The Last Outpost

My dad included one of those 10-packs of war movies. The kind that aren't good enough or well-known enough to merit their own release. There isn't much that looked promising, but The Last Outpost had Cary Grant and Claude Rains in a competition for better mustache, so it had more going for it than most.

I think Grant's is a little better, but I'm not a fan of mustaches that stop before the edges of your mouth. Rains' is more essential to his look, though. And that's enough of an excuse to use the hair tag. Twice in less than a week!

Grant plays British officer Andrews, captured during World War 1 in Kurdistan, and Rains is the British Intelligence officer Stevenson who rescues him by pretending to be a Turkish officer. They successfully move an entire village and their livestock across a mountain range to safety, though Andrews keeps raising Stevenson's ire by playing patty fingers with the village leader's wife.

Grant fractures his leg during all this, and is sent to a hospital in Cairo to recuperate, where he meets lovely nurse Rosemary Haydon (Gertrude Michael) he starts to woo. Stevenson returns to the field, providing intel that leads to a major British victory. As a reward, he gets six months' leave, and returns to Cairo to see his wife, who, to the surprise of no one, is Rosemary Haydon. She eventually confesses all this, and when she reveals the name of the man she's fallen for, well Stevenson is a bit cross. Rosemary and Andrews can be say they didn't know (she hadn't seen Stevenson in three years, thought he was dead), but he's seen how much a woman being married matters to Andrews, so he doesn't buy it. He sets out after Andrews, who has returned to active duty, and is trying to defend a fort from a large force of warriors. Given that the warriors were depicted as black men, most of them with shields and spears, I'm guessing Andrews was sent into sub-Saharan Africa. Stevenson finds him, but has to decide between revenge and duty, that sort of thing.

It's certainly not the best work Grant or Rains ever did. Grant doesn't get to do much other than alternate between flirtatious and gallant. Gertrude Michael had some potential in her character, but doesn't really get enough time (the movie is about 70 minutes) to do anything with it. She's a woman moved to Cairo then abandoned by her husband. He didn't do it willingly, but he did take off, and hasn't contacted her in three years. So she started working as a nurse, trying to cope with her loneliness, met a guy who charmed her, and then her husband comes back, and everything's changed. Except he doesn't really see it. But she's really only there for the middle of the story, and gets tossed aside once Rains sets off after Grant.

Rains gets a bit more depth, since you can tell he takes his work seriously. But it isn't so much about winning the war as saving lives. To that end he can be harsh and uncompromising, especially when faced with betrayal, but at his core, he wants to protect people if he can. The problem is when he gets to Cairo, he goes a bit overboard with regards to Rosemary. Some of it is making up for lost time, trying to pick up where they left off, but he also underestimates how strong she is. Doesn't recognize that she's grown from the woman he knew, I guess. When she passes out at the sight of him, and the matron of the hospital comments on the strain Rosemary seemed to be under until recently, he remarks that she should never have been working at all. Or perhaps she just needed to know you were still alive and thinking of her, Stevenson.

As unsympathetic as all that could make him seem, Rains is able to show a vulnerable core inside Stevenson, one that he's protected with stiff upper lip and thoughts of duty, but is in serious danger of cracking now that he's home. He really needs Rosemary, which adds a little something to her story because she feels that pull, that he could fall apart if he sees that he's lost her because of his work, but she can't change how she feels. So there was some narrative meat there, if the movie had given it more time to shine, but this wasn't the movie for that. Or for a more nuanced view of the non-white folk the British were fighting, for that matter.