FilmIndia (1939)

) February 1939 FILMINDIA (Continued from page 27) which they have been tortured by the Pathans in a dungeon full of snakes. I don't think a torture chamber like the one is shown in "Gunga Din" exists anywhere in the frontier. The only place I saw anything like it was in the "Chamber of Horrors" at Madame Tussaud's I in London where all the instruments of torture perfected by civilized Europe are displayed ! RIDICULE OF THE GODDESS KALI Fed on books like Katherine Mayo's "Mother India" and films like "India Speaks" the average American has rather a cockeyed notion of India and Indians. The scenarists who wrote "Gunga Din" Iseem to have heard of Pathans, ; |of Kali, of idols and priests and temples, of elephants, of loin-cloth : land of upright British soldiers. And in "Gunga Din" they have J |put them all together in a most ^(amazing jumble. Kali-worship goes I on in the land of Muslim Pathans, ipeople in the frontier are shown • ^wearing loin cloth (instead of the i"Shalwar", which every one, Hindu j or Muslim, wears over there), ele I phants tread the camel tracks of the Khyber Pass. It is all like producing a film of Hollywood life and showing glamour girls riding I on the back of Alaskan bears and I cigar-chewing producers going about with feathers stuck in their hair like the Red Indians ! I was so amazed by these hopeless incongruities that I wanted to know who was the technical adviser. In and around Hollywood there live quite a number of Indians (Hindus, as they are invariably called in America; including professors, students and other cultured people who could surely tell the producers of "Gunga Din" a thing or two about India. But, imagine my surprise, when I discovered that the Technical Adviser for this picture is a seventy-year old retired British Officer, Sir Robert Erskine Holland whose chief qualifications for being an expert on Indian culture and customs is that he was for a long time a member of the high-born services in India, one of our rulers, who after a whole life spent in India, cannot speak two words of Hindusthani correctly and don't know the difference between a "chapati" and a "chaprasi". I was curious to find how they came to select this great "authority" on India and was told that he had been sent by the British Embassy in Washington. Later on I was informed that whenever a Hollywood producer undertakes a film about India, the British Embassy is asked to supply an "expert." The tentacles of Imperialist propaganda are farreaching ! India Exposed to the Ridicule of the White World Such is the film that will shortly be released from Hollywood. And yet one more outrageous libel on India will be flashed on the screen in every country of the world. It is not enough even if we manage to get the film banned in India. In my recent wanderings all over the world, I was haunted by the "Drum" and "The Tiger of Eschnapur" wherever I went. From New York to Budapest these films chased me from town to town. What must they think of me, I often wondered when I met foreigners, after seeing such films about my country? No longer was I surprised that we are always looked down upon in alien lands. To the foreigners I appeared perhaps either as an unscrupulous black-hearted devil Ike those shown in "The Drum" or a cringing barbarian like Gunga Din. "Don't such films make your stomach turn?", a fair-minded English Film critic asked me in London, referring to "The Drum." And when I assured him they did, he added, "Then what are you going to do about it?" Now that "The Drum" is shortly to be followed by "Gunga Din", I repeat the question "What are we going to do about it?" AN EXTRACT FROM THE ORIGINAL STUDIO NEWS FROM HOLLYWOOD. GUNGA DIN Nick Ermolieff Foreign Department by RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. Hollywood, Calif. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur Joel Sayre and Fred Guiol THEME: WHEN A REVIVAL OF THUGGEE, ANCIENT MURDER RELIGION. THREATENS BRITAIN'S TROUBLED NORTHWEST INDIAN FRONTIER , THE THREE TOUGHEST SERGEANTS IN THE BRITISH INDIAN ARMY ARE SENT TO THE SCENE, ONE, TREASURE-BOUND, DRAGS THE OTHER TWO INTO TROUBLE AND THE THREE SERGEANTS AND THEIR NATIVE WATER CARRIER, GUNGA DIN, ARE CAPTURED BY THUGS. A RESCUE BATTALION HEADS DIRECTLY INTO A THUG. AMBUSH BUT IS WARNED JUST IN TIME BY GUNGA DIN AT THE COST OF HIS LIFE. HIS HEROISM AVERTS THE AMBUSH, THE SERGEANTS ARE RESCUED AND THE UPRISING IS STAMPED OUT. It speaks for itself. "Indians" means "Thugs" who believe in murder as Religion. 31