Gunga Din (film)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Gunga Din | |
|---|---|
 Gunga Din poster |
|
| Directed by | George Stevens |
| Produced by | George Stevens |
| Written by | Rudyard Kipling (poem) Ben Hecht (story) Charles MacArthur (story) Joel Sayre Fred Guiol |
| Starring | Cary Grant Victor McLaglen Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Eduardo Ciannelli |
| Distributed by | RKO |
| Release date(s) | February 17, 1939 (USA wide release) |
| Running time | 117 min. |
| Language | English |
| IMDb profile | |
Gunga Din is a 1939 RKO swashbuckler film, based on the 1892 poem by Rudyard Kipling, about three British sergeants and their native water bearer who fight the Thuggee, a religious cult of ritualistic stranglers in colonial India. The movie stars Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Joan Fontaine,Eduardo Ciannelli, and, in the title role, Sam Jaffe. 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 more appropriately recast.
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
 |
Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. This article has been tagged since January 2007. |
After much spirited derring-do, all four of the main characters are captured by the Thugs. They meet the mad leader of the cultists, 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 stabbed, but manages with all his strength to climb to the top of the gold dome of the temple. He sounds the alarm using a bugle he has handy, and dies heroically when shot down by the Thugs. At his funeral pyre, the Colonel of the regiment reads the last lines of the Kipling poem over the body.
[edit] Production and awards
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. Filming began on June 24, 1938 and was completed on October 19, 1938. The film premiered in Los Angeles on January 24, 1939.
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.
The film 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.
[edit] Influence
Critics have noted that the film has many plot similarities with The Front Page, with Fairbanks' character wanting to leave to get married but being 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 Revenge of the Pink Panther, 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 Thuggi leader, although all the original film's plot similarities to The Front Page are omitted in the Spielberg movie.
[edit] Trivia
- California's Sierra Nevada range, Alabama Hills and 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 the hundreds of extras were in the background being marshalled for larger takes.
- The character of Gunga Din is referenced in The Venture Brothers episode "Mid-Life Chrysalis", when one of the boys is polishing his brother's shoes while wearing a head wrap.
- In the first line of one version of Bob Dylan's song "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" appears the allusion: "Clouds so swift an' rain fallin' in / Gonna see a movie called "Gunga Din"
[edit] External links
- Gunga Din at the Internet Movie Database
