The class issue is very confusing.

Rating: 2/10 (30 November 2011)

In several of the reviews, mention was made of the class differences between Michael Caine, taking the part of an English blue-blood Lieutenant , and Stanley Baker, also as a Lieutenant and a Welsh patriot. The likelihood of a person from Michael Caine's background making officer at the time of the Zulu wars, is asking rather too much. Similarly, with Stanley Baker.
Snobbery was at the core of the British officer class and commissions were closely monitored. A top-class tailor might just make a good-looking East-End Cockney sit a horse and pretend to be a Cavalry officer. But once Mr. Caine starts to speak, the cat is out of the bag.
This failure, possibly, lay with the casting director. Caine auditioned for the Cockney Private - spot-on - but the casting director felt that his looks were too good for a private.
What was the woman thinking? It just doesn't work - at any level. There was a time when Received Pronunciation (RP) was drilled into all aspiring British actors & actresses. The result was, ofttimes, a highly affected accent, the speaker sounding, like Julie Andrews, for instance, as though they had a marble in their mouth.
Consider "The Four Feathers" - from the late 1930s. Apart, possibly, from C. Aubrey Smith, the men spoke with strangulated vowels - Harry Faversham became Herry Fevvershem etc...
Suspension of disbelief is stretched to the limit with miscasting. Zulu is carried by the action; the set pieces, but the sympathy lies with the Zulus, not with the miscast Baker & Caine.
If contrast is needed, consider David Niven, the quintessential upper-class English gentleman. He doesn't have to do anything other than be himself. In "The Guns of Navarone" he plays a private and no one would question his motives in declining to be an officer. We know he would pass the Recruiting Board if he applied.
In "Bedtime Story" Niven plays an aristocratic confidence trickster. It is not surprising that gullible women fall for his unassuming charm.
In the less than riveting remake, "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" (both films have appalling titles) Michael Caine is miscast as the aristocrat. He could easily play a confidence trickster (in a different film). He was perfect in Mona Lisa, as the East-End pimp.
But this is not my point.
Bruce Willis, a fine action man, was cast as a posh English newspaper reporter in "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and who can forget Marlon Brando fopping his way through the remake of "Mutiny on The Bounty"? The problem is that one must believe in the identity of the character portrayed. If they are totally miscast, as is the case with Caine, they become comical & unbelievable.
Enough. I rest my case & hope that someone in Hollywood will take note & make their characters believable.
Think Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe or Bette Davis as Margot Channing.
Think Kristin Scott-Thomas as an upper class English lady.
Geddit?