boxer from South Africa. Their physical skills are all on display.<br /><br />Not a moment of this movie is to be taken seriously. It's about Thugees, a sect in India, whence our English word "thug." I can't go through all the felicities of this movie but probably ought to point out that the director, George Stevens, was a polymath with a background in Laurel and Hardy movies -- see his choreography of the fight scenes -- and went on to the infinitely long dissolves of Shane and The Diary of Anne Frank. Dynasties rose and fell. Geological epochs came and went, while Liz Taylor and Monty Clift kissed in "A Place in the Sun." Here, in his comic mode, he excels.<br /><br />This is a story of male bonding and it would be easy -- too easy -- to read homoeroticism into it, as many people do with Howard Hawks. Or hatred of women. But it isn't that at all. Sometimes things portrayed on screen don't deserve too much in the way of heuristic attention. Men WILL form bonds by working together in a way that women do not. (Women share secrets.) Read Deborah Tannen, nobody's idea of an anti-feminist. Well, when you think about it, that's what evolution should have produced. For most of human history -- about nine tenths of it -- hominids have been hunters and gatherers, and the men tend to hunt and the women to gather. Hunting is more effective as a team enterprise. Men who were not very good at bonding were Darwinianed out, leaving men who have a lot of team spirit. And Grant, Fairbanks, and MacLaughlin have got it in spades.<br /><br />Sorry to ramble on about evolution but I'm an anthropologist and it is an occupational disease. Did I ever tell you about the horse in Vaitongi, Samoa, that slipped on the cement and fell in the bathtub with me? You've got to watch the hooves.<br /><br />Joan Fontaine is lovely, really. Only got to know her in her later years and wondered why she was in so many movies. I lived in Saratoga, California, where her sister, Olivia DeHavilland, grew up and went to a convent school. Pretty place.<br /><br />If you miss this adventurous lively farraginous chronicle of the British Empahh at its height, you should never forgive yourself. It's so famous that it's parodied in the Peter Sellers movie, "The Party." Yes -- the colonel's got to know.