The Stranglers of Bombay (1960)

Even buffs who are major Hammer enthusiasts don’t have much affection for The Stranglers of Bombay (1960). It’s not a horror picture, but Hammer produced many films that are outside the genre.  With just a slight nudge, it could be a horror movie.  Set in colonial India during the 1830s, the film is based, with the usual cinematic looseness, on the efforts of William Henry Sleeman, an officer with the East India Company, to discover and then eradicate the cult of thuggee.

The Sleeman substitute is Capt. Harry Lewis, played by Guy Rolfe, one of those wonderful Brit actors who move from good films (Nicholas and Alexandra) to bad (Snow White and the Three Stooges) with the surety of a Slinky going downstairs.  His wife is the faithful and always understanding Mary (Jan Holden); his commanding officer the decent but too-frequently obtuse Col. Henderson (Andrew Cruickshank); and his rival in the company, the man chosen to investigate a history of mysterious disappearances, is Capt. Christopher Connaught-Smith (Allan Cuthbertson).

Representing the other team are the High Priest of Kali (George Pastell, who had been exotic and evil for Hammer the previous year as Mehemet Bey in The Mummy), and the oily Patel Shari (Marne Maitland, who would be demoted to the rank of Beggar in the following year’s The Terror of the Tongs).

Having used his own free time to investigate these disappearances for several years, Capt. Lewis suspects a cult of killers who ingratiate themselves in small numbers into merchants’ caravans along the road, then murder their victims with a silk cord, burying the remains off the highway. Capt. Connaught-Smith doesn’t believe that a conspiracy of that magnitude could exist, ignores Lewis’ report, and puts himself and, by extension, the entire empire at risk. In an attempt to rescue the stubborn soldier, Lewis himself would face death but for the marginally motivated help of a thug who decides to make amends for his past crimes.

The movie clocks in at a swift 81 minutes, and very little of that time is spent in back story or explanation. Either the audience was expected to know about the cult of Kali, or director Terence Fisher and writer David Goodman assumed that everyone knew Orientals were capable of the most insane horrors and no time needed to be spent pointing that out.

And yet, for all its captures and escapes, the film builds very little sense of urgency. We keep expecting a grand confrontation between an army of thugs and an army of Army, but it never happens. Even the final combat between Lewis and the High Priest is over in a snap. One of the villains gets tossed onto a burning funeral pyre, and he just screams once then lies there. At this last moment, Fisher makes no attempt whatever to disguise the fact that he’s working with a relatively small cast for an historical epic.

But the picture is fun and a sly reminder that movies made essentially for kids can get away with almost anything. Even very little.