Gunga Din (film)

Infobox Film | name = Gunga Din


caption = "Gunga Din" poster
director = George Stevens
producer = George Stevens
writer = Rudyard Kipling (poem)
Ben Hecht (story)
Charles MacArthur (story)
Joel Sayre
Fred Guiol
starring = Cary Grant
Victor McLaglen
Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
Eduardo Ciannelli
Sam Jaffe
Joan Fontaine
music = Alfred Newman
cinematography =
editing =
distributor = RKO
released = February 17, 1939 (USA wide release)
runtime = 117 min.
language = English
midget =
amg_id = 1:21156
imdb_id = 0031398

"Gunga Din" is a 1939 RKO adventure film loosely based on the poem by Rudyard Kipling, combined with elements of his novel "Soldiers Three". The film is about three British sergeants and their native water bearer who fight the Thuggee, a group of native Indians engaged in murdering and robbing travellers in colonial India.

The movie stars Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Joan Fontaine, Eduardo Ciannelli, Abner Biberman and, in the title role, Sam Jaffe. The movie was written by Joel Sayre and Fred Guiol from a storyline by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, with uncredited contributions by Lester Cohen, John Colton, William Faulkner, Vincent Lawrence, Dudley Nichols and Anthony Veiller. It was directed by George Stevens.

Plot summary

On the Northwest Frontier of colonial India, circa 1880, the British fort at Muree has lost contact with its outpost at Tandipur in the middle of a telegraph message. Colonel Weed (Montagu Love) dispatches a small detachment of British Indian Army troops to learn what happened, led by three sergeants of the Royal Engineers, MacChesney (Victor McLaglen), Cutter (Cary Grant), and Ballantine (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.). The trio are long-time friends and campaigners, and also a disciplinary headache for their colonel, but are just the ticket for a mission requiring cool-headed resourcefulness outnumbered and under fire. Accompanying the detail to Tandipur is a regimental "bhisti" (water-bearer), Gunga Din (Sam Jaffe), who longs to throw off his slave/untouchable status and become a soldier of the Queen.

They find Tandipur apparently and mysteriously deserted--including food left uneaten on the table--and set about repairing the telegraph. Ballatine comes across a mysterious group skulking in the back room of a house and as he rounds them up, one tries to strangle him. With Cutter and MacChesney's help, the Indians are subdued but in short order their leader reveals that it is the troops that are surrounded. The troops fight their way out of the trap and return to Muri shot up and without arms, but with pride intact. They bring back a pickaxe that Colonel Weed and Major Mitchell (Lumsden Hare) both identify with alarm as a thuggee weapon. Ballantine is due to leave the army in a few days to be wed to Emmy Stebbins (Joan Fontaine) and go into the tea business, a combined calamity that MacChesney and Cutter consider worse than death. When Colonel Weed, as part of an expedition to subdue the revolt, sends them back to Tandipur, MacChesney contrives to put his replacement, the "stick-in-the-mud" Sergeant Bertie Higginbotham (Robert Coote), in hospital and have Ballantine ordered to go. He also tricks Ballantine into signing a blank re-enlistment form that, if filled in, would keep Ballantine in the army for nine more years.

After much spirited derring-do, all four of the main characters are captured by the Thugs. They meet the fanatical guru of the cultists, portrayed by Eduardo Ciannelli, who tells them of his plans for conquest and forces them to watch as an ambush is prepared for their regiment. Gunga Din is bayoneted, but manages with the last of his strength to climb to the top of the gold dome of the temple and sounds the alarm using a bugle he has taken from a dead Thuggee. He is then shot dead by the Thugs. As a a result, the British force is alerted and defeats the Thuggee forces. At Din's funeral pyre, the Colonel of the regiment formally inducts Gunga Din as a British soldier and reads the last lines of the Kipling poem over the body.

Production

Originally, Grant and Fairbanks were assigned each other's role; Grant was to be the one leaving the army to marry Joan Fontaine's character, and Fairbanks the happy-go-lucky treasure hunter, since the character was identical to the legendary screen persona of Fairbanks' father. Grant wanted to switch; the producers relented and the actors were successfully recast.

Filming began on June 24 1937 and was completed on October 19 1937. The film premiered in Los Angeles on January 24, 1939.

California's Sierra Nevada range, Alabama Hills and surrounding areas doubled as the Khyber Pass for the film. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. reported in a featurette interview on the DVD release that in his travels, he has met several Indians who were convinced the external scenes were filmed on location in Northwest India at the actual Khyber Pass.

The original script was composed largely of interiors and detailed life in the barracks. The decision was made to make the story a much larger adventure tale, but the re-write process dragged on into principal shooting. Some of the incidental scenes that flesh out the story were filmed while hundreds of extras were in the background being marshalled for larger takes.

The movie includes a sequence at the end in which a fictionalised Rudyard Kipling, played by Reginald Sheffield, witnesses the events and is inspired to write his poem (the scene in which the poem is first read out carefully quotes only those parts of the poem that tally with the events of the movie). Following objections from Kipling's family, the character was excised from some prints of the movie, but has since been restored.

Awards

The cinematographer Joseph H. August was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White.

In 1999 the film was deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Influence

Critics have noted that the film has many plot similarities with "The Front Page" which was also written by Ben Hecht andCharles MacArthur. Fairbanks' character wants to leave to get married but is prevented from doing so by Cary Grant's scheming character. (Grant played the same role in a remake of "The Front Page" called "His Girl Friday" the following year.)

The film version of "Gunga Din" was re-told (perhaps "parodied" would be a better word) in a 1962 tongue-in-cheek version reset in the American West and starring all of the members of the Rat Pack, entitled "Sergeants 3", with Frank Sinatra in the McLaglen role, Dean Martin in the Grant role, Peter Lawford in the Fairbanks role, and Sammy Davis, Jr. in the Jaffe role.

"Gunga Din" remains the favorite film of novelist and screenwriter William Goldman; his first novel, "The Temple of Gold", is named after the location of the film's climax.

The film is referenced in two Peter Sellers films. In "The Party", Sellers plays an Indian actor in the role of Gunga Din, and a parody of the film's climax has Sellers blowing his bugle to warn the British Army to such annoying effect, that his own troops start shooting at him; in "The Pink Panther Strikes Again", the mad genius Dreyfus quotes the insane guru's speech about mad military geniuses.

Many of the events and scenes from the second Indiana Jones film, "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom", are taken from "Gunga Din", including casting a lookalike as the Thuggee leader, although all the original film's plot similarities to "The Front Page" are omitted in the Spielberg movie.

External links

*imdb title|id=0031398|title=Gunga Din