Gunga Din

Gunga Din (1939) is a classic Hollywood adventure you can watch online on iFILM, directed by George Stevens and based on Rudyard Kipling's poem. Three British sergeants — Cutter, MacChesney and Ballantine, played by Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. — are stationed in 1880s India when a remote telegraph post goes silent.

Sent to investigate, they uncover evidence that the Thuggee cult — considered crushed a generation earlier — has rebuilt in secret. Fortune-hunting Cutter chases a rumour of a golden temple and ends up a prisoner, leaving the other two to mount a rescue. Sam Jaffe plays Gunga Din, the native water-carrier who wants nothing more than a soldier's uniform; he earns it in the hardest way possible. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur wrote the screenplay for RKO.

The location work was shot in the Sierra Nevada doubling for the Himalayas. The film's structure — three mismatched heroes against a fanatical enemy — fed directly into the adventure template that Steven Spielberg later refined for the Indiana Jones pictures. Stream Gunga Din (1939) online on iFILM.