East of Elephant Rock is a 1977 British independent drama film directed by Don Boyd and starring John Hurt, Jeremy Kemp and Judi Bowker. It was Boyd's second feature film following his little-noticed 1975 Intimate Reflections.[1][2] Like William Somerset Maugham's 1927 play The Letter and two subsequent film adaptations, its narrative content depended on the 1911 Ethel Proudlock murder in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which became a cause célèbre scandalising British colonial society and which had been featured in a Sunday Observer article as recently as the year before.[3][4] Boyd, drawing in part on his own experience of growing up in an increasingly dysfunctional family in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion, wanted to tell a story about the decline of the Empire and the surrender of responsibility.[5][6] In the event his project was for the most part ridiculed but the film did draw warm support from the film director Bryan Forbes.