Gunga Din

I find it difficult to watch Gunga Din and not think about Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The films are so alike. Westerners accidentally find themselves facing off against the vicious Thuggee Cult of India, worshippers of the goddess Kali who dream of enslaving their entire nation under a spell of endless darkness. Spielberg and Lucas clearly used Din as a primary influence on their sequel, but it's interesting how they didn't bother to improve upon the original's considerable flaws. George Stevens' film, like Spielberg's nearly 50 years later, looks terrific and provides considerable thrills and spectacle, but suffers from occasionally awkward timing, a bloated running time and terribly unfunny comic relief. Also, they're both highly mysogynist and racist to boot.



The racism is one aspect that Spielberg and Lucas tried to improve, though their level of success is debatable. Temple of Doom is still frequently cited as a modern example of Orientalism in cinema, and both Lucas and Spielberg sort of distance themselves from the film in interviews now. But the explicit racism in Gunga Din is undeniable. First off, the incredibly poor decision was made (as it was with all films depicting "exotic" races in 1939) to cast white actors in greasepaint as Indians. Ugh. Sam Jaffe's performance here as the film's namesake Indian water boy was actually praised at the time of the film's release, but it's the same bug-eyed, childlike minstrelsy you see all the time in this sort of film.

Allow me to clarify: many people think that movies like Gunga Din and Temple of Doom are racist because of their portrayal of the Hindu religion as murderous and evil. I disagree. I have no problem with depicting a group of villains based on various folk legends and cultures. When a movie features Nazis, we do not say it is anti-German. It depicts evil people who happened to be German. When a movie features vampires, we don't say it is anti-Christian. It features villains whose background are intertwined with Christian mythology. Likewise, a movie featuring bad guys who use Hinduism to excuse their behavior isn't anti-Indian.

What makes Gunga Din in particular (but also Temple of Doom, to be honest) racist is the portrayal of so-called "good Indians" and Indian society. All the Indian characters are infantilized, rendered as childlike and simple. They need the white people to come in and boss them around and tell them what to do. When he wrote "Orientalism," Edward Said was making the point that all the attempts to exoticize Asian cultures, to emphasize its far-out otherness, was at the root of Western prejudice. So when the characters stand around Gunga Din at the end of the film that bears his name, and talk of how he's the greatest soldier in the British Army, it's offensive because it's condescending. It reduces this character into a mascot.

That's why I think Temple of Doom doesn't do a good enough job of improving on the treatment of this subject matter. Much as I enjoyed it as a child, the "chilled monkey brains" dinner party scene's pretty offensive, asking the viewer to laugh at the mysterious foriegn-ness of this foreign culture. The Indians devouring whole eels are egregious stereotypes.

Okay, enough about that. On to the rest of the movie. Gunga Din, that is. It's legendary director George Stevens' so-so adaptation of a Rudyard Kipling epic poem. Three British officers stumble upon a temple hiding the believed-to-be-extinct murderous Thuggee Cult. One of them, prankster Sgt. Cutter (a miscast Cary Grant), believed the temple to be made of gold (causing him to dance around and whoop in a style that must have inspired Chuck Jones' animations of Daffy Duck), and made his way there along with water boy/servant Gunga Din.

So, once Cutter's buddies MacChesney (Victor McLaglen) and Ballantine (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) show up to rescue him and are themselves kidnapped, the stage is set for a major showdown between the British Imperial troops and the army of the Thuggee.

This description makes the film sound action-packed. If only it were true. Stevens' started his career as a cinematographer, and few filmmakers can match his ability to frame large-scale action set-pieces. The scope of Gunga Din is truly incredible. Stevens had his crew encamp in the California desert for months in order to capture the Khyber Pass at the height of the British Empire. The battle sequences he captured are beautiful and stunning, a tremendous achievement for the time.

Yet when the film isn't hurtling frenetically from incident to incident, it slows down to a near-crawl. Grant's among the greatest movie stars of all time, but he couldn't really save this rotten material. Grant's wit was sly, devious, and mischevious, and this sort of cornpone over-the-top comedy doesn't suit him at all. Asking him to parade around making funny faces, or fake drunk with the likes of Victor McLaglen, is simply put embarrassing. Even he looks tired of his shenanigans by the film's halfway point. And Joan Fontaine appears so briefly in the film, as Ballantine's fiancee, she barely registers at all.

Finally, a word must be said about the atrocious music. Alfred Newman's (seriously, that's the composer's name...) score is so bouncy and upbeat, you'd think you were watching a movie that took place at a circus. This is a war zone. People are dying. Why does it sound like a sideshow? And some of the musical cues make no sense at all. Why does "Aud Lang Syne" play at a funeral? What's up with "God Save the Queen" popping up all the time? How about something with, I don't know, a little bit of an Indian flavor?

So, what you got here is one of them mixed-bag kind of deals. The visual splendor of this film is undeniable. (The cinematography was nominated for an Oscar, but lost to Citizen Kane cinematographer Gregg Toland's work on Wuthering Heights). One sequence in particular, in which an elephant threatens to topple the teetering bridge upon which Grant and Gunga Din stand, unfolded with such mastery and timing, it almost made up for the sins of the movie on its own. But let's be honest - the movie's kind of an ordeal to sit through. It's way too long, it's not at all funny, and it's exciting only in infrequent bursts.

But, man, that climactic battle. Truly incredible.