Author: Jim McLennan

Hunterwali

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★★½
“Oh, God. Where to start….”

hunterwaliIt’s through this film that I backed into my discovery of early Bollywood star, Fearless Nadia. For doing some post-view Googling, I realized this 1988 Pakistani film is actually inspired by an Indian one of the same name, from more than 50 years earlier. That’s an entirely different rabbit-hole however: let’s consider this on its own, highly psychotronic merits.

The plot concerns two sisters, Bano and Bali (Anjuman), the latter also known as Hunterwali. Bano is demure and quiet, Bali… is not. In fact, she’s a totally wild child by local standards. Mind you, local standards apparently also involve killing girls who have the temerity to want to marry someone of their own choice. Still, there are three suitors for Bali’s hand. #1 is Umri, a warrior type, who tames her horse. However, after taking vengeance on the man who kills Umri’s entire clan, he is forced to become an outlaw. Potential husband #2 is the son of a family friend, who is her father’s choice. He is entirely useless and can be ignored, since he is present largely for comic-relief.

Finally, there’s Shahreyar, he helps rescue Hunterwali from attack by a gang. However, turns out that’s a ruse to gain her confidence. When she elopes with him, he takes her to a seedy cave – we know it’s seedy, because it has posters of Madonna and Brooke Shields on the wall! – and assaults her, along with the rest of the gang. The disgrace this brings to the family, causes Hunterwali’s dad to kill himself. In the fracas, Bano is also killed, but Bali takes the identity of her sister, who is married to the local police commander. This allows her to go out on vigilante missions, masked and with her whip, to hunt down the perps. She’s not messing around either: she shoots their eyes out and hangs them from the cave roof. While she eventually works her way up the chain to Shahreyar, he has an entire new gang. Fortunately, she has the help of Umri. And her horse. And her dog.

This has not dated well. Indeed, I suspect this wasn’t very good, even for the time – 1988 was the year Hollywood gave us Die Hard. The thing about the Fearless Nadia films is they’re not incomparable to what Hollywood was making at the time. You can’t say the same about this, which has all the technical quality of a bad 50’s B-movie. The director’s sole cinematic trick is the snap zoom, which is used so often it becomes a surreal joke, as does the single horse noise apparently available to the foley team. Yet there’s a loopy energy, and Anjuman has screen presence, which means the two and a half hours certainly do not drag. If you’re looking for a bizarre combination of Zorro with a musical version of I Spit on Your Grave,  also including a dog riding to the rescue of its owner on the back of a horse, the entire thing is on YouTube. Just don’t say, I didn’t warn you…

Dir: Iqbal Kashmiri
Star: Anjuman, Sultan Rahi, Mustafa Qureshi, Jameel Babar

Miss Frontier Mail

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★★★
“Unquestionably dated, yet still a pioneer,”

frontiermailIt has now been more than eighty years since this was released. It’s important to bear this in mind, because what you have here, is very much a product of its time and place – 1936 and Bollywood, respectively. That said, it possesses a far feistier heroine than anything coming out of Hollywood at that point. Indeed, you’d probably have to wait over 35 years, until Pam Grier showed up in the seventies, to find someone comparable to the characters portrayed by an Australian actress, known in India as “Fearless Nadia”. There’s more info on Fearless Nadia elsewhere, and you might want to start there, since background is likely near-essential to appreciating her movies.

This entry has her playing Savita, the daughter of a station master who is accused of murdering his deputy, a crime actually carried out by a gang of railway robbers that have been terrorizing the area, under their anonymous master, “Signal X”. Savita seeks to clear her father’s name, initially with the help of an informant inside the gang, who had been helped by the station master. But even after Signal X kills the informant, she continues to investigate them, seeking to expose his identity. Turns out the plan is to destroy the railway network’s reputation on behalf of an airline company. This involves a terrorist campaign, including blowing up bridges and deliberately causing train crashes, and Savita is the only person who can stop him.

Let’s be clear. The fights here are awful. My daughter and her friend used to make little films in our garage when they were early teenagers. They had better brawls. It appears the sole guidance offered by the director was, “Okay, look like you’re fighting. Action!” The results resemble a drunken shoving match at a wedding more than anything. Still… For there’s one sequence where Nadia and the rest of the cast are doing it on top of a moving train, and you know it’s not doubles, green-screen or CGI. There, I don’t care what you’re doing, because I would be desperately clinging onto any relatively-fixed point. There might also be whimpering involved. This cheerful and complete disregard for personal safety, along with some of the slapstick elements, feels inspired by the silent works of Harold Lloyd, etc.

This is a real hodge-podge with no consistent tone. Action rubs shoulders with romance, and drama with juvenile comedy. There’s a reason one supporting character is listed in the credits as “champion banana eater”, and I didn’t even mention the entirely gratuitous sequence of Savita weightlifting. At 143 minutes, it’s likely a good half-hour too long; interesting to see, both in that and the shoehorning in of musical numbers, elements that remain common to many contemporary Bollywood films. Yet, once your modern eyes adapt a bit to the approach, it remains entertaining, and remarkably forward-thinking. Virtually the only competent member of Signal X’s gang, Gulab (Gulshan), is also a woman, and while Savita does have a romantic interest, it’s handled well; she’s clearly more than his equal.

You could well argue that portrayals of women in Indian cinema have significantly regressed since this. Although the action elements do leave something to be desired for 21st-century viewers, and it all looks rather naive nowadays, that doesn’t detract from being decades ahead of its time.

Dir: Homi Wadia
Star: “Fearless Nadia”, Sayani Atish, Sardar Mansur, Gulshan

Fearless Nadia: The first action heroine film superstar?

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“If India is to be free, women must be given their freedom. If you try and stop them, you’ll face the consequences.” — Diamond Queen

nadia1For more than four decades, the Indian cinema industry, popularly known as “Bollywood”, has been the most prolific in the world, producing close to a thousand features per year. It has also been active for longer than you’d think; the inaugural Indian feature came out in 1913, just two years after Nestor Studios became the first to open its doors in Hollywood. Perhaps most surprisingly, there’s a case to be made that it was also the birthplace of the action heroine feature film, with 1935’s Hunterwali. Weirder still, it made a star of “Fearless Nadia”, its leading lady – who was actually 27-year-old Australian, Mary Ann Evans.

There had already been some action heroines in America. However, these were almost exclusively in series such as The Hazards of Helen, which ran for 119 episodes of twelve minutes, from 1914-17. Like James Bond, the actresses who played the lead changed over time, but the most-used was Helen Gibson. She’s also considered the first professional stunt-woman in Hollywood, and graduated from that role on Hazards, going on to portray Helen in 63 episodes. Unfortunately, as with so much silent cinema, the entire set is now close to lost, just a few parts surviving. However, it’s impact was not limited to America.

“Suddenly, out of the unknown there arises a mysterious personality called ‘Hunterwali’… Protector of the poor and punisher of the evil-doers, and by her daring adventures, she leaves all people spell-bound.”

In 1933, brothers  J.B.H. Wadia and Homi Wadia founded Wadia Movietone, a production company specializing in action, fantasy and mythological films. Among the cast in early works such as Noor-E-Yaman was Evans. She had been born in Western Australia in 1908, then moved to India with her family at age five, when her father, a British Army soldier, was sent to Bombay. Though he was killed in World War I, Mary Ann picked up a range of skills, from horseback riding to ballet, and toured India as part of a theatrical troupe in the early thirties. This helped lead to bit parts for the Wadia Brothers, who then created the role of “Hunterwali” – “The woman with a whip” – specifically for her. Adopting the “Fearless Nadia” name, Evans’ blonde, statuesque appearance was quite the contrast to the typical heroines of the time. This likely contributed to her acceptance in action roles by the Indian audience, despite her Hindi dialogue being delivered with a heavy accent.

Hunterwali is the story of Princess Madhuri (Evans), who has a secret identity as a masked vigilante, fighting injustice with her whip, and the help of her faithful horse and dog. The production was a gamble for the Wadias. Production took six months and cost 80,000 Rupees – about $30,000, a huge sum at the time for a local film. But the risky, unproven concept meant they were unable to find a distributor, so ended up taking that role on themselves. It worked out: the novelty of a blue-eyed action heroine, doing all her own stunts, proved impossible to resist. Crowds flocked to cinema halls for months to see the 164-minute epic, giving Wadia one of the biggest box-office hits of the entire decade. Sadly, the film too is apparently now only available in an incomplete version.

“Nadia is to stunts what Jane Russell is to sex.”

nadia5So said Bollywood film writer, B.K. Karanjia, who remembers meeting Nadia on the set of one of her films in the forties. “To my considerable amazement, she did every stunt in a sort of bindaas (carefree) manner. She didn’t take herself seriously. She did not take her stunts seriously. She was never afraid, always laughing, whistling and joking.” Hunterwali launched Nadia’s career, which continued in films with titles such as Miss Frontier Mail, Diamond Queen, Jungle Princess and Lady Robinhood. The characters may have varied, but some elements remained the same. A fierce devotion to the oppressed and the punishment of villainy. Her loyal horse, dog and even a car (an Austin, semi-ironically named “Rolls Royce Ki Beti” – “Daughter of Rolls Royce”). Sayani Atish was a regular villain. and bodybuilder John Cawas also frequently appeared.

The main element, however, was the showcase provided for Nadia’s willingness to do her own action, in a way no modern star would do – or be allowed to do! As her career progressed, the stunts required became increasingly dangerous. Even in Hunterwali, she “fell flat on her face from a great height,” in a scene where she was supposed to swing from a chandelier, and was also almost swept away filming a scene in rapids near Bombay. Raging waterfalls? Jumping from horseback onto a ladder dangling from a plane? Fighting multiple lions? Not a problem for Nadia. “I’ll try anything once,” she famously said, and another journalist, Rauf Ahmed concurred: “In those days, Fearless Nadia did stunts that even men didn’t attempt.”

Her career lasted through the forties and fifties, albeit with the action components slowing as she moved into her own forties and fifties. She married Homi Wadia in 1961 – their wedding having to wait first for the death of his disapproving mother – and effectively withdrew from cinema. She came out of retirement for her final role in a James Bond spoof, Khiladi, in 1968, before retiring to raise thoroughbred horses. She died at the ripe age of 87, in 1995. In the past few years, there have been rumblings of a bio-pic, with names mentioned in connection with the role ranging from Franka Potente to Uma Thurman, and even Angelina Jolie said she’d love to play Fearless Nadia. Conflicts with her family reported derailed one project, but it’s still being kicked about. It’s certainly something I’d love to see; since there have been few, if any, characters in the history of motion pictures, quite like Fearless Nadia.

Read: our review of Miss Frontier Mail.

Roommate Wanted

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★★★
“Share today, gone tomorrow.”

If this concept sounds familiar, it should. Because this bears a strong resemblance to 2003 Japanese film 2LDK. Most obviously, both films are virtually single-location set pieces, in which the relationship between two room-mates devolve over the course of the feature, into a full-on brawl. Perhaps even more damningly, the original working title for this was 2BR/1BA – exactly like 2LDK, real-estate shorthand. [I wonder where the new title came from, since there’s no “wanted” at any point here] Yet there’s not even a “based on” credit to be seen, and no apparent acknowledgement of any inspiration. Hmm.

roomatewantedOn the other hand, if the plot has more than some similarities, the tone and approach are different here. There’s much more in the way of social commentary here, with the disparate personas of the two young women. [Indeed, so disparate, you have to question how the heck they ever ended up sharing a house] Jamie (Vega) is serious-minded, the kind of person who labels her food in the fridge, and seeking to pursue an academic career, but desperately needs funds to cover tuition at her chosen college. Dee (Grammer) is a party girl, whose days are filled with going to the gym and tanning, while her nights are filled with tequila and casual sex.

The culture clash between them is obvious, and provides most of the dramatic tension, as well as the more comedic aspects. For instance, Dee offers to make Jamie a smoothie, and on being reminded the latter is vegan, replies that she’ll use low-fat milk. Grammer nails the vapid, wannabe model-type perfectly, yet there’s an undercurrent of bitterness (particularly, as things turn out, toward Jamie and her perceived superiority) and you get the sense she’s smarter than she appears. Jamie has her own set of insecurities to deal with; as well as her tuition situation, she just broke up with her boyfriend after finding a thong in his car’s glove-box. Might Dee be able to shed some light on that?

Where this isn’t as good as 2LDK is in the mayhem. The Japanese version was, literally, no-holds barred, up to and including the use of a chainsaw. Here, there’s rather too much of the protagonists standing at a distance and lobbing things at one another. While the cynical social commentary and bite can make up some of the difference, this needs to amp up the brutality significantly, and include more surprises. When a point is made of a giant fish-tank in the living room, you know it’s only a matter of time before it’s going to come crashing down in a mini-tsunami of water, broken glass and flailing fishies.

Then there’s the ending. It could be the greatest ever. Or the worst ever. I’d listen to arguments, and could be convinced in either direction. It certainly is… a shocking ending. I should say no more than that. We will remember it, that’s for sure. But we’ll be more likely to watch 2LDK again, and an interest in doing so, is likely the main takeaway from this unofficial reboot.

Dir: Rob Margolies
Star: Alexa Vega, Spencer Grammer, Kathryn Morris, Bryan Dechart

Darkweb

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★½
“You smell the farmer!”

darkwebThe above is one of the lines of dialogue – rewound and checked on the closed-captions to confirm – which somehow got through the script, production and editing without correction, into the final film. This, folks, is cinema as a second language. The IMDB says “USA,” but that clearly isn’t the case. I’m going with Belgian, based on the names in the credits, but whoever it is should be sending a diplomatic apology. It seems vaguely located in Russia, based mostly on the mention of roubles as currency. However, it starts with a tank rampaging through the countryside. Why? Like so much here, it’s never explained.

The meat of the story has a group that kidnap people, then turn them loose for others to hunt down in a forest, streaming the results on the “dark web” side of the Internet [the film’s on-screen title inexplicably loses the space]. But they bite off more than they can chew when the kidnap Anna (Seul) and her brother. Holding him hostage, she’s set loose for the sport, only for infighting and the unexpected presence of a “ringer” among the hunters, to disrupt proceedings. Can she survive? Or will she just keep tripping over things and falling down?

Oh, dear. Despite the cover which promises an adequate quota of butt-kicking, what we get is much more like a bad level of Tomb Raider, with Anna jogging around the forest, as if looking for a goddamn key. Everyone in the film is incredibly dumb, failing miserably to utilize obvious chances for taking out their enemies, typically just leaving them unconscious instead. The dialogue is barely functional, while the two “names” who appear in minor roles – Oliver Gruner and, inexplicably, Danny Glover – have clearly fallen on hard times. The latter literally Skypes in his entire performance.  Much of what happens makes no sense, such as Anna’s sudden prowess with a longbow, which is used once then never mentioned again.

The film doesn’t look too bad; it’s nicely shot, and the wooded location offers a good range of terrain. The problems lie elsewhere, and are far more numerous. The title is more or less irrelevant, for starters, and the action sequences are generic and unimpressive. Few of the characters make any impression at all. If they’d given Anna some kind of back-story that could have made subsequent bad-assery plausible, that might have helped. Instead, she’s just a goat herder, and we’re given no reason to root for or care about her and her brother. But lengthy sequences of tank rampage? The film fits that in, no problem. The film doesn’t so much build to a climax as peter out. You likely won’t even think “Is that it?” so much as “Thank god that’s over.”

Dir: Bruno Vaussenat
Star: Nina Seul, Petra Silander, Sebastien Vandenberghe, Tristan Robin
a.k.a. Survival

High School Hellcats

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★★★
“Pussies galore.”

hellcatsSpectacularly dated in some ways, this also possesses comforting resonances with the present day: hey, teenagers were brattily rebellious in 1958 too. New girl Joyce (Lime) is lured in by the bad-girl posings of the Hellcats, led by Connie (Lund) and her long-time second in command, Dolly (Sidney). They shoplift! They throw knives about! They smoke! This is all to the concern, not so much of her parents (who seem largely oblivious to the moral depths into which their daughter is sinking, providing her skirts aren’t too short), as her boyfriend, Mike (Halsey), who is concerned about where the Hellcats are leading Joyce.

Dolly, meanwhile, is none too happy at the increasingly cozy relationship between Connie and Joyce, that threatens to supplant her position as deputy. Matters come to a head after a party at an unoccupied house, where a game of “sardines” has a tragic conclusion. The death is hushed up, with all present vowing to keep it secret – but the cops are soon nosing around, and the pressure starts to cause cracks in the Hellcats – some members in particular…

Probably the most deliciously mad element is the first “initiation” through which Joyce has to go, involving her in the hideous crime of… wearing slacks to school. Clearly, these young women are completely irredeemable and beyond any hope of redemption. Yeah, it all seems remarkably sweet and innocent in comparison to modern life; though on the other hand, this was also while segregation was still part of American culture, and the entirely Caucasian nature of the film and its cast is also notable. But as so often, the bad girls seem an awful lot more fun than the blandly-uninteresting Joyce; give them seven more years (plus some plastic surgery), and they could end up starring in Faster, Pussycat! – there’s much the same enthusiastic spitting of over-ripe dialogue here.

It isn’t just their attitude: it’s notable that, unlike some entries in the “teenage girl gang” genre, the Hellcats are not an off-shoot of a male gang, or indeed, beholden to men in any way – the only male character of note is Mike, and he is basically as useful as a chocolate teapot. Even at the end, when Joyce is lured into a late-night meeting at the derelict cinema which is the gang’s HQ, he serves no significant purpose. That’s remarkably advanced for its time, and is the kind of forward thinking which keeps this watchable when, let’s be honest, many of the topical elements are more likely to trigger derisive snorts in the contemporary viewer. On the other hand, the amusement added certainly can’t be said to detract from the overall entertainment value.  While I’m not exactly going to claim this is some kind of hidden gem, it was certainly more watchable than I expected, given both the passage of time and its obvious throwaway nature, even in its day.

Dir: Edward Bernds
Star: Yvonne Lime, Brett Halsey, Susanne Sidney, Jana Lund

Let There Be Zombies

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★★
“Fight off the Living Dead”

Let-There-Be-ZombiesIt’s curious to look back at the history of zombie movies, which as we know them, began with a low-budget horror film called Night of the Living Dead, in 1968. Almost fifty years later, zombies have gone utterly mainstream, giving us films such as World War Z and the most popular show on basic cable, The Walking Dead. But it has also re-spawned its own slew of low-budget genre entries, many of which prove the truth of the statement, “Just because you can make a zombie movie. doesn’t mean you should make a zombie movie.” Even as a horror fan, I will happily admit many of these should have been strangled at birth, rehashing over-familiar story-lines with poverty-row production values and inexperienced talent on both sides of the camera.

This is not quite in the same category of being irredeemable. Certainly, there’s nothing much new in the story of a handful of survivors struggling to cope in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, and the effects are workmanlike at best. However, it managed to sustain my interest somewhat better than many of its undead siblings. The heroine is Drew (Daly), a rookie teacher painfully unable to handle disruptive pupils her class – as she’s told, “Control the situation, don’t let the situation control you.” Before she can do that though, the apocalypse strikes and in trying to flee, her car runs out of gas in the middle of the countryside. She meets another lost soul, computer programmer Jeff (Lowe) and they try to find safety, eventually ending up on the farm run by Red (Monsante) – but it’s only a brief respite before the hordes track them down there, and Drew is going to need to transform from her milquetoast personality, if she’s to have any hope of surviving.

It’s this character arc which qualifies it for inclusion here, though it’s less of an arc than the flicking-on of a psychological switch. One second, she’s afraid of her own shadow; the next, having found a gun, she’s blasting away at the undead like they were a fairground attraction. This could be sloppy writing, or it could be a deliberate statement on the immediate empowerment obtained by possession of a firearm. Certainly, she’s a good deal more interesting once she’s in bad-ass mode, and by the time of the film’s coda, she has more or less turned into Alice from Resident Evil – albeit, without any of the cool moves. The script, however, is extremely hit-or-miss: if there were a couple of moments, where I’ll confess I did laugh, there are just as many where poor delivery killed any potential. Patterson and the rest of his cast and crew clearly have a deep love for the genre. That can only take a film so far, and unless you have a similar affection, there’s only so much entertainment to be found in watching the walking dead get prodded with bits of wood.

Dir: Andrew Patterson
Star: Sydney Daly, Manuel Monsante, Doug Lowe, Enrique Arellano

The Golden Claws of the Cat Girl

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★★½
“Great idea, spoiled by limp execution.”

goldenclawsInspired by the first in a series of books by Albert Sainte-Aube, it’s easy to see why this proved a successful concept. Beautiful circus performer Françoise (Gaubert, who managed to marry both a dictator’s son and a triple Olympic gold medalist, in Radhamés Trujillo and Jean-Claude Killy respectively) takes her talents to the criminal field, where her tightrope and trapeze skills help in her secret life as a cat-burglar. However, this is derailed when she falls for a sting by government operative Durieux (Guiomar), and the price of her freedom is her assistance with a task set by him.

Diplomat Saratoga (Pitoëff) is using his status as a cover for drug-running, and in order to break the operation open, Durieux needs Françoise to break into Saratoga’s office and liberate a 20 kg package of drugs from the safe. To this end, she’s given the help of Bruno (Duchaussoy), a gifted lip-reader who’ll be able to figure out when the deal is going down, and the two of them begin a stake-out from a nearby apartment. But our heroine’s sticky fingers don’t stop at the drugs, and when she also liberates a large sum of cash from the safe, and heads for Switzerland, with the cop, the criminal and Bruno, all keen to track her down, each for their own reasons.

Unfortunately, this is one of those films that, despite a brilliant title (not the original one, which translates as much more prosaically, as The Lone Wolf). doesn’t live up to its promise. There is an awful lot of sitting around and chatting, filmed in a flat and uninteresting manner, and none of the supporting cast provide any kind of depth or interest. That’s a shame, as the action is generally well-handled, not least the heist at the movie’s core, which takes place during a thunderous rainstorm, making every move all the more treacherous. I do have to wonder, however, quite where they are hanging the trapeze from which the heroine swings, or why she bothers – the tightrope-walking depicted on multiple occasions previously, would seem a much more sensible and reliable method of getting from High Point A to High Point B!

Regardless, after a wonderful 10 minutes, it’s back to sitting around and chatting, and that’s largely where the movie remains until the end. More than one review has remarked on the film’s possible status as an inspiration for Luc Besson’s Nikita. While I can see that possibility, in its tale of a woman coerced into working for the government, who yearns to escape, this would be a case where the student’s efforts significantly surpassed those of his master.

Dir: Edouard Logereau
Star: Danièle Gaubert, Michel Duchaussoy, Julien Guiomar, Sacha Pitoëff
a.k.a. La Louve Solitaire

Enemy of the Reich: The Noor Inayat Khan Story

Video

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khanBorn three years before the Russian Revolution in St. Petersburg, Khan was perhaps the most unlikely of secret agents. Her father was an Indian of noble birth, descended on his maternal side from Tipu Sultan, and a noted Sufi mystic; her mother, a cousin of Mary Baker Eddy’s from New Mexico. The family also lived in London, before settling in Paris until the invasion of France in 1940, when Khan returned to the United Kingdom. Keen to help free her country from the Nazis, she joined the Women’s Auxilliary Air Force as a wireless operator. However, her additional talents as a native French speaker, brought Khan to the attentions of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), tasked with organizing resistance groups in France.

After being trained in undercover work, she was sent to France in June 1943, and began work in Paris, transmitting agent reports back to London. It was a ferociously dangerous job, with the average lifespan of radio operators only a few weeks. A sweep by occupying forces gathered up almost all her colleagues, leaving Khan the only operator still at large. She was the most wanted British secret agent in Paris, with her description widely circulated; wireless detection teams meant she was constantly on the move and could only transmit for 20 minutes at a time. According to a post-war commendation, “She refused to abandon what had become the most important and dangerous post in France and did excellent work.”

It eventually took betrayal from within the organization before she was captured after three and a half months in October 1943. Even then, she managed to escape custody, only to be recaptured once again. Another unsuccessful attempt followed. The Germans were taking no further chances, and shipped her from France to Germany, where she was imprisoned in solitary confinement, with her hands and feet shackled. After more than nine months she was transferred to Dachau concentration camp, along with three other female British SOE agents. On September 13, 1944, all four were executed. Khan was 30 years old. Her final utterance was: “Liberte”. She was posthumously awarded the George Cross, the second-highest British decoration – one of only four women to receive it – and also given the Croix de Guerre by the French government.

Enemy of the Reich: The Noor Inayat Khan Story
★★★

khanScreened on PBS in 2014, this uses a combination of interviews, with scholars and Khan’s descendants,  as well as dramatic re-creations, to tell her life-story, touching on most of the aspects mentioned above. It also delves into her psychology, suggesting that the tenets of strong Sufi philosophy instilled during her upbringing were both a source of Khan’s strength and, potentially, her biggest weakness. She was, according to the film, almost incapable of telling a lie, which could be a literally lethal flaw for a secret agent in wartime. In his memoirs, cryptographer Leo Marks (played here by Isenberg) gives some blackly amusing anecdotes to illustrate this. But the film concentrates on how he used the trait to strengthen her encryption skills, another area of concern from her training.

Unfortunately, rather unimpressive are the interviews with her nephew, Pir Zia Inayat-Khan who delivers slabs of philosophical mumbo-jumbo that makes little sense and is even less interesting. I’d rather have seen more of the re-enactments of Khan’s time in occupied Paris, which manage to do a fairly good job of capturing the sense of danger and perpetual tension for an agent in those times. Srinivasan, as Khan, doesn’t appear to have anything of an acting resume in the IMDb, yet is successful in depicting Khan’s idealism, which ultimately led to her death. Curiously though, the film appears almost to soft-pedal the treatment received at the hands of the Nazis after her capture. Still, there’s no denying the impact of the final sequence, which cuts from the execution, shot almost in stark black-and-white, to Khan reading from the book of stories she had written, to two young children.

Though running little more than 50 minutes, it does highlight the cinematic potential in the story: the modern resonance of a Muslim woman taking up arms and participating in a Western war is particularly undeniable. There was word, back in 2012 [around the time a memorial statue of Khan was unveiled in London], that such a project was in the pipeline. Producers Tabrez Noorani and Zafar Hai announced they had bought the rights to Shrabani Basu’s book, Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan. You’d think a Hollywood-Bollywood partnership would be all over the story. Yet since then? Little or nothing. Maybe some day, Khan will finally receive the global recognition she likely deserves.

Dir: Robert H. Gardner
Star: Helen Mirren (narrator), Grace Srinivasan, Joe Isenberg, Mike Sullivan

Below, you should see another documentary on the same topic, Princess Spy. This formed part of BBC’s Timewatch series in 2006, and if perhaps a little dry, is also a good overview of a heroine who isn’t as well known as she should be.