skygiants

(I only know about The Four Feathers through cultural osmosis, and that very vaguely -- it's about accusations of cowardice?)

Yes, through which it's about concepts of courage and cowardice and what they mean against people's actual behavior as illustrated through a winning combination of angst and adventure. I've written a couple of times about the 1939 film, which is widely regarded as the best of at least half a dozen adaptations; it sharpens the novel's ironies and does spectacularly by its cast and location shooting and then there's the brownface, which is an irony I don't think it intended to add. Every so often I think about revisiting it for Patreon now that I know more about movies, but I have not actually done so. It was part of my discovery of Ralph Richardson and introduced me to John Clements, which in a wild shift of subjects reminds me to ask if you have seen Knight Without Armour (1937), because it is actually fascinating about the Russian Civil War. Sympathetic Bolsheviks in English-language cinema are, in my experience, hella rare.