One Paragraph Movie Review: Gunga Din

Two hundred and eighth film: Gunga Din, a 1939 movie about British soldiers in India that is so much more than just a moderately droll war movie, because it is also a pretty racist and mildly sexist war movie. Rather than hiring brown actors to play the two main Indian characters, they’re played by white men in brownface. The one woman in the whole film exists only to represent an evil spectre of love, trying to drag a soldier away from his boy’s own adventures via marriage, the bitch. But look, despite all that, this is a pretty decent adventure, and with its bizarre temple ritual conducted by bloodthirsty Indian men in turbans, a pit full of snakes used as punishment, and a rickety bridge across a ravine that does not work out well for all its passengers, it also seems to have inspired scenes in at least one Indiana Jones movie. It’s based on a Rudyard Kipling poem, so has an actor playing Kipling as a kind of tag-along which is — y’know — weird. Cary Grant is extremely handsome, though — has anyone ever noticed that? Two ritualistic strangle cloths out of five.