There’s a lot going on in Gunga Din, the high point of a certain kind of Hollywood film-making. Released in the golden era’s “annus mirabilis” of 1939, it’s an exotic, oriental white-man’s-burden kind of adventure adapted from a Rudyard Kipling story, but locked away in there something is grumbling away. All is not as it first appears.
There are two main storylines, connected together by a familiar trio of bromantic soldiers – the lover (Douglas Fairbanks Jr), the joker (Cary Grant) and the fighter (Victor McLaglen) – three sergeants in Queen Victoria’s army in India sent out from their base to find out why the vital telegraph system keeps going down.
It turns out the lines have been cut and it’s the work of the Thuggee, an anti-colonialist native “murder cult” who worship the goddess Kali and wish to kick the British out of India. Emphasis on the “murder cult” aspect, soft pedal on the anti-colonialism.
More important than that, seemingly, is the decision by loverboy Sgt Ballantine (Fairbanks Jr) to get married to his true love, played by Joan Fontaine (who gets a couple of scenes), and leave the army and his compadres behind. In joshingly comedic storylines that eclipse the whole Thuggee strand, quip-ready Sgt Cutter (Grant) and fist-happy Sgt MacChesney (McLaglen) set out to stop him.
The tone is of three caballeros hanging together – of the guys in On the Town, or John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King, or of Channing Tatum and Sandra Bullock in 2022’s The Lost City, even. Danger? We laugh in its face, with our legs athwart and our arms akimbo, much as Fairbanks’s dad, Douglas Fairbanks Sr, was doing in a string of silent adventures in the 1920s. Fairbanks Jr reckoned this was his finest hour. Paging Dr Freud.
The key Indian characters are played by white men in brownface. Sam Jaffe plays Gunga Din, the lowly water “bhisti”, a comic figure with only a minor but pivotal role. Loyal to the British rather than his own compatriots, from the point of view of the Indian seeking independence Din is a traitor. And yet he’s depicted here as a noble, courageous fellow when the chips are down, who will put his life on the line for a grand cause.
Against him, the Italian-born actor Eduardo Ciannelli as the Guru leading the Thuggee, another character of some nuance. Guru is the swivel-eyed Bond-villain type who says far too much too often, but Ciannelli gives him a touch of dignity and buried in his speechifying is a critique of the British imperial project. These Thuggees may be thugs (it’s where the word comes from), but there is a politics here, buried way down in the subtext.
The film is gorgeously made, economically directed by George Stevens, beautifully shot by Joseph August and edited together with real skill by a trio including future director John Sturges. It is Hollywood film-making at its most slick, propulsive and invisible, and the lead trio of Grant, McLaglen (particularly good) and Fairbanks Jr dance through it.
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas borrowed liberally from this film when writing and shooting Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Whole chunks of set design appear to have been lifted too, especially towards the end when the action shifts to the temple of Kali, where Cuttter, Ballantine and MacChesney must somehow defeat the Thuggee, save the British regiment riding into an ambush and also save themselves.
There’s nothing less fashionable these days than the light-hearted colonial adventure, unless it’s images of white men smeared in brown make-up, and yet there’s also something fairly radical about Gunga Din. The accents of the three men are insistently, patently, doth-protestily British, as if to say “no, really, this is about British colonialism, what else could it be about?” But watch that charge on horseback by a group of Indians towards the end. They start whooping like the Red Indians in the westerns of the era. Is someone asking us to compare and contrast?
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
