I used to think that Cary Grant could do anything. Comedy? Drama? Action? There's a classic film in almost every category to make an argument. In more recent years, I've been discovering the limits of the Grant persona. Grant was not particularly suited to historical pieces like The Howards of Virginia or The Pride and the Passion (though he's not bad in the latter). Some registers of comedy don't work with the polished perfection of "Cary Grant," either. I've often thought that Grant was wasted in sitcoms in the 1950s. But the thing that Grant really couldn't pull off was facial hair. This is the problem with The Last Outpost (1935, directed by Charles Barton and Louis J. Gasner), which finds Grant sporting a 1930s-style pencil thin mustache and that mustache completely dims Grant's star power. I mean, he's barely recognizable, which is a shock given how small a change it is to his face. It's like Superman putting on a pair of glasses to become Clark Kent. It makes him ordinary.
The story finds British Lieutenant Michael Andrews (Grant) captured by Kurdish tribemen somewhere in Kurdistan during World War I. He's dragged behind a cavalry column and thrown into a cell that looks out on a town square where he witnesses the Kurds massacre prisoners. He's sure he will be next, but help comes from an unexpected source. The leader of the men who captured him conducts him on a midnight escape, and then reveals himself as a British intelligence officer named "Smith" (Claude Rains). Soon, Smith suborns Andrews to aid him in moving the allied tribesmen out of the path of the marauding Kurds in a difficult forced march across a flooded river and a high mountain barrier. Andrews has his eye on the wife of the leader of the tribesmen, and Smith warns him about philandering with the wife of his friend. There's another British officer in tow during this exodus, one who plants seeds of doubt in Andrews about the loyalties of Smith, which comes to a head when Smith attempts to murder this man. Andrews intervenes, but breaks his leg on the terrain. The other officer is revealed to be an enemy agent, guiding the Kurds to intercept them. Andrews is carried the rest of the way on a stretcher, and then is spirited to Cairo where he convalesces under the care of the pretty Nurse Haydon (Gertrude Michael), for whom Andrews falls hard. When he's fit for service, Andrews is transferred to a fort in the Sudan. Meanwhile, Smith returns to Cairo, revealed as John Stevenson, and the husband of Nurse Haydon. When she confesses her love of Haydon, Stevenson requests a transfer to the Sudan to confront Andrews. But fate intervenes and soon Andrews and Stevenson are forced into another forced march, with resentment simmering between them...
This movie is really two movies. The first act, with the flight from the Kurds, is gripping, with Grant's nonchalance playing well against the polished intensity of Rains. The film establishes both as co-heroes, which makes the remaining film into a mush of a love triangle. If I'm being honest, this is one of those films from Grant's early career where he fades into the scenery when acting against a strong co-star. Rains here commands the screen whenever he's on stage. This, in spite of the fact that this is undoubtedly Grant's film. Of the four films he made in 1935, this is the ONLY one in which he's top-billed. He's the character we follow across the theater of war. He's the character that the filmmakers appoint as the designated hero who gets the girl in the end. And, boy howdy, does that backfire in this case, because it's Claude Rains who an audience is most likely to view as the hero. The filmmakers are at least aware of this and give him his due at the end of the movie, but they're also complicit in creating the impression that Rains IS the hero. There are a ton of shots with Rains placed above Grant in the hierarchy of the film's blocking, even though Rains was considerably shorter than Grant. This is compounded a bit by having a leading lady with relatively low-watt star power of her own. As the object of conflict between our heroes, she seems hardly worth the trouble, certainly not to the lethal extent to which this film escalates. This is the second film in which Gertrude Michael appeared with Grant. In her first, she was up against Mae West, so it's a comedown for Grant's ascending star power to be matched against Michael. One almost wishes that the filmmakers had found a way to promote former panther woman, Kathleen Burke, into the lead instead of consigning her to the brownface ethnic part of the wife of the tribal chieftain. But I have no idea of whether she had the acting chops to withstand the leading men. Not a lot of actresses short of actual supernova-level movie stars did. You need an Ingrid Bergman to bring this sort of thing off. Paramount did not have such an actress under contract and likely would not have paid to borrow one. Not for this particular film, anyway.
This film was clearly not an A-picture for Paramount, in spite of its two leading men. Great whacks of this film consist of stock footage. Huge chunks of the first act were originally shot by Merian C. Cooper for Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life, though it's admittedly integrated with the main story. I'm willing to bet that the screenwriters, Charles Brackett among them, were given this footage first and told to construct a narrative around it. This was based on a short story, though, so maybe not. Some of the battle footage in the second half of the film comes from the 1929 version of The Four Feathers. The action the film provides props up the melodrama, though not completely. The film is compelling when it's focused on anything but the love triangle, and complete mush when that triangle is center stage. And the end comes out of left field. When the whole thing comes to it's entirely too convenient end, an intelligent viewer is likely to feel a certain amount of ire at the way the film has blatantly arranged for everyone to get a (not so) just ending.
Regardless of its dramatic failings, that damned mustache is the film's greatest offense. It's like painting a similar mustache on the Mona Lisa. It's just....awful. Thankfully, it's also unique in Grant's output. He never wore unfortunate facial hair on film again.
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