During the climatic and well-staged battle, there is a sequence showing a Gatling gun being unloaded from an elephant, assembled, and then hastily put into action. (In an age before computer-generated special effects, all of those thousands of extras and horses that appear on screen are real.)
GUNGA DIN is now generally available on DVD and can be obtained through Netfix or perhaps even your local library. (For the 2 or 3 of you out there who have never seen this film, it’s one that shouldn’t be missed, even if it is now considered politically incorrect.)
For more information on how to find specific locations that appear in GUNGA DIN (and in the hundreds of other famous movies that were filmed in the Lone Pine area) read ON LOCATION IN LONE PINE by Dave Holland. |
2 comments:
The area around Lone Pine, and Bishop, the Owens Valley and the rest of the eastern Sierras aren't like any other place in California. Isolated and a long trip from anywhere the eastern Sierras catch snowmelt that supplies water to LA, hundreds of miles away. When our older kid was in school outside Bishop we would visit up there and it felt like another planet. Lots of films shot on location and stories of stars drinking in local wateringholes in the 30's and 40's.
The battle sequence was added after studio executives felt that the original ending was too bland. Although GUNGA DIN was the most expensive film RKO had produced up to that time, it was the second biggest moneymaker of 1939 after GONE WITH THE WIND.
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