 "The Last Outpost" borrows stock footage from earlier productions, notably Merian C. Cooper's 1925 silent ethnographic documentary "Grass—A Nation's Battle for Life".The spectacular river-crossing and mountain-climbing scenes are a genuine record, filmed by Cooper, of traditional Bakhtiari migrations in Iran.Writing for "The Spectator" in 1935, Graham Greene gave a mixed review, describing the first half-hour of the film as "remarkably good" and the remaining 40 minutes as "quite abysmally bad".