Movies - Gunga Din

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	Movies - Gunga Din

Gunga Din (1892) is one of the most famous poems by Rudyard Kipling. Perhaps best known is its often-quoted last line, "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!" The poem is a rhyming narrative from the point of view of a British soldier, about a native water-bearer who saves his life. Like several other Kipling poems, it celebrates the virtues of a non-European while portraying a colonial infantryman's view of such people as being of a "lower order".

The film

The poem inspired a 1939 swashbuckler film about three British sergeants and their native water bearer who fight the Thuggee, a religious cult of ritualistic stranglers in colonial India. It stars Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Joan Fontaine, and Sam Jaffe in the title role. Originally, Grant and Fairbanks were assigned each other's role, Grant the one who was leaving the army to marry Joan Fontaine, Fairbanks the happy-go-lucky treasure hunter. Grant wanted to switch; the producers relented and the actors were more appropriately recast.

After much spirited derring-do, all four of the main characters are captured by the Thuggees and forced to watch as an ambush is prepared for their regiment. Gunga Din manages to free himself, sound the alarm using a bugle he has handy, and die heroically.

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 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.

The movie includes a sequence at the end in which a fictionalised Rudyard Kipling, played by Reginald Sheffield, hears of 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.

Influence

The film version 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 Three
, 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" is also the title of an apparently unrelated 1969 song by The Byrds, written by Gene Parsons.

Bob Dylan references "Gunga Din" in his song, "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere"

The Gunga Din Highway is also a novel by Frank Chin, the polemical Chinese-American playwright and fiction writer who deals with themes of "authentic" Asian-American identity.

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.

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 an almost exact lookalike as the Thuggee leader.

The film is referenced by 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 priest's speech about mad military geniuses.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Gunga Din ]

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