Gunga Din (film)

• Release Date: 1939
• Director(s): George Stevens
• Writer(s): Fred Guiol; Joel Sayre
• Principal Actors and Roles: Douglas Jr. Fairbanks (Ballantine); Cary Grant (Cutter); Cary Grant (Cutter); Victor McLaglen (MacChesney); Eduardo Ciannelli (Guru); Joan Fontaine (Emmy); Sam Jaffe (Gunga Din)
• Book / Story Film Based On: Gunga Din by Rudyard Kipling

Gunga Din is a Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) Pictures adventure film that was produced and directed by George Stevens. Stevens was well known for his previous work on silent comedy films. Howard Hawks was originally going to direct Gunga Din. But the delays on his 1938 film, Bringing UpBaby, and its abysmal box office numbers led the studio to replace Hawks with Stevens as director. The leading cast members of Gunga Din are three acclaimed actors: Douglas Fairbanks Jr.; Archibald Alexander Leach, also known as Cary Grant; and Victor McLaglen. Supporting cast members included Sam Jaffe, Eduardo Ciannelli, and Joan Fontaine.

Gunga Din was based on an 1892 poem of the same name. The original work was an eighty-nine-line poem by acclaimed author, poet, and journalist Rudyard Kipling. After Kipling’s death in London on January 18, 1936, his widow sold the film rights to many of his works, including Gunga Din. In 1936, an independent producer named Edward Small paid £5,000 to purchase the film rights to Gunga Din for his production company, Reliance Pictures. RKO later acquired those rights from Small, and production finally started on the movie. William Faulkner was originally hired to write the screenplay for a nominal fee of $750/week, but the script was later handed over to Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht for reworking.

Renowned composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold was RKO’s first choice to score the film. Korngold declined the offer because he felt there was not enough time for him to do justice to the film. Alfred Newman, with just three weeks to spare, produced the film’s original score. Newman was one of the great pioneers in film music in 1938. Newman produced the scores for such films as Drums Along the Mohawk, Wuthering Heights, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Plot

Gunga Din is set in nineteenth-century colonial India. The British have lost contact with one of their outposts at Tantrapur. Colonel Weed, played by Montagu Love, orders his top sergeants from the Corps of Royal Engineers to lead a detachment of twenty-five British Indian army soldiers to investigate the situation. MacChesney (Victor McLaglen), Cutter (Cary Grant), and Ballantine (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), longtime friends and veterans, require the services of six Indian camp workers for this mission. Gunga Din, a water bearer, is only too eager to tag along, having been denied the privilege of joining the British military. Din befriends Cutter, whose main preoccupation is finding a trove of buried treasure and gold. The outpost at Tantrapur is deserted when the soldiers arrive, and the aggressive natives descend on the troops. Fighting erupts, and a weapon is found and brought to Colonel Weed and Major Mitchell (Lumsden Hare), who identifies the pickaxe as belonging to the Thuggee, a militaristic cult devoted to the worship of the Hindu goddess of destruction, Kali.

Din informs Cutter of a temple he discovered that is made of gold, and Cutter immediately tries to entice MacChesney to run off and seize the fortune. MacChesney wants no part of Cutter’s plan; instead, he has Cutter placed in a stockade to prevent his fleeing to the temple. Cutter escapes with the assistance of Din and arrives at the temple, which belongs to the Thuggee. To avoid their capture, Cutter creates a distraction that allows Din to escape. Din arrives at the encampment and shares the news of Cutter’s capture with MacChesney. Ballantine, whose contract with the British army has expired, wants to accompany Din and MacChesney. But first, Ballantine is forced to reenlist so that he can help rescue Cutter, although all he really wants to do is leave the service and get married.

MacChesney, Bellantine, and Din storm the temple but are captured easily. They manage to free themselves and take the cult leader hostage on the temple’s rooftop. But their Thuggee captive has set a trap, and his soldiers descend on the foursome after the men’s hostage commits suicide. Gunga Din is bayoneted in the melee, but he manages to alert the British force of the attack with his dying breath by blowing a bugle. The British force arrives, and the Thuggees are defeated. At the boy’s funeral, Colonel Weed formally inducts Gunga Din into the British army as a corporal.

Significance

Gunga Din was well received by both critics and audiences alike; however, due to its over-extended budget, it recorded a loss of $193,000 and did not recoup its production cost of $1,915,000 at the box office. However, Gunga Din did manage to turn a profit after the 1941 reissue of the movie, and in 1954, Howard Hughes, RKO’s proprietor and managing director, reissued the film once more. To make Gunga Din compatible with the double-bill features that were common in theaters at the time, Hughes severely edited the film. Gunga Din’s running time was reduced from 117 minutes to just 94 minutes, with some scenes drastically trimmed and others cut entirely out of the film. The abridged version of the movie was sold to television.

Filming for Gunga Din began in June 1938 and was set to last for sixty-four days. Instead, the movie ended up taking 104 days to complete, exceeding its budget and missing its 1938 Christmas Day release date. Gunga Din premiered in Los Angeles on January 24, 1939, and went into general release on February 17, 1939. It was shot by Joseph August, the film’s cinematographer. August was able to photograph the outdoor scenes flawlessly and captured the essence and vision of the film that Stevens wanted to create. August was also able to highlight the landscape to a great degree. Most of Gunga Din’s outdoor shots were filmed in the California desert at Lone Pine.

The last scene of the movie included a sequence in which a fictionalized Rudyard Kipling, played by Reginald Sheffield, witnesses the events that inspired him to write his poem. Believing that it was embarrassing to portray Kipling in such a manner, the author’s family objected to the scene and demanded that it be removed from the film. RKO complied with this request and removed the sequence. Gunga Din was also criticized for being politically incorrect because of the film’s flagrant Indian caricatures and stereotypes. Distribution of the film was banned in India for its imperialist propaganda.

August’s work on the film earned Gunga Din a nomination for an Academy Award in 1940 in the Best Cinematography, Black-and-White category. The movie is considered a classic in its genre, and in 1999, the Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, citing it for its cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance.

Bibliography

Burns, James McDonald. Cinema and Society in the British Empire, 1895-1940. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print.

"48. Gunga Din." Bartleby.com. Bartleby.com, n.d. Web. 3 Jan. 2016. <http://www.bartleby.com/103/48.html>.

Govil, Nitin. Orienting Hollywood: A Century of Film Culture between Los Angeles and Bombay. New York: New York UP, 2015. Print.

Kipling, Rudyard, and Robert Andrew Parker. Gunga Din. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987. Print.

"Gunga Din (1939)." Turner Classic Movies (TCM). Turner Entertainment Networks, 2015. Web. 3 Jan. 2016. <http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/3242/Gunga-Din/articles.html>.