Gunga Dumb

By J.C.

CONDUCT UNBECOMING Directed by MICHAEL ANDERSON Screenplay by ROBERT ENDERS

The subject is the twilight of Empire. The year is 1878, but already night has fallen all along India's northwest frontier. Someone in the 20th Indian Light Cavalry is assaulting women. The entire regiment is in a flap. Surly, cynical Second Lieut. Edward Millington (James Faulkner) is accused of brutalizing comely Marjorie Scarlett (Susannah York), widow of a regimental hero.

The assault on Mrs. Scarlett was not merely an attempted rape, but a grotesque sexual debasement in which the woman was treated as if she were the chief object of a pigsticking game. Millington's defense is handled by his contemporary. Second Lieut. Arthur Drake (Michael York), who figures his client is guilty but cannot quite allow himself to go along with the military court's charade of justice. A good thing, too, be cause there is an increasingly likely chance that Millington is blameless.

There is a great deal of chatter in Conduct Unbecoming about the honor of the regiment, much stern enunciation of principles like "gentlemen do not question the honor of other gentlemen."

From all this it seems clear that the film makers intended a treatise on the perils of colonialism and on the human horrors that such a policy can work. What Conduct Unbecoming quickly becomes, though, is a wheezy courtroom thriller and, eventually, a nostalgic vindication of the British lads out on the frontier Concepts of military honor and justice neatly survive the half-witted examination to which Screenwriter Robert Enders subjects them. The movie is cast with a virtual mothball fleet of character actors (Trevor Howard, Christopher Plummer, Richard Attenborough), who are directed by Michael Anderson (The Shoes of the Fisherman) with almost definitive incompetence. One scene alone, in which Miss York is forced to reenact her attack and crawls toward the camera on all fours, squealing like a pig, might stand as a textbook example of unskilled labor.

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