The Drum

The year is 1938; the place is Tokot, a town on the Northwest Frontier of India. Captain Carruthers, His Majesty's Resident, and British to the last hair of the tiny mustache on his stiff upper lip, steps up to a curtain behind which he thinks an assassin is hiding. "Why must you do it?" his wife cries. "Because I must," he replies firmly. His answer, in fact the whole picture, is a sort of swansong of the white man who is beginning to stagger under his burden.

Although the early Alexander Kordan spectacle is as littered with scenery and overstuffed with a plot as most of the later Hollywood efforts to exploit India, its youthful sentimentality is somehow still far from sticky. Perhaps the picture succeeds because the actors are genuine Englishmen who look as if they belong in the country. All of them, that is, except the native villains. They are played mostly by Americans.

Raymond Massey, as a power-mad prince who wants to carve out a personal empire, is the chief of the Oriental evildoers. His flowing robes and turban do not quite succeed in converting him into an Indian ruler, but his perpetual and disdainful sneer gives a suggestion of Eastern inscrutability. Captain Carruthers, played by Roger Livesey, foils his plans with the legendary stolid determination of the British colonial officers. Livesey's characterization is so stereotyped that, at times, it almost sinks to burlesque. Somebody, however, usually shows up in time with a knife or a machine gun to keep the plot happily rolling and to leave any thoughts of character study forgotten.

The shortage of believable people is the weakest point of the film. Sabu, who plays a young prince caught between the machinations of the villain and the colonials, was a boy when the picture was made and could creditably show the workings of a fourteen-year-old. Massey, on the other hand, does not portray the subtle mentality of an Indian. As someone in the movie says, he is only another gangster.

Despite its faults, The Drum is never dull. Always alive with some new piece of skullduggery, the picture moves quickly through that simpler age when Knives and rifles, not jet planes and propaganda leaflets, decided who would control Asia.