Paul Megee

Gunga Din (RKO 1939)

Action movies haven’t changed all that much over the last sixty years. George Stevens’ Gunga Din shows that the basic elements of today’s action films were firmly in place during Hollywood’s Golden Era.

Although technology has changed the way the action movie is presented (recent film editing techniques allow for a much more suspense-filled action sequence), the bulk of action movie making is here. Instead of jeeps, Gunga Din has Annie the elephant. Instead of playing “hot potato” with grenades, these 19^th Century Brits toss around dynamite. Frame acceleration replaces lightning-quick cuts and “bullet time.” Thousands of evil Arabs with rifles are replaced by . . . well, thousands of evil Arabs with slightly older rifles.

Cary Grant finds himself a member of another macho trio, this time as Sergeant Archibald Cutter (no, not Carter, as in Only Angels Have Wings), with fellow Sergeants MacChesney (Victor McLaglen) and Tommy Ballantine (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.), whose personal desire for gold gets the better of his professional restraint in war-time duty. In premise, then, Gunga Din looks a lot like Spike Jonze’s recent Three Kings, where Gulf War soldiers go searching for gold as the decline of battle leaves them bored.

Gunga Din’s real hero is not Cutter, though he gets top billing, and it’s not another member of the trio either. In alerting the British Army of the coming pagan sabotage, Gunga Din (Sam Jaffe) dies saving the day. Din prevents the army of the evil Guru (a body-painted Eduardo Ciannelli) from having its way with the queen’s men.

Where Spike Jonze suggests that the American freedom fighters are at least as barbaric as the Iraqis they call enemies, Stevens seems to assert that the individual (the title character, in this case) is able to overcome the fault that is his race and culture, in becoming a true British soldier. Colonel Weed (played by Montague Love) even dubs him a corporal upon the lovable Persian’s death.

Second on the movie’s agenda seems to be defining the role of the man. Ballantine is initially set to leave the military and get married, but when he finds out Cutter is in trouble, he tells his fiancée Emmy (Joan Fontaine) that love can wait, that “friendship is something else.” To leave Cutter to the Persians would make Ballantine a coward, and Ballantine refuses to be a coward. We learn, then, that a man’s duty to his own pride (the evil Guru calls it “false pride”) and to his friends is much more important than any woman. Director Stevens leaves it at this; we never see Emmy again.

Gunga Din is an enjoyable movie. The westerners win, of course, as they always do, but the fact that the movie’s hero is not white makes for an interesting if not mildly daring assertion. Gunga Din is worth seeing.