Cambridge Forecast Group Blog

GUNGA DIN (1939)

Guru: You seem to think warfare an English invention. Have you never heard of Chandragupta Maurya? He slaughtered all the armies left in India by Alexander the Great. India was a mighty nation then while Englishmen still dwelt in caves and painted themselves blue.

Colonel Weed:

[reading from the poem by the journalist, Rudyard Kipling]

“Though I’ve belted you and flayed you /

By the living God that made you /

You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.”

Sgt. ‘Mac’ MacChesney: Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Cutter, you ain’t leaving this village without my permission. Give me that bottle.
Sgt. Archibald Cutter: MacChesney, I’ve been a soldier for fourteen years. I know my duties as well as you do. But you’re not talking to a soldier now, you’re talking to an expedition. I’m an expedition!

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Sgt. Archibald Cutter: Eight feet away from where I’m sitting, right here, there’s enough gold to make me sole owner and proprietor of a pub as big as the Crystal Palace. Best pub in Hampshire.

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Sgt. Archibald Cutter: You’re mad!
Guru: Mad? Mad. Hannibal was mad, Caesar was mad, and Napoleon surely was the maddest of the lot. Ever since time began, they’ve called mad all the great soldiers in this world. Mad? We shall see what wisdom lies within my madness. For this is but the spring that precedes the flood. From here we roll on. From village to town. From town to mighty city. Ever mounting, ever widening, until at last my wave engulfs all India!

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Sgt. Archibald Cutter: Now you’re all under arrest. Her Majesty’s very touchy about having her subjects strangled.

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Guru: You seem to think warfare an English invention. Have you never heard of Chandragupta Maurya? He slaughtered all the armies left in India by Alexander the Great. India was a mighty nation then while Englishmen still dwelt in caves and painted themselves blue.

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Sgt. Archibald Cutter: How can we get a nice little war going?

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Gunga Din: The salute satisfactory?
Sgt. Archibald Cutter: That’s the idea. Only… you want these fingers to fan the eyebrows more like this.
[makes a salute]
Sgt. Archibald Cutter: The breeze from them fingers oughta almost blow these eyebrows off. Now try it again.
[Din salutes, Cutter smiles]
Sgt. Archibald Cutter: Very good. Very good indeed. Eh… That one almost blew your turban off, didn’t it?

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Sgt. ‘Mac’ MacChesney: You ain’t so stupid as you look.

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Sgt. ‘Mac’ MacChesney: It just goes to show you what a piece of dry goods will do.

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Sgt. Archibald Cutter: Now get me some tools. Something to rip these blinking bars out.
Gunga Din: Already bring all tools could find. Is this satisfactory, sahib?
[holds up a fork]
Sgt. Archibald Cutter: Look… What do you think I want to break out of – a bloomin’ pudding? Now go on, get something big.
[Din returns with an elephant]
Sgt. Archibald Cutter: What are you doing, Din?
Gunga Din: The large tool you asked for, sahib.

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Sgt. ‘Mac’ MacChesney: What do you mean “elephants”? This ain’t elephants. This is Annie. My Annie.

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Guru: Where are the stranglers?
[thugs respond in Hindi]
Guru: Give them their strangling cloths.
Thugs: Kali.
Guru: Give them their burial picks.
Thugs: Kali.
Guru: Swear by our mother Kali to be thrice faithful to her and to me and to our order and to all of us.
[thugs pray in Hindi]
Guru: Rise, our new-made brothers. Rise and kill. Kill, lest you be killed yourselves. Kill for the love of killing. Kill for the love of Kali. Kill! Kill! Kill!

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[Sgt. Cutter confronts the Thugs in their stronghold]
Sgt. Archibald Cutter: Well if it ain’t young toadface. Fancy meeting you here.
Guru: Vile dog! For that insolence you shall grovel before my son. You shall grovel, I say!
Sgt. Archibald Cutter: Look here! I’m a soldier of her Majesty, the Queen. I don’t grovel before any ‘eathen.
Guru: Tabul, take him to the tower and teach him the error of false pride. Take him away! Gunga Din is a 1939 RKO adventure 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 successfully recast.Plot summary

On the Northwest Frontier of colonial India, circa 1880, the British fort at Muri has lost contact with its outpost at Tandipur in the midst of a telegraph message. Colonel Weed (Montagu Love) dispatches a small detachment of British Indian Army troops to learn what happened, led by three sergeants of the Royal Engineers, MacChesney (Victor McLaglen), Cutter (Cary Grant), and Ballantine (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.). The trio are long-time friends and campaigners, and also a disciplinary headache for their colonel, but are just the ticket for a mission requiring cool-headed resourcefulness outnumbered and under fire. Accompanying the detail to Tandipur is a regimental bhisti, Gunga Din (Sam Jaffe), who longs to throw off his slave/untouchable status and become a soldier of the Queen.

They find Tandipur apparently and mysteriously deserted–including food left uneaten on the table–and set about repairing the telegraph. Ballatine comes across a mysterious group skulking in the back room of a house and as he rounds them up, one tries to strangle him. With Cutter and MacChesney’s help, the Indians are subdued but in short order their leader reveals that it is the troops that are surrounded. The troops fight their way out of the trap and return to Muri shot up and without arms, but with pride intact. They bring back a pickaxe that Colonel Weed identifies with alarm as a thuggee weapon.

Ballantine is due to leave the army in a few days to be wed to Emmy Stebbins (Joan Fontaine) and go into the tea business, a combined calamity that MacChesney and Cutter consider worse than death. When Colonel Weed, as part of an expedition to subdue the revolt, sends them back to Tandipur, MacChesney contrives to put his replacement, Sergeant Bertie Higginbotham, in hospital and have Ballantine ordered to go. He also tricks Ballantine into signing a blank re-enlistment form that, if filled in, would keep Ballantine in the army for nine more years.

After much spirited derring-do, all four of the main characters are captured by the Thugs. They meet the fanatical guru of the cultists, portrayed by 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 bayoneted, 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.

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.

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 Thuggee leader, although all the original film’s plot similarities to The Front Page are omitted in the Spielberg movie.

Trivia

• California’s Sierra Nevada range, Alabama Hills 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”