Gunga Din (1939)
Gunga
Din is ostensibly the story of three British soldiers stationed in colonial
India in the 19th century. I
say ostensibly because I spent the first half of the film wondering what Gunga
Din meant, and the second half wondering why the comedy relief got the title
role. It turns out Gunga Din is the name of a Water Bearer who works for the
Crown and longs to be a real soldier. If
you are aware of the Rudyard Kipling poem of the same name you may be able to
guess how things work out for him, but this knowledge is hardly necessary to
enjoy the film. Din (played by Sam
Jaffe) will come to be wrapped up in the adventures of our more fair-skinned
trio of heroes, Sergeant Cutter (Cary Grant), Sergeant MacChesney (Victor McLaglen) and
Sergeant Ballantine (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.).
Following an introduction that reveals Cutter has a proclivity for get-rich-quick
schemes (and his compatriots have a proclivity for listening to Cutter) the
three are dispatched to the town of Tantrapur following a telegraph message
mysteriously gone dead. There they
initially find the town abandoned, and later find evidence that what has
transpired there may be linked to a long-thought-lost cult known as the
Thuggee.
Ballantine reveals that he means to leave the service to be married, and more disturbingly to enter the tea business. His fiancée Emmy Stebbins (Joan Fontaine) cannot wait to get him out of the army and into a properly curtained den, and this causes no small amount of consternation in his two brothers-in-arms. McLaglen throws himself into his concern for his elephant Annie, while Cutter learns of a temple made of gold from Din and the two naturally go in search of it. There they discover a scene that will be quite familiar to anyone familiar with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
These events loosely hold together a series of action set pieces that are quite impressive for their time. Gunga Din is an adventure film where the stakes are never too serious and the mortal wounds never too grievous (with one notable exception). Director George Stevens keeps things moving at a brisk pace and the amount of fun the three male leads seem to be having is palpable, with Grant in particular chewing up scenery with gusto. The reflexive white guilt caused in the modern viewer by both the faceless brown hordes that oppose our heroes and by Gunga Din himself is somewhat undercut not only by events relating to Din’s development but by a speech that the cult’s leader gives to our heroes explicitly stating that from his perspective it is they that represent a monolithic ethnic horde… and aren’t they after all in the wrong country? Gunga Din is not a great film, but it is a great entertainment. It wants to put a smile on your face for two hours, and for the most part it succeeds admirably.