The Last Outpost (1935)

During WWI, a British officer (Cary Grant) captured by Kurds is rescued by an undercover British Intelligence officer (Claude Rains) and together they set out on a mission to warn a British friendly tribe of an impending attack by the Kurds. They are eventually separated but when they meet again, the circumstances are under highly volatile conditions. Based on the novel THE DRUM by F. Britten Austin and co-directed by Charles Barton and Louis Gasnier, the first portion of the film is quite interesting mostly because of the stock footage borrowed from Merian C. Cooper's 1925 documentary GRASS. After Grant is wounded and returned to civilization, the film becomes a rather tedious and predictable wartime romance and even though the film eventually returns to the war in the Sudan sequences, it's never able to recover the good will from the first third of the film. Even at a brief running time of an hour and 16 minutes, it's a bit of a slog. With Gertrude Michael as the film's love interest, Kathleen Burke and Billy Bevan.