From Afghanistan With Love

Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda gang, the Taliban, the U.S. and Northern Alliance forces and even the invading Soviet military of the 1980s all rate as Johnnies-come-lately to Afghanistan. In contrast, Hollywood--with a frequent salaam of thanks to Rudyard Kipling--has been making war in Afghanistan for more than 70 years and along the way managed to turn out Adolf Hitler’s favorite movie. The films vary greatly in quality but almost all make use of that country’s rugged landscape, unfamiliar (at least to Western eyes) customs and warlike inhabitants.

The Hollywood-Afghanistan connection began in 1929 with “The Black Watch,” directed by John Ford and starring Victor McLaglen and Myrna Loy. Also in 1929, Sovkino, the Soviet Union’s government cinema agency of the time, cranked out “Afghanistan,” a documentary probably ranking as the first motion picture filmed on location in that land.

“The Black Watch” was the first full-length talkie directed by Ford, who had not yet gained the eminence he was to have in later years even though he had already racked up credits as a director, producer, screenwriter or actor on 38 films. Loy played an Afghan princess who, luckily for McLaglen’s character, a captured British Army officer, falls in love with him. He is thereby spared the princess’ usual punishment for POWs: castration. An unknown by the name of John Wayne appeared as an extra.

(The film was remade in 1953 as “King of the Khyber Rifles,” directed by Henry King and starring Tyrone Power.)

Tales by Kipling have provided much Hollywood plot material, a good portion involving Afghan settings. Hollywood’s usual Kipling gambit has been to follow his plots loosely. For instance, in 1937 for “Wee Willie Winkie,” which included Afghan settings, 20th Century Fox ordered screenwriters Julien Josephson and Ernest Pascal to perform a sex change on the central character to adapt the role for its wildly popular star Shirley Temple, thereby assuring the film’s box office success.

In another case of surgery, RKO in 1939 turned “Gunga Din” into an unlikely screen success. A colorful but simple Kipling poem glorifying a faithful bhisti (water boy) serving a British regiment on the fabled Northwest Frontier between India and Afghanistan, “Gunga Din” offered scarcely a plot. Nevertheless, at the behest of producer Pandro S. Berman, a writing team--including noted playwrights and screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur and novelist William Faulkner--inflated it into a big-budget hit that starred Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Joan Fontaine and McLaglen.

Sam Jaffe starred as Gunga--in those days, racial authenticity in casting wasn’t a factor. Another example of this was “Drums,” a 1938 British release that was shot in Afghanistan in the Khyber Pass. Wearing suitable makeup, Raymond Massey starred as beetle-browed Prince Ghul, an Indian with an attitude problem--or maybe he was an Afghan or a Persian or some kind of central Asian. The writers of vintage Afghan shoot-’em-ups sometimes were negligent in nailing down the specific bloodlines of their characters.

It should be pointed out that these films belong to a class of Union Jack-waving, Rule Britannia, “sun never sets on the British Empire” productions that during the 1930s were a distinct trend in Hollywood, one that experienced a modest revival in the ‘50s. The stories, presented in the context of the Raj--the British colonial regime in India--were set in the era long before Pakistan gained independence from India in 1947.

In those days, it was India proper (not Pakistan) that directly adjoined Afghanistan, and the British troops in the films were characteristically stationed along the storied Northwest Frontier that divided the two lands. In them, the Tommies did a lot of ominous muttering about who and what lay beyond the Khyber Pass, the historic crossing point between the two countries that to movie audiences once seemed impossibly remote and romantic, but that today has become almost a household term to news junkies.

In these movies, the Brits invariably used the Khyber Pass to march into Afghanistan to confront various legions of Pathan (or Pushtun) tribesmen, who were forever rebelling, massacring, kidnapping, smuggling and committing other forms of villainy.

Hollywood seemed to have, in fact, a fixation on the Khyber Pass. Unlike the suddenly Afghanistan-hip audiences today, moviegoers of five or six decades ago easily got the impression from these films that the whole of Afghanistan consisted of no more than a piddling expanse of desert and mountains at the western end of the pass.

Although Hitler was reportedly obsessed with films, particularly German films made under his Third Reich, it’s curious, if not laughable, that he was “wowed” by one of these American movies glorifying India-garrisoned British soldiers fighting the Afghans. Herbert Dohring, manager of Hitler’s Bavarian alpine retreat, Berchtesgaden, in the 1930s, testified that Paramount’s “The Lives of a Bengal Lancer,” starring Gary Cooper, Franchot Tone and C. Aubrey Smith and released in 1935, was “definitely the favorite film” of Hitler, according to a 1997 article in the London Observer.

Hitler admired how the picture depicted the British Army controlling the native peoples on the Northwest Frontier. “He was fascinated by how this relatively small number of people established [an] Indian empire and then kept it in order,” Dohring said in the Observer story.

The Kipling-does-Afghanistan genre includes the 1950 film “Kim,” with Dean Stockwell in the title role and Errol Flynn as an Indian horse trader; “The Man Who Would Be King” (1975), directed by John Huston and starring Sean Connery, Michael Caine and Christopher Plummer as Rudyard Kipling himself; and “Soldiers Three” (1951), reputed to be producer Berman’s rough facsimile of his previous hit, “Gunga Din.”

In truth, Kipling had no more firsthand knowledge of warfare in Afghanistan than did the Hollywood people who concocted Kipling-based movies. What he knew he learned in barrooms, barracks rooms and officers’ messes by devouring the tales of troops who had experienced it.

In “The Man Who Would Be King,” Kipling has his character Peachy Carnehan, played in the movie adaptation by Caine, colorfully describe Kafiristan, a mountainous region of eastern Afghanistan south of the Hindu Kush range. It’s where vainglorious drifters Peachy and Daniel Dravot (Connery) try to carve an empire for themselves, but it’s a place Kipling never laid eyes on. It’s also an area that has figured prominently in current military operations by the Northern Alliance and the U.S. against Taliban and Al Qaeda forces.

Kipling was born in India in 1865, and after being educated in England, he returned to India as a young man to live and work, principally in Lahore in present-day Pakistan. The years he spent in India were peaceful. Although a sizable British army was always deployed and ready for action on the Northwest Frontier in Victorian times, Kipling missed out on a couple of Anglo-Afghan wars. In 1885, while covering for two Indian newspapers a British reception for an Afghan emir on the frontier, Kipling wandered a few hundred yards into the nearby Khyber Pass but retreated after a tribesman took a shot at him. This was his first and last experience on the Northwest Frontier and the farthest he ever ventured in the direction of Afghanistan.

It should not be concluded from all this that Hollywood movies represent the total of cinema credits amassed by Afghanistan. Far from it, in spite of the region’s remoteness--until now. There have been, obviously, screenplays set in Afghanistan but filmed elsewhere, and also screenplays set in Afghanistan and filmed there. Filming has been done by foreign companies as well, among them British, Russian, German, Italian, Finnish and Indian. Films have dealt with Kiplingesque 19th century conflict and the modern Soviet-Afghan war.

Undoubtedly the most prominent production shot on location there was the Sylvester Stallone action thriller “Rambo III,” filmed in part around the Afghan capital of Kabul and released in 1988 in the same month the real-life Russian army began withdrawing in defeat from Afghanistan. “The Horsemen” (1971), with Omar Sharif, Leigh Taylor-Young and Jack Palance appearing as Afghans, was another U.S. picture set in modern Afghanistan and filmed on location there and in Spain under the direction of John Frankenheimer.

“Peshavarsky Vals,” a 1994 Russian release, was set against the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The action, however, takes place in a camp of Russian POWs in Pakistan. A quirky credit here is the writer whose story was the source of the script: Andrei Sakharov, the famed Soviet dissident, physicist and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Among the sites that have doubled for Afghanistan over the years are Bryce Canyon National Park and Glen Canyon in Utah, along with locations in Morocco, Israel and Spain. But probably the single most popular non-Afghan site representing Afghanistan on film has been California’s Alabama Hills, scenic rock formations at the foot of Mt. Whitney near Lone Pine.

In his review of “Zarak,” a 1956 film set in Afghanistan, James Powers, a movie critic for the Hollywood Reporter, played off the phrases “horse opera” and “oater” (referring to horse feed) used by the Hollywood trade papers to describe westerns. For this, film Powers coined the terms “camel opera” and “dater.” His appraisal of this camel opera was strictly lukewarm.

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Dan Bagott is a retired journalist and publicist.