Kipling’s “ Gunga Din ” For The Screen

Manawatu Times, Volume 64, Issue 80, 5 April 1939, Page 11

Kipling’s “ Gunga Din ” For The Screen

Millions of dollars are invested an nually by Hollywood producers in purchasing screen rights to best-selling novels, outstanding stage hits, magazine stories and original screen plays. Of the approximately 500 feature productions yearly turned out by tho cinema plants, few, if any, are adapted to the screen from popular poems ot ballads. It is therefore something of a rarity when a major studio decides to -base its most ambitious and expensive production for tho current year upon a livepage verse commemorating the activities of a native water-carrier. This is exactly wliat has been done by RKO Radio, the studio responsible for bringing to the screen a lavish pieturization of Rudyard Kipling’s best known work “Gunga Din,” which serves as the current film vehicle for Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen and* Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. The motive behind such an apparently unusual move does not at first appear on the surface. It is at once obvious, however, that an original screen play does not enjoy the wide interest created by advance publication. A good magazine story is perused only by those readers who subscribe or buy the periodical. The average stage success, if it has a long-run, is seen by countless thousands, but is physically liandii capped to enjoy unusually wide cover|age. Even tho popular “best seller,” jalthought sometimes read by a million or more people interested in contemporary fiction, reaches a limited audience, j The name “Gunga Din” immediately recalls Kipling’s famous line: |“ You’re a better man than I am Gunga Din.” It conjures the image of | a loyal, brave “ bhisti” who so eourage- ■ ously served his regiment in India. In its translation to the screen, the colourful character of the native water-car-rier has been immortalized as only tho wider scope and .elasticity of tho medium can. Same Jaffe, noted stage and screen actor who scored as tho lHigh Lama in “Lost Horizon,” plays the title role, while Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., are seen a 3 three devil-may-care British sergeants who, with their battalion, are saved through the heroism of the native water-carrier.