'DVD Talk' said of this film that it " . . . has a lot in common with John Ford's Stagecoach in that it's essentially a tale of a motley mix of Anglos confined in a train car, racing across an Indian plain trying to evade "bloodthirsty savages". It may be a blatant reworking of Stagecoach as the original story was co-written by John Ford's son Patrick Ford and Maureen O'Hara's husband Will Price. The final screenplay was adapted from a script by screenwriter Frank S. Nugent, the writer of eleven Ford films."
'Time Out' called this picture "the British equivalent of a Western".
'Variety' said that this movie was "reminiscent of the same director's Ice Cold in Alex, with an ancient locomotive replacing the ambulance in that desert war story and with hordes of be-turbaned tribesmen substituting for the Nazi patrols."
Average Shot Length = ~6.9 seconds. Median Shot Length = ~6 seconds.
Final film as a writer for Will Price.
The book that Van Leyden (Herbert Lom) reads in the film was historian Edward Gibbon's 'Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire' (1776).
The famous viaduct sequence in the movie was shot at Hacho Bridge which is situated between Guadahortuna and Alamedilla in Andalucía, Spain.
The name of the train in this movie was the 'Empress of India'. This was also one of this film's three English alternate titles, the title used for the film's theatrical release in Australia.
The old railway seen in this film was also used in the movies Red Sun, The Long Duel and Sette pistole per i MacGregor.
The old railway seen in this picture is now abandoned and no longer used. The railroad originally traversed the northern part of the Sierra Nevadas, the mountain range in the region of the Spanish provinces of both Granada and Almería.
This movie has also been released in a pacier ninety minute version reducing the running time by about a quarter.
This movie is equally well known by three different titles used for its theatrical release in English speaking countries. They are 'North West Frontier' (UK), 'Flame Over India' (USA) and 'Empress of India' (Australia).
This movie was made and released around the same time as the similarly titled 1958-1959 TV series Northwest Passage.
This picture, known as 'Northwest Frontier' in the UK, was released there in the same year as the similarly titled Alfred Hitchcock film North by Northwest.
This picture's setting, the North-West Frontier Province of colonial British India in 1905, is now a region that is situated within modern day Pakistan.