Although he occasionally played honest police officials or army officers, New York-born C. Henry Gordon excelled at playing oily, duplicitous villains, whether gangsters, businessmen or evil rulers. Among the many evildoers he portrayed, his most memorable would have to be the murderous Surat Khan, who massacred prisoners, women and children, in the classic Errol Flynn swashbuckler The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936).