"It was the kind of Fascist film you could make before World War II." So said distinguished Director George Stevens late in his career, referring to his greatest early success, GUNGA DIN (1939). As an Army documentarian, Stevens had seen what war is really like, and found religion. GUNGA DIN remains, however, his first, finest and only theatrical war movie, one he would never have made later. Despite that faint praise, looking at the film today, granting its monochrome photography and 19th Century setting, it is easy to say that he was too hard on his work, but considering the kind of charade being created around Osama bin Laden, it is also understandable why he said it.

GUNGA DIN represents a zenith, an amalgam of a score of ideas and talents coming together to produce what Hollywood did superlatively in the late 1930s: The Action Adventure Film of Empire (with comic undertones). These pictures often celebrated symbolically the hegemony of white men over people of color. Such films were inherently racist, but produced in an America which championed Democracy, yet recognized Britain as a country that spoke boldly, brought "the Law," and, if need be, swung a big stick. (The French received slightly less, more ambiguous praise in films based on the French Foreign Legion's pursuit of Evil Arabs, such as 1920's "terrorist," Abdel-el-Krim, in North Africa. The only American overseas imperial entry in the genre during this period was the curiously entertaining (and forgotten) THE REAL GLORY (Wellman, also 1939), about Gary Cooper and David Niven combining forces to defeat Muslim Oro Mundados (huramundados) amid the Philippino Insurrection, in the aftermath of The Spanish-American War.] Some of the best of the films, not surprisingly, concerned the origins of the British Raj, much in the Pre-War news: CLIVE OF INDIA (Boleslawski, 1935), LIVES OF A BENGAL LANCER (Hathaway, 1935), THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE (the first two-thirds -- Curtiz, 1936), WEE WILLIE WINKIE (Ford, 1937), etc.

With the exception of numerous Westerns about our subjugation of hostile Indians under the likes of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Geronimo, Americans saw the military action adventure films as if they concerned amusing, exciting sporting events, far removed from any reality or consequences to our Nation. We were, also, so we claimed, aside from incredible divisions caused by wealth and by Jim Crow, a people without class systems. And if we did not count Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii, Samoa, the Virgin Islands and several other scattered possessions, we were proudly a nation without Empire.

Unlike in recent years, when the British have been contemptuously referred to as "The Brits," or judged fatuously as "owing us one" by the likes of Washington Post Columnist Charles Krauthammer, American media between the Wars had an artistic and political admiration for Britain and the Raj. Our heed to the call of Britain and France in the First World War had left us with a respect for the gallantry and sacrifice of the British Army. British writers like Aldous Huxley, John Buchan, Richard LLewellyn, certain of them not adverse to long working vacations in the California sun, were best selling authors. British fashions, especially for men, reflected in a dutiful-son sort of way the model of the "English Gentleman." A family feud over Edward VIII's choice of an American Divorcee in 1937 somehow emotionally linked simple American farm families around their radios with the Fate of the Empire. In 1938, "Doin' the Lambeth Walk," a gentle English variation on the Cakewalk and the Lindy Hop, joined the Jitterbug craze of that year.

The Crash of '29 had marked at the beginning of the decade, in the symbolic loss of the gold standard and decline in Sterling, an end of Great Britain as the predominant Financial power in the World. That portentous result was politely not spoken of much, at least for public consumption, around American banking circles. In such an ominous time, though many citizens still fought the Revolutionary War in their imaginations, most Americans longed for the beleagered stability of a white, English-speaking force on which the Sun Never Set.

Another reason suggested for the popularity of the British in American Motion Pictures involved a palpable social inferiority complex on the part of some Hollywood Moguls, many of whom had come to America poor from Eastern Europe. Lacking the formal amenities, seldom able to marry themselves or their children to even minor royalty, despite their fabulous wealth, they surrounded themselves with lordly "visiting firemen, " and hired British servants, managers, writers, directors and players by the regiment to front their magnificent homes and lucrative businesses. Or so went the theory.

British diction, acting style and training had been a much sought standard from the advent of Sound Films. Leading actors like Brian Aherne, Ronald Coleman, Errol Flynn, Leslie Howard, Ian Hunter, Boris Karloff, David Niven and George Sanders came from far flung parts of the Empire to show the Colonials how it was done. British beauties such as Madeline Carroll, Olivia DeHavilland, Maureen O'Hara, and Merle Oberon were abroad on the Movie landscape.


The most important practical reason for Hollywood's love fest with Great Britain, however, was that the British Empire represented an immense market, full of subjects, no matter what their color or religion, who accepted a common heritage -- in other words, ticket buyers for Hollywood films. In fact, according to the old formula, an A-picture's goal was to win back its costs at home; profits were to come from the overseas' box office.

In 1936, Warner Brothers made the immensely successful epic of empire, THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE (Curtiz), based on a poem of the same name by Sir Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The movie linked the Raj, evil Muslims and Russians, with The Crimean War: A perfect box office combination for its time. It also solidified Errol Flynn's position as one of the great stars.

Understandable then, that desperate RKO, a financial roller coaster of a studio, gambled a million initially, and in the end nearly two million dollars on a story, suggested by an idea, drawn from a poem, "Gunga Din" by Anglo-Indian writer Rudyard Kipling.

Written by Kipling in 1892, "Gunga Din" immediately swept the English-speaking world. Like most of Kipling's doggerel-like verse, it was decried by critics, but recited, along with "Fuzzy-Wuzzy," etc., nightly in bars from Manchester to Chicago to Sidney, especially when some exciting carnage was going on in a far place. (Very much like our situation today, but now men, no longer willing to memorize poetry, instead fix their eyes between ball games on battles, which hover within TV sets above ranks of whisky bottles.) Essayed for a movie as early as 1911, Kipling's poem was "treated" by John Neville and Norman Huston for prime Producer Irving Thalberg in 1928. Director Woody van Dyke scheduled a version of "Gunga Din" after completing TRADER HORN in 1931, but the expensive box office failure of that picture set plans back to 1936, when the great American novelist, William Faulkner, was hired by Independent Producer Edward Small to do a screen play.

Kipling died that year, 1936, and his American widow quickly sold rights to "Gunga Din," along with those for such successful films as ELEPHANT BOY (Flaherty, 1937), CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS (Fleming, 1937), WEE WILLIE WINKIE (Ford,1937), THE LIGHT THAT FAILED (Wellman, also 1939), and JUNGLE BOOK (Zoltan Korda, 1942).

Kipling was hot.

Faulkner culled from "Gunga Din" a tentative story about a drunken British officer, who is saved from rebellious Muslim tribesmen by the sacrifice of a loyal Afghan guide named Gunga Din. At that point the title was to be Sufi Khan's Temple, copied from an idea in THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (Walsh, 1924), with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. The problem was that there was not enough story to be gleaned from "Gunga Din" to sustain a feature movie. Faulkner, in his desultory attitude toward Hollywood, lost interest, and Small sold the project to RKO, which brought in Faulkner's friend, Director Howard Hawks, who did a revision with John Ford writer Dudley Nichols in 1937, for Lester Cohen.

Sabu, the first Indian International star, soon to be featured in Korda's remake of THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (1940), was offered the title role. Gunga Din became a pick-pocket from the streets of Calcutta, who leads English officers to safety. But there still wasn't enough story.

Enter Hawks' friends, collaborators and crack writers Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur [THE FRONT PAGE, 1931; SCARFACE (1932); TWENTIETH CENTURY (1934), VIVA VILLA (1935), etc.] They wedded the story, as it stood, with their own play The Front Page (pertaining to Editor Walter Burns' machinations against Ace Reporter Hildy Johnson, who desires to quit his job to marry) and Kipling's 1888 interrelated series of stories, Soldiers Three (English, Welsh and Irish NCO's loose in India). Cary Grant, a rising leading man, and Victor MacLaglen, a brawny veteran star, were signed to play two of the noncommissioned officers.

Director Howard Hawks was soon gone, as was the rumor of his replacement in the person of King Vidor (NORTHWEST PASSAGE, 1939).

More revisions, more re-casting, more hiring.

George Stevens, who had never directed an action film, but had done Laurel and Hardy silent comedies, was put in charge of the newly retitled GUNGA DIN. (His comedic experience eventuated some of the most enduring charms of this classic.) Stevens sat down with experienced writers Joel Sayre and Fred Guiol, and they changed the story to one about a cult of Hindu Thugees ritually attacking Muslims; and Sufi Kahn's temple became one devoted to Kali, the Goddess of Power and Destruction.

[The Western need for oil may already have been influencing Hollywood decisions.]

In a nice touch, and at Cary Grant's urging, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., was hired as a third lead, the dashingly romantic Sergeant Ballantine. Grant passed on that role to take on the more humorous, roguish Sergeant Archibald Cutter. And Joan Fontaine (REBECCA, Hitchcock, 1940), a young English actress, in the shadow then of her older sister, Olivia DeHavilland (THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE, Curtiz, 1936), was engaged for the small but pivotal part of Emmy Stebbins, the love interest.

Finally, Sabu still in England with THE THIEF OF BAGDAD, was replaced by American character actor, Sam Jaffe (LOST HORIZON, Capra, 1937). Knowing he was not the first choice, Jaffe crafted his performance with Sabu in mind. However, his costuming, and that of the story's chief villain, The Guru (Eduardo Ciannelli), was altered to suggest Mohandas K. Ghandi, then regarded as a dangerous, sinister crank by many in English-speaking nations facing a new World War.

Come the spring of 1938, Stevens persuaded the new RKO producer, Pandro S. Berman, to approve a budget of almost a million dollars. He was allowed to take youthful Art Director Perry Fergusson -- soon to work his magic in CITIZEN KANE -- up to Lone Pine, California, (shooting location of THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE) in order to scout locations. They made sketches for the construction of the British Northwestern Frontier outpost of Muri, the Muslim town of Tantrapur, and a mysterious Hindu Temple of Kali.

The British regiment selected for the three NCO's was The Queen's Own Sappers and Miners, a little known outfit in which sergeants had day-to-day command. Preparations were made for six weeks shooting at Lone Pine, and nothing remained but to recruit 1500 extras for the regimental rank and file, plus a company of Gordon Highlanders, a detachment of Black Watch, and a squadron of Bengal Lancers; to round up 300 horses, mules and elephants; and to provide uniforms, rifles, pistols, lances, pick axes, Gattling Guns, shovels, explosives, plus food for the company.

Stevens took his photographer Joe August (THE INFORMER, Ford, 1935) and the company to prepared positions for six weeks of shooting in the Summer of 1939. During the 105 degree heat, it was almost as Kipling had imagined it:

*You may talk o' gin and beer
When you're quartered safe out 'ere,
An' you're sent to penny-fights an' Aldershot it;
But when it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An' you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it.
Now in Injia's sunny clime,
Where I used to spend my time
A-servin' of 'Er Majesty the Queen,
Of all them blackfaced crew
The finest man I knew
Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din.

He was "Din! Din! Din!
You limpin' lump o' brick-dust, Gunga Din!
Hi! slippery ~hitherao~!
Water, get it! ~Panee lao~! [Bring water swiftly.]
You squidgy-nosed old idol, Gunga Din."

These cruel, ironic lines, not entirely acceptable today, may nevertheless express a rather accurate, if stylized and bluntly condescending attitude of a British soldier, at the height of the Raj, toward the native troops -- a water bearer, in particular -- with whom he served.

However, GUNGA DIN is a movie produced in 1939, the greatest year of the classic Hollywood Raj, and so that view is hyped with melodrama, seasoned with comedy, energized by extraordinary action and tempered by an admirable humanism.

From main titles, brought on by a man repeatedly striking a gong (copied later by J. Arthur Rank), bouyed by Victor Young's stirring, memorable themes of romance, adventure and sacrifice, GUNGA DIN seeks our attention.

[Two years later, Bernard Herrmann, in his first great movie score, would quote, as an in-joke, bits of Young's music, to describe exotic Xanadu in "The Newsreel" of that pre-Tarantino, pre-MEMENTO, jigsaw puzzle masterpiece, Orson Welles' CITIZEN KANE.]

The movie proper begins with the surreptitious Thugs cutting with picks telegraph wires between the Muslim town of Tantrapur and the British outpost at Muri. We see the Colonel of the Regiment (Montague Love) analyzing the situation with his staff. Corporal Higgenbotham (Robert Coote) is sent to summon the senior NCO's to lead a reconnoiter of Tantrapur. Unfortunately, Sergeants McChesny (MacLaglen), Cutter (Grant), Ballantine (Fairbanks) are engaged in a brawl with a platoon of Black Watch over a treasure map. Serving to introduce them and the plot to us, played with enjoyable broad humor, we are off to a good start, balancing suspense and melodrama with comedy.

The early battle sequence in Tantrapur, which prefigures the GUNGA DIN's epic climax, finds the Muslim townspeople either fled or strangled. As the Sergeants lead their troop of regulars into the town, we witness a group of Thugs, under Chota (Abner Bibberman), silently dispatching sentries and scouts. Suspense and humor are once more combined in what will be the film's signature, as our jaunty heroes puzzle over a scene of abandonment, mysterious as the famous opening of BEAU GESTE (Wellman, 1939), while in the distance or in the edge of a frame, the Thugs garrote one enlisted men, and another and another.

The confrontation, when it comes, is exciting -- full of stunts, camera tricks and prat falls out of Stevens' experience in Silent Comedy -- but Chota eventually drives the Sergeants Three to leap into the river from a high bluff, with a shot copied for a memorable homage in BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (Hill, 1969). The arrival of the survivors before the Regiment drawn up, after a forced march from Tantrapur, is piped in with the marvelously defiant "Bonnie Dundee."

There follows the introduction by Jaffe and Grant, after a proper build up, of Gunga Din as the title character, in a scene improvised on the first day of shooting, when the extras were being rehearsed by military advisors. (We have previously seen Din at a distance or in passing.) Din desperately wants to be accepted, and he has forlorn ambitions as an untouchible to become a bugler in the Indian Army. "The uniform 'e wore/Was nothin' much before,/An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind,/For a piece o' twisty rag/An' a goatskin water-bag/Was all the field-equipment 'e could find . . . ." Cutter, always the scampish rebel, indulges Din by giving him a bugle to practice on. Din blows a ragged "Dismiss" of the Regiment -- to the consternation of the Colonel and Senior Sergeant McChesney.

This pattern of humor alternated with adventure is continued for the rest of the film. We have Cutter's obsessive pursuit of the elusive treasure, which later appears to be hidden in the Temple of Kali. It is here where the film's climax will be centered. Along the way, McChesney's treatment for his beloved elephant, Annie, provides a powerful laxative with which he and Cutter use to sabotage Ballantine's resignation from the Regiment and marriage to Emily Stebbins. Din employs Annie to break Cutter out of the stockade and carry him to the Temple of Kali to find the treasure.

It is at the Golden Temple that the the most memorable scenes occur. (Alexander Korda would use the interiors of the Temple to complete his THIEF OF BAGDAD a year later, when the War forced his company's retreat to Hollywood [and the Grand Canyon] to complete his film.) Three Musketeer-fashion, the sergeants and Din, one or two at a time, are captured by the Guru and his son Chota, who plan to employ them as decoys to lure the Regiment into a trap at the Temple, where hordes of Thugs will destroy them all.

Surrounded by a vengeful army of fanatics -- and prisoners of the Guru -- McChesney, Cutter, Ballantine and Din are forced to listen to the megalomanic Guru rant about his dream to destroy the Empire and (by analogy) rule the World. When they jibe that the Guru is mad, he cries: "Grupa Maurya -- He slaughtered all the armies left in India by Alexander. Mad? Hannibal was mad. Caesar was Mad. And Napoleon was surely THE MADDEST OF THEM ALL!"

[It is perhaps the most memorable line in the film, quoted many times since.]

In the end, it is Gunga Din who saves the Regiment, and hyperbolically the World, with his bugle.

GUNGA DIN, for all its dated view of Empire, became highy influential. RKO invested an additional $400,000 and extended the shooting schedule by two weeks to create a "[Bengal] Lancers Charge to the Rescue." Not called for in the original script, it was an attempt to rival the spectacular final sequence of THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE (Curtiz, 1936). Released in January 1939, GUNGA DIN won no awards, nor did it save RKO from bankruptcy, but the film was greatly popular during the War years, released year after year.

Major American screen writer William Goldman (BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, 1969; ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, 1976) saw the film at every opportunity. He entitled his first novel, The Temple of Gold, and he considers GUNGA DIN a major influence on his life and his career.

And Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., referred to each other as Cutter and Ballantine for ever after.

In 1954, Howard Hughes re-released GUNGA DIN at 94 minutes, and Image Entertainment restored it to 117 minutes on Laserdisc in 1995. [Not on DVD at this writing, you are urged, if interested, to find a VHS copy of this edition. It includes candid photographs and production footage taken on location, and a particularly charming home movie of a "world premiere" that Stevens held at his home for his son, George, Jr., and little friends.] In 1999, The Library of Congress included GUNGA DIN in its National Preservation Registry. The same year, David O. Russell applied the story to the Gulf War, in THREE KINGS, with George Clooney, Ice Cube, Mark Wahlberg, and Spike Jonz, in a different mix of personas, and a Humvee replacing Annie the Elephant.

Now the year is 2001, and it is Troopers of The American Empire, wounded by an attack from fanatics from the Middle East and Central Asia, who are preparing to drop into the land of the Pathans (or Pashtoons, if you prefer their modern appelation), scourge of the Britisn Empire, north of the Khyber Pass. Already a remake of THE FOUR FEATHERS (Korda, 1939), a British counterpart of GUNGA DIN, has been remade in Morocco by Shekhar Kapur, with Wes Bently, Djimon Hounsou, Alex Jennings, Heath Ledger and Kate Hudson.

What are the odds that somewhere in Hollywood, a feverish producer is pitching a story about three Commandos or Green Berets and a loyal Afghani lad trapped in an underground temple by Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida? President Bush is being lured to personally smoke him out. "Osama is standing above a pit of Cobras, see, and he is shouting something like: 'Hannibal was mad. Caesar was mad . . . .' And then, in the distance -- "

At a theater near you in 2003 (if you can pass through the Anthrax check).






Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12