The Last Outpost

The Last Outpost finds Cary Grant and Claude Rains as British Army officers in that backwater theater of World War I, Mesopotamia. Today we know it as Iraq.

It's fascinating how things change, in this film it's the Kurds who are the nasty villains, working on behalf of the Ottoman Empire and facing the British here. When we meet Cary Grant as the film opens, he's being dragged into camp as a prisoner.

But the guy who dragged him in is Claude Rains in a Turkish army uniform. But wait, it turns out he's a spy working for British Intelligence and he frees Grant and also saves an Armenian tribe from being massacred.

While convalescing in hospital Grant falls for his beautiful nurse Gertrude Michael. She kind of likes him, but she's slightly married though it was a quickie romance that didn't really take. Guess who she's married to?

A lot of nice action here makes up for just another wartime triangle. But Claude Rains is such a superb actor, that man could make any kind of drivel look good.