Philip French's DVD club: No 79: Gunga Din (original) (raw)

No 79 Gunga Din
1939, U, Universal
Directed by George Stevens

Universal has just released a box of 21 Cary Grant movies, cheap at £149.99, many of them classics, some available individually. Among the most attractive is this great action movie, directed by Stevens in that exuberant period before he commanded an army photographic unit from D-Day to VE Day. Before the war he directed comedies, musicals, romantic melodramas. He emerged from the Second World War determined that everything he made had to have serious social significance, with Christ or Anne Frank at its centre. He's at his pre-war best in this conflation of Kipling's story Soldiers Three and his poem about the regimental water boy Gunga Din (Sam Jaffe). Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Victor McLaglen and Cary Grant have great fun (but no more than the audience does) as maverick British soldiers on the North West Frontier.

It's an allegory, as many films of the late 1930s were, about the coming struggle between Nazism and what was then perceived as the civilising, democratic countervailing force of the British Empire. Of course many will now think it infused with patronising racism. Bertolt Brecht admired it (despite his hatred of British imperialism) and so did Pauline Kael, who called it 'one of the most enjoyable nonsense-adventure movies of all time'.

Sinatra and his Rat Pack remade it as a western, Sergeants 3, with Sammy Davis Jr in the Gunga Din role; Spielberg paid homage to it in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. At the end of the film, Kipling is shown as a war correspondent writing his poem. His widow insisted that this image be obliterated from the initial release. His appearance has now been restored.

Next week: Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. See the archive at observer.co.uk/dvdclub.