A very beautiful melodrama of tragic love set in India in some of its most enchanting places (including Taj Mahal, of course,) under the shadow of the war with Japan. Dirk starts off escaping from them in Burma and ends up their prisoner once again. Between his ordeals he experiences an ideal romance with a Japanese girl who teaches Japanese to intelligence soldiers, one of whom is Dirk. The class sequences are almost the best of the film. Charming music embellishes the film and wraps it up in bitter-sweet romance which never gets too sleazy, since there are constant complications.
It's an odd film for Dirk Bogarde and a very singular war and love story, very much akin to William Holden's war and love experiences in Korea and Hongkong, but this is both more idyllic, more intimate and more personal, since Yoko Tani is a more Madame Butterfly kind of girl, more sensitive and vulnerable, and Dirk is delicate enough to treat her with care. so he doesn't make matters worse, as he did in "Simba".
The film leaves you with a few question marks, though. Whatever happened to the miserable Fenwick? You can only suppose the worst. But the worst gaffe is the tremendous mistake of Brigadier Anthony Bushell not to immediately turn back when he sees an obvious booby-trap on the road, a dreadful tactical mistake, which no qualified Brigadier would have risked committing. But then without that goof, there would have been no great finale to the melodrama.
The most beautiful detail of the film is the symbology, though, which doesn't become clear until afterwards. A sign says that you may not pluck cherry blossoms while they bloom, but the wind cannot read and plucks them anyway, one of those enigmatic but most appropriate Japanese philosophical adages as a motto for the whole film.