THE SOLDIER AND THE LADY, from 1937, was, as of 2025, the fifth of a dozen filmed versions of Jules Verne’s 1876 novel “Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar”. Done in Hollywood by RKO, starring Anton Walbrook, who had played the title role in dueling French and German versions the previous year, the $400,000 production benefited by cribbing 22 minutes of footage from the big-scale French epic and sliding them into the Hollywood affair, which runs 85 minutes. Box office results yielded $1,600,000, ranking 139th in 1937.

“Go,Michael Strogoff. For God. For Russia. For the Czar.”

Russia, 1870. The Tartars are coming! Alexander II (about as good as Tsar’s ever got) needs to get word to his brother the Grand Duke. He selects Captain ‘Michael Strogoff ‘ for the mission, crossing 3,500 miles between St. Petersburg and Irkutsk. Tartar agents try to stop him. The fate of Mother Russia is in Michael’s hands.

The 416 pages of Verne’s classic adventure were in the mitts of journeyman director George Nicholls Jr. (Anne Of Green Gables, Man Of Conquest) and a trio of variously capable screenwriters: Mortimer Offner (Alice Adams), Anthony Vieller (Stage Door, Moulin Rouge, The Night Of The Iguana) and Anne Morrison Chapin.

Strogoff is played by Austrian emigre Anton Walbrook, 40, fleeing the Nazis for a one-off sojourn to the States before resettling in England. Joining him were English actresses Elizabeth Allan as demure romantic interest ‘Nadia’ and Margot Grahame as Tartar femme fatale ‘Zangarra’. Russian transplant Akim Tamiroff is ‘Ogareff’, wily Tartar chieftain.

Walbrook would fare well in England in pictures like 49th Parallel, The Life And Death of Colonel Blimp and The Red Shoes,  and perhaps he was okay in the French and German versions, but he’s a waxwork stiffo in the US costumer, charisma free even though he gets to fight a bear, endures torture, have a knockdown dragout with Tamiroff and lead a cavalry charge. Director Nicholls was loose on the reins: acting throughout is florid, with an excess of meaning-laden arched eyebrows. The makeup, wild beards, drooping mustaches and gaudy costumes let you know the Tartars are cruel Asiatic savages threatening to despoil all that is fair and noble in Czarist Russia.

Beyond the amusing get-ups and posturing, the pluses are Joseph H. August’s expertly lit cinematography, the inserted action footage and the work from dependable ruffian Tamiroff. Though he’s outfitted with a facial scar that changes from scene to scene, Akim gives the needed nastiness edge to his villain. The ogre Ogareff also has a lustful attachment to the slinkish Zagarra, so this may be the one chance to see Akim Tamiroff get close to something like romance, albeit stretching the definition.

There was another Russia-set adventure in 1937, the top-rate Knight Without Armour, starring Robert Donat and Marlene Dietrich: it eats Strogoff’s borscht.

With Eric Blore and Edward Brophy providing wan comedy relief as squabbling war correspondents, Fay Bainter, soulful as Michael’s mother and Paul Guilfoyle, the definition of suspicious (and looking a lot like Pedro Armendariz), as a Tartar assassin. In bits, try and spot Ward Bond and Richard Loo, under their headgear and mustaches .