The Rains Of Ranchipur (1955)

A lush and glamorous CinemaScope remake of the 1939 THE RAINS CAME based on the Louis Bromfield novel of the same name. A jaded American heiress (Lana Turner) married to an English lord (Michael Rennie) arrives in a small province in India where she becomes attracted to an unworldly Hindu doctor (Richard Burton) dedicated to helping the poor of his country. Their misguided romance is interrupted when earthquakes, flood and plague decimate the province. It's a superficial yarn but director Jean Negulesco (THREE COINS IN THE FOUNTAIN) was in his element during his fertile CinemaScope years at Fox (though there are those who prefer his grittier years at Warners in the 1940s) and he gives the film a glossy sheen and a solid sense of melodrama though some might place it in the disaster genre because of the earthquake sequence. The special effects were good enough in their day to get an Oscar nomination. Turner looks sensational in her Helen Rose wardrobe and the Indian flavored score by Hugo Friedhofer is a gem. With Fred MacMurray, Joan Caulfield and in the film's best performance, Eugenie Leontovich as the Maharani who raised Burton as a son and challenges Turner's conquest of him.