FILM NOTES

FILM NOTES INDEX

NYS WRITERS INSTITUTE
HOME PAGE

CLASSIC FILM
SERIES

Gunga Din

(American, 1939, 117 minutes, b&w, 16mm)

Directed by George Stevens

Cast:
Cary Grant . . . . . . . . . . Archibald Cutter
Victor McLaglen . . . . . . . . . .MacChesney
Sam Jaffe . . . . . . . . . . Gunga Din
Douglas Fairbanks Jr . . . . . . . . . .Sergeant Ballantine

The following film notes were prepared for the New York State Writers Institute by Kevin Jack Hagopian, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Pennsylvania State University:

It was called "The Hollywood Raj," that collection of English actors living in self-imposed exile among the palm trees and Spanish Mission architecture of Hollywood in the 1930s. Ronald Colman, David Niven, George Sanders, Boris Karloff, and a dozen others, like Melville Cooper, Reggie Gardner, and Stan Laurel convened regularly for socializing, gin-and-tonics on the lawn, and even polo. They were presided over imperiously by Sir C. Aubrey Smith, Hollywood character actor and a legendary British cricketer of an earlier generation. Their presence incited the notoriously Anglophilic Hollywood producers to impersonate the life of the English country squire, building lavish fake Tudor manor houses, taking riding lessons, and sending their children to exclusive private schools. A squadron of the British actors were joined by a kind of auxiliary, who also loved to play at being members of the gentry. There was the South African Victor McLaglen, the Tasmanian Errol Flynn – to say nothing of the Montanan Gary Cooper and the Nebraskan Darryl Zanuck, the latter of whom ostentatiously took up polo to further the illusion. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. took it all very much to heart, too, cultivating an English-sounding accent, befriending the nobility, serving the British gallantly in World War II, and in general playing the part of the English lord so effectively that he was finally knighted in 1949.

The presence of this anachronistic community-within-a-community made it possible to make ‘British’ movies in America more self-consciously British than those made in London’s studios. THE RAINS CAME, THE LIVES OF A BENGAL LANCER, DISRAELI, CAVALCADE, CLIVE OF INDIA, THE LIGHT THAT FAILED, CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS, FOUR SONS, SUSPICION, DAVID COPPERFIELD, LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY, THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE, ANTHONY ADVERSE, WEE WILLIE WINKIE, THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD… The list is virtually endless. The catalog of every British author from Dickens through Noel Coward to J.B. Priestley was ransacked for stories of British pluck, wit, and grace. Hollywood producers rarely read anything other than their own scripts in those days, but if there was a single British author they were likely to treasure, it was Kipling. His stories of adventure, dash, and boyish camaraderie in colonial lands, especially India, vividly captured their own adolescent fantasies and framed them in an orderly world of action and pomp, where the lower castes always stood by faithfully to serve their masters, and everyone had an equal opportunity to die gloriously for Queen and Empire. Of all Kipling’s works, none was more beloved by Hollywood than the critically-despised "Gunga Din," Kipling’s long poem depicting the childlike loyalty and surpassing bravery of a native water carrier for the British army in India.

A version of GUNGA DIN had been produced as early as 1911. In 1929, a newly matured Hollywood film industry turned again to "Gunga Din," and the first of a series of attempts to bring the story to the screen began with Irving Thalberg at MGM organizing the project, which came to nothing. So did several other concepts for "Gunga Din," notably independent producer Edward Small’s, which included the services of novelist William Faulkner as screenwriter. The quest to bring "Gunga Din" to the screen foundered on the problem of story: there simply wasn’t enough of it in the Kipling poem to furnish fodder for a big-budget Hollywood production. Frustrated, Small sold his version to RKO studios in 1936. When RKO bought "Gunga Din," the studio put director-producer Howard Hawks on the project, and assigned A-list screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur to it, they of THE FRONT PAGE fame. They quickly beefed up the story by cribbing from Kipling’s collection of stories called SOLDIERS THREE, adding the memorable and essentially comic characters of three British infantrymen in foreign service ("Ballantine," "Cutter," and "MacChesney"), as a foil to the tale of the valiant water bearer, Din. Hawks, MacArthur, and Hecht made a rollicking team, as antic as the three soldiers they were creating for the screen. The three sent an exuberant wire to RKO’s front office announcing that they’d tackled the story at last:

The film was eventually reassigned to RKO contract director George Stevens, and other screenwriters were brought in to substantially revise the work Hecht and MacArthur had done. One of them, Joel Sayre, added the often objectionable (and inaccurate) depictions of the Thugee cult. Still, much of GUNGA DIN retains Hecht and MacArthur’s masculine humor and physical comedy, while the alternately funny and tragic ‘band of brothers’ sensibility is vintage Howard Hawks.

The cast was straight from the playing fields of Beverly Hills, with British and Commonwealth expatriates (and their American auxiliaries) playing most of the leading roles. Victor McLaglen, Cary Grant, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. play the rowdy and sentimental trio of Tommies. For the role of Din, the studio had wanted Sabu, but when he proved unavailable, cast versatile character actor Sam Jaffe. Eduardo Cianelli played the sinister Thugee leader. The film’s carefully choreographed physical comedy, breathtaking action sequences and epic production values were costly; at nearly $2,000,000, the film was far and away the most expensive of its day. Location shooting at the venerable cowboy movie setting of Lone Pine, more than 200 miles from Los Angeles in the foothills of the Sierras, was torturous and long, with the huge company sweating out 100 degree days for weeks on end. In the end, it all proved to be escapism at its best, an image of a thrilling, well-ordered, romantic life in an exotic clime, a far cry from the shaky, post-Depression America into which the film was released. And if Americans of the time did not find the film’s crude ethnic and racial stereotyping at least bizarre, perhaps this was because the kind of big, splashy, no-holds-barred fun that the film delivered simply overwhelmed more serious concerns. Director Stevens recognized GUNGA DIN as the wonderfully preposterous adolescent fantasy it was, and called the film "The Rover Boys in India." The Hollywood Raj was never more faithfully served by its handsome, brave, fun-loving men-at-arms. Just a year after the release of GUNGA DIN, the Raj would begin to break up, as several of its members, including David Niven, went home to fight for England. But GUNGA DIN remains evergreen, a memento of a decade when England ruled not just the waves, but the hearts of moviegoers as well.

— Kevin Hagopian, Penn State University

For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.