128. Gunga Din (1939)

Directed By George Stevens

Synopsis

Freedom fighters try to liberate India through targeted attacks on the military only to be shafted by a traitorous Indian reactionary and crushed under the boot of imperialism.

Review

Wow, talk about un-pc films, this one is way up there. You are supposed to empathise with the British and their blacked-up friend while they treat Indians like dirt, and I'm not even talking about the Thugees. The treatment of all Indians is pretty bad, except the kind of patronising relationship that Cary Grant has with Gunga, as if he was a 4 year old.

Of course this is one of those films about the "white man's burden", it is part of a tradition of justifications for the presence of colonials in any colony including India. It goes like this: "We need to be there to keep it civilised, or else the whole country would be taken over by mad murderous heathens who worship Kali, the goddess of BLOOD!". Of course less than 10 years after this film there would be a very different tune going on.

Of course you could try to feel better about this film and take it the other way and think that all the British had to be saved by a lowly Indian, but the message here is that some Indians, and by what you see in the film, a minority are still submissive to the white man and there fore are "good natives".

Let me skip my anthropology under-grad rant and go on about the film... Ideologies aside I am just not big on adventure films, not big on Captain Blood, on Robin Hood or on this film. When it's swashbuckling for swashbuckling's sake I just don't engage. I loved Mutiny on The Bounty and Only Angels Have Wings, but those are much more about relationships than adventure. Also, I was so shocked by most of it that I couldn't take it seriously. In the end it is not a bad film visually, there are plenty of battles and the temple is quite cool and all, it is also worth watching because of the scenes that remind you a little too much of Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom. Get it from Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

6/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

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.

Trailer: