The Stranglers of Bombay *** (1959, Guy Rolfe, Allan Cuthbertson, Andrew Cruickshank, Marne Maitland, Jan Holden) – Movie Review 3281

Director Terence Fisher’s intriguing and quite chilling 1959 Hammer Films adventure/horror movie stars Guy Rolfe, Allan Cuthbertson, Andrew Cruickshank, Marne Maitland, Jan Holden, George Pastell, Paul Stassino, Tutte Lemkow, David Spenser, Ewen Solon and Roger Delgado. It gets good mileage dealing with the real-life story British East India Company‘s investigation of the murderous religious cult of Thuggee stranglers in the 1830s.

In the screenplay by David Z Goodman, passengers with the British East India Company are being strangled in their hundreds by a violent Indian cult in the 1820s. Fisher keeps his entertainingly gruesome Hammer film tense, eerie and taut.

Guy Rolfe stars as Captain Harry Lewis of the British East India Company, who is investigating why over 2000 natives are missing. Andrew Cruickshank plays Lewis’s boss, Colonel Henderson, upset that English merchants’ caravans disappearing without trace. He appoints the son of an old friend to investigate – the newly arrived, oblivious Captain Connaught-Smith (Allan Cuthbertson).

So Captains Rolfe and Cuthbertson both investigate the offbeat case, which takes the British film studio reasonably profitably into then hitherto unchartered territory. More recently, though, it appears to have influenced Steven Spielberg’s 1984 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and the 1988 The Deceivers, with Pierce Brosnan.

The film has more historical credibility than most Hammer films in describing the religious cult of Kali and the deaths of thousands — some believe millions — at the hands of the Thugs. The British succeeded in wiping out the cult, which may have originated as far back as the sixth century.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3281

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