Cant believe this has got 6.1....

These days a woman of thirty-three or four would resemble a teenybopper. In those days (1955) an aging woman of thirty-something would look like a woman in her fifties does now. Actually, I believe that Turner was thirty-four. If she was born in January 1921 and they filmed this movie in early 1955, she would have at least been that old.

Times have changed. Even women do not age as fast as they used to. Today we look younger longer, but are a lot poorer and fatter than Lana Turner ever was.

Anyway, Richard Burton said it best when this film got terrible reviews: "It never rains, but it Ranchipurs". He is gorgeous in this but he looks more like an Anglo-Indian (with emphasis on the Anglo) than he does an Untouchable. And he is the best thing about this movie although I also like Michael Rennie, Fred MacMurray, and Eugenie Leontovich, the actress portraying the Maharani. Burton is still regarded as a legend, but both Rennie and MacMurray were underrated as actors. Rennie was the robot in The Day The Earth Stood Still, and he was terrific as the love interest in The Wicked Lady, while MacMurray gave one of the all-time great performances by an actor ever in the noir classic Double Indemnity.

The beautiful Lana Turner is good, but I agree that this babe was vastly overrated as an actress. I hope she thanked her lucky stars that she actually received an Academy award nomination for Peyton Place, because so many great actors and actresses never received even one in their entire careers. She did not have to be so talented because she had so much star quality and could bring in her box office clout. I must admit, however, that I recently bought the first season of Falconcrest on DVD because Lana is in it.

At the time that this film was made, Burton had already been twice Oscar nominated, for The Robe (opposite Jean Simmons), and My Cousin Rachel (with Olivia de Havilland) although he was not yet a major star. He would receive his third Academy Award nomination three years after this film was released for Look Back In Anger. It was another three years before he met Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Cleopatra and made movie magic and cinematic history. Four more Oscar nominations would follow without a win.

The chemistry between Burton and Turner is wonderful, but the Rains of Ranchipur storyline was weak and predictable. The cinematography is gorgeous but the original (the Oscar-winning black-and-white classic The Rains Came in 1939) with Tyrone Power and Myrna Loy is better and the one worth mutiple viewings.

I am delighted that John Banner (a German-born actor who escaped Nazi Germany in 1939 because he was Jewish) is also in this movie with a bit part as a policeman. He would later go on to television fame as the lovable and laughable Sgt. Schultz in Hogan's Heroes in the 1960s, by which time Lana's career was on the wane, MacMurray was TV's favorite dad in My Three Sons, and Burton was a world star married to the most famous woman in show business.