In the winter of 1936, a dispatch from the British Board of Film Censors requested two officers posted in Bengal, RT Peel (who served as Se...
In the winter of 1936, a dispatch from the British Board of Film Censors requested two officers posted in Bengal, RT Peel (who served as Secretary to the Public and Judicial Departments) and Colonel Lumby (an expert on military intelligence), to review a Warner Bros film that was released two months previously in the USA. It was the second of eight films to star the legendary pairing of Olivia de Havilland – just turned 20 – and Errol Flynn, sporting his trademark pencil moustache for the first time on the silver screen.
The film, titled The Charge of the Light Brigade after Alfred Lord Tennyson’s canonised poem (pun unintended) and directed by Michael Curtiz, is a historical action/romance set in India in the years leading up to the First War of Independence. But why did the censor board get involved?
In Hollywood’s reimagined cartography of mid-19th century South Asia, under the sway of the East India Company, a kingdom named Suristan appears at the North-West Frontier. The tribal population of this region answer to Surat Khan, an English educated Amir, who, at the beginning of the film is stripped of an annual stipend of £1,50,000 upon the death of his father, the old king. Trouble...
