Word: dinned
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...Gunga Din (RKO Radio), most expensive picture in the history of RKO, which was last week on the point of emerging from a six-year bankruptcy, unfolds a jolly story about high jinks on India's frontier. Poor old Gunga Din (Sam Jaffe) has small part in the proceedings. In the first part of the picture he wobbles about carrying a goatskin water bag. In the last part, he inspires a scared-looking Rudyard Kipling to produce a commemorative poem. The rest of the time Gunga Din's doings are eclipsed by those of three agile young sergeants...
...story of Gunga Din, written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur and made into a screen play by Joel Sayre and Fred Guiol, appears to be a sort of Anglo-Indian Three Musketeers. What plot there is concerns the efforts of two sergeants to persuade the third to re-enlist when his period of service expires. This entails much hand-to-hand fighting against a band of Thugs, a few barrack-room practical jokes and frequent athletic tricks of the sort popularized by Master Fairbanks' father. Funny, spectacular, and exciting, Gunga Din reaches its climax when the liveliest sergeant...
...individual product of the cinema industry, there is practically nothing to be said against Gunga Din. First-class entertainment, it will neither corrupt the morals of minors nor affront the intelligence of their seniors. But unfortunately, Gunga Din is not an isolated example of the cinema industry's majestic mass product. It is a symbol of Hollywood's current trend. As such it is as deplorable as it is enlightening...
...producer in England persuaded Bernard Shaw to sell picture rights to his plays. French producers have lately turned out genuinely original products like Le Roman d'un Tricheur and Grand Illusion. Hollywood, however, even when it was not deliberately repeating itself, repeated itself unconsciously. Gunga Din is an example of this unconscious repetition. Whatever there is to be said about the minor matter of barrack-room life in India has been more than sufficiently said by the cinema many times, most recently in Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Charge of the Light Brigade and Drums...
...Gunga Din" is an excellent film. Thoroughly as exciting and far more skillfully made than any of its predecessors, it adds to the usual story of native uprisings constant suspense, some rollicking humor, and incidentally an interesting characterization of Kipling's immortal water boy. Battling a band of natives who worship the goddess of blood and show their devotion by strangling some thirty thousand persons a year, are Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. These men engage in the usual pitched battles, of course, but this time skill and originality of direction make them more than mere spectacles...