 Okay, good evening everybody. Welcome to the latest edition of classic Tuesdays here at the virtual playhouse. We're glad that you could take some time out tonight to join us for what's going to be a really fun conversation about a real personal favorite film of mine. Gangadine, which is released in 1939 starring Carrie Grant, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Victor McLaughlin, Sam Jaffe and Joan Fontaine directed by George Stevens. Before we start, as always, I just want to inform you that if you have any questions at all that come up already points, topics, opinions that you'd like to share. There's a Q&A button that is at the bottom of your screen if you're on a laptop or computer, and it's on the top of your screen if you're on a iPad or your iPhone. We are still closed. Unfortunately, the bed for playoffs like all other movie theaters in New York is still closed in the interest of social distancing during this crazy time. So we do ask if you enjoy tonight's program and you'd like to see more of it as we continue operating virtually that you join either as a member. You can go to bedforplayhouse.org and become a member or consider making it a small donation. Any contribution is appreciated. You can do that at bedforplayhouse.org before you shut your devices down this evening. So that being said, let's get started. Gangadine, as I mentioned, was released in the year 1939, which is considered to be one of the greatest years for movies ever. You had Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, a whole host of other great films, and the film is loosely based on the 1890 poem by Rudyard Kipling and follows three British sergeants and their water bearer in a battle against the murderous cult in British colonial India. I have to just say this film does have a very special place for me. It's the very first black and white film that I ever saw in its entirety. When I was a kid, I was about nine years old. It made me a fan of Carrie Grant right away and is sort of the film that sent me to the dark side of becoming the broken human being you see before you now, who lives a life of movies and Hollywood and all things cinema. The film was started with RKO Studios, which was a very small studio compared to some of the other giants in Hollywood like Metro Golden Mayor or Warner Brothers. RKO had purchased the rights to the film, to the actually to the poem and to make it to a film and they had assigned Howard Hawks, who directed many great films he did the dawn patrol. He would later do his girl Friday, Red River, Sergeant York, The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, many, many others. He was a fairly well known director, and he was originally been slated to direct on the dean from a treatment that was being written by William Faulkner. Yes, that William Faulkner. So production was slated to begin in 1937, but it was delayed because there were difficulties in finding what they thought would be a suitable cast. And so in the interim Hawks was fired, because he had done the film bringing up baby now considered a classic of the screwball comedy genre with Carrie Grant and Catherine Hepburn and a leopard. And he brought George Stevens on to direct George Stevens is a man who really doesn't get as much of you as he should, considering some of his contemporaries are much more famous than he was but he had a great career. He began as a cameraman in silent films working on many Laurel and Hardy shorts before he got his break as a director, and he was incredibly versatile. He was one of the more versatile directors that the system produced. He could do comedies, such as Woman of the Year with Spencer Tracy and Catherine Hepburn. He did a film called the more the merrier which is sort of a, for its time, rather risky plot about two men sharing an apartment with a woman on be known sort of to each with Joe McCrae. He did swing time which is a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical. He did epics like Donga Dean, and he did dramas like the talk of the town which actually had a very strong social message about racial equality and other topics that really all that discussed in the time period that we're talking about. So having learned his craft in the improvisational style of silent pictures. He a lot of times when he was filming he would wing it. And so he would shoot from an undeveloped and underdeveloped screenplay if there was one. And then he would sort of figure things out. As he went along and this that he would later edit it. So he was one of the first directors to really start with they call editing in the camera he would only shoot what he needed with the idea that they couldn't mess up. The editors couldn't mess it up in post production by using footage he didn't want them to use. And so he also sort of became more of his own producer on these films and with filmmaking becoming more and more expensive in the 1930s. Thanks to the studios now making movies on a much faster scale than they previously had witness Gangadine. His methods gave the suits at RKO quite a bit of anxiety. And his improvisation on Gangadine resulted in the shooting schedule almost doubling. It went from 64 days to 124 days. And its cost at the time was then an incredible two million dollars and there were very, very few sound films that had grossed more than five million up to that point. And so a picture needed to gross anywhere from two to two and a half times its negative cost to break even. So with the cost of two million dollars certainly they were very, very nervous about the prospects for this film. Carrie Grant at this point in his career is just starting to turn into the Carrie Grant that we all know he's done up to this point mostly comedies he's 35 years old. He's done Topper and he's done The Awful Truth with Irene Dunn and he's done Bringing a Baby with Catherine Hepburn and after this film he does the adventure movie Only Angels Have Wings which is about pilots in South America. And then he does right after that his Girl Friday and the Philadelphia story, which really sets him off on that meteoric rise to start him. His character in this film is actually one huge inside joke because the character's name is Archibald Cutter. And as some of you may know, Carrie Grant's real name was Archibald Leach. And every now and then in some of his films he makes a reference to the name of Archibald that's referred to only once in this film when he's reading a letter that's addressed to him. It's, it was just a gag that they threw in to see for those who were listening carefully enough. Arguably, Victor McLaughlin is a much bigger star than Grant at this time or he's at least the most well rewarded. He was, he was mostly known as a character actor, mostly in westerns working with John Ford and John Wayne. But he had actually won an Academy Award for Best Actor in 1935 for a film called The Informer, which was directed by John Ford. And he was also in a precursor of sorts to Gungadine. There's a very, very good film called The Lost Patrol, in which Victor McLaughlin appears with Boris Karloff, also directed by John Ford, which is about soldiers who are trapped in the desert, gradually losing their minds. It takes place in what's now Iraq. And it's, it's a very, very underrated film, shows up on television every now and then on Turner Classic Movies. If you ever happen to come across it, I highly recommend it. It's a, it's very, very interesting film. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. naturally grew up in the shadow of his father, who was clearly along with Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, and some of the other stars of the silent era, one of the most famous people in the world. Truly, just the level of fame that they achieved in an era with no radio, no television. Only people knew him from the movies. The level of fame he achieved is staggering. So, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. struggled with his identity for a little bit, being the namesake of such a famous person. And most of the parts that he got as a younger man were more or less given to him as by people doing favors for his father. None of them were very memorable. And aside from his parentage, he was probably most well known at a young age for being married to Joan Crawford. He and Joan Crawford were married. He was 19. She was four years older than him. It was not a very stable relationship or marriage. But that's sort of how he was appearing in the tabloids of the time. He did find his way into supporting roles with stars like Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar. He appears with Catherine Hepburn in Morning Glory. But Dungadine is really the pinnacle of his Hollywood career. He moves to Britain not too much later than that. And he makes a number of films over there. A decent one is nothing that's fairly memorable. And then he starts finding work in his later years on television. And you may remember he did guest spots on all kinds of TV shows, The Love Boat, Colombo. He was that suave, debonair, older man that they called upon when they needed someone to fill that role. Playing the title role of Dungadine is Sam Jaffe. Sam Jaffe was a very well respected character actor. He's 47 years old when he plays this part, which is one of the two film roles for which he's best remembered. This one and then the other being the criminal mastermind that appears in the asphalt jungle, which was directed by his very, very good friend, John Houston. He also found a second career in television from the 1950s onward. There's a series regular on Ben Casey, for those of you who may remember Ben Casey. He was on a number of shows ranging from Batman to Colombo. And an interview many, many years later, Sam Jaffe, who came from a Jewish Russian background, was asked how he so convincingly played in Indian Hindu. And he replied that he kept telling himself to think Sabu. And Sabu was an actor, if you remember who appeared in films like The Thief of Baghdad. He appeared in the live action version of the Jungle Book from the 1940s. He was at the time a well known actor and he had been the first choice to play Dungadine, but he wasn't available. And even though he's the title character, Sam Jaffe doesn't appear in the film until 11 minutes in, where he's seen walking at the end of the of the line as they're marching out into the desert. And he doesn't have his first line of dialogue until 26 minutes into the film. So they really focused more on the three sergeants than on the title character itself. And then the last of the top build characters was Joan Fontaine. Joan Fontaine was also just on the cusp of stardom when she appeared in this film. Of course, she's most well known or very well known as being the sister of Olivia de Havilland. But her big breakthrough came the year after this film she appeared in Rebecca, which is Alfred Hitchcock's American debut, and she was nominated for an Academy Award. She actually did win an Academy Award for Best Actress for a role in suspicion with Alfred Hitchcock, which also co-starred Terry Grant, and that made her the only actor to ever win an Oscar for appearing in a Hitchcock film. So your next trivia contest. Who won an Oscar for being an Hitchcock film? The answer is Joan Fontaine. She became a huge star, usually typecast in melodramas. She did Jane Eyre with Orson Welles. And not too much longer after, again, around the 1950s, she turned to Broadway and to television. And she was, I guess, notorious for having a long running feud with her sister, who remained to this day the only siblings to each win an Oscar. So as you know, Olivia de Havilland just passed away a few months ago. I guess she had the last laugh because she survived Joan by a number of years. It's a very commonly accepted story and interesting about the making of this film that Carrie Grant and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. were originally assigned each other's roles. Because the character of Cutter, just played by Terry Grant, was virtually identical to the screen persona, the legendary screen persona that Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. had established. And Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. was very well known as sort of a comedic acrobat, did Zorro, did his own version of the thief at Baghdad, did Robin Hood, lots of those heroic type roles. George Stevens settled it by flipping a coin. And so Carrie Grant won, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. lost the role that probably would have made him an even bigger star than what he eventually became. There's a lot of controversy over whether or not the story is true. And who wanted to switch roles? Some people say, Fairbanks wanted to switch. Some people say, Carrie Grant wanted to switch. But it's rather solidly ascertained that Carrie Grant was originally supposed to play Valentine. And then he switched over to play Cutter and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. took over the Valentine part. Filming for this was done, it began in June of 1938, and it was completed in October of that year, it premiered in January of 1939. They shot pretty much the entire film, the exteriors of the film, in the Sierra Nevada mountains, which were doubling as the Kyber Pass for the film. A number of people, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., would later write in this autobiography that people who had been to the Kyber Pass were convinced that that was where they must have shot the film. And even when he told them the truth, they still refused to believe him. So a little bit of the magic of movie making. They did a few of the interiors on sets at RKO sound stages, and the original script was largely based on interiors and sort of a detailed life in the barracks type of comedy. And the decision was made to make the story a much larger adventure tale, but the rewrite process dragged on into principal shooting. A lot of the individual scenes that flesh out the story, the incidental scenes that flesh out the story were filmed, while at the same time you had hundreds of extras in the background being choreographed for the larger takes. And if you've seen the film, the army marching through the desert, there's a couple of scenes where they're up for their morning calisthenics. You know, the big spectacle shots where all these extras are in costume, many of them are riding on horseback, all carrying rifles and flags and the pageantry. And so at $2 million, as we talked about it was at $2 million cost. It was the most expensive film that RKO had ever produced to that date, and it was about $500,000 over budget. And it's important to note that this film obviously predates special effects and many of the scenes that today you would just do digitally featured the real thing. And so this is one of the original cast of thousands type of films. And I've seen that they couldn't resort to some tricks in the process of shooting. The bridge over the gorge scene, in which the elephant shakes the rope bridge while Harry Grant, Cutter and Dungadine are trying to cross. It was actually filmed on a bridge it was just eight feet off the ground. The background was a painting of the gorge but it's completely believable. You're totally fooled and of course we've seen that scene of the the flimsy rope bridge over the deep gorge in many, many films since then it's become a little bit of a cliche, more or less originating with Dungadine. And then the battle between the Tuggies, the cult, and the British army was added because RKO considered the original ending was just too bland for them. And so, again, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in his autobiography talks about how they had to go back out and restage what's more or less the climatic battle scene at the end of the film, because the suits just didn't think that there was enough, I guess, pizzazz with it and it obviously turned into one of the great, great battle scenes of that period. And with sharp eyes to me have noticed in the title sequence, the gong that they, they use in the title sequence with the credits is the same one that RKO used to summon King Kong about six years earlier, 1933. There's a sequence at the end, the movie includes a sequence at the end, in which a fictionalized Ruder Tipling witnesses the events and then he's inspired to write the poem, Dungadine. And the scene in which the poem is his first read out only really quotes the parts of the poem that match with the events of the film it's a much longer poem than that. And then originally, there were Kipling's family objected to this depiction in the film and so it was written out. The character was removed from some of the prints but it's since been restored. So, that's a way to tell if you've seen, which version of the film you may have seen if you see Ruder Tipling appear at the end, you know that you're watching the restored version. The film was one of the top 10 grossing films of 1939, which again is some feet. When you consider that was the year of Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith goes to Washington, Wuthering Heights, a whole slew of others. It hasn't really aged all that particularly well. Certainly there's an attitude that comes from Kipling's quote unquote white man's burden, as it depicts the Indians as being very primitive and uncultured when the opposite is true, we know the opposite is true. And for a time it was actually banned in certain cities in India. But in terms of story and spectacle, it falls into the, you know, they don't make them like this anymore category. Douglas Fairbanks Jr., again, who if you're ever interested to read his autobiography talks in great depth about the film, considers it to be the sole masterpiece he was made that he made. He did about 100 films in the course of his life. And this is the one that he points to as the top of the heap, which in my opinion is deservedly so. When the next couple of years after when America entered World War Two, George Stevens, for those of you who are interested, he joined the Army Signal Corps, and he headed a film unit from 1943 to 1946 under General Eisenhower and his unit shot footage that documented D-Day. They shot really the only color footage from the invasion at Normandy. They shot the liberation of Paris, and they shot the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. And so the footage that George Stevens shot during the war and during especially during the liberation of the camp was used both as evidence during the Nuremberg trials and also in the denotification program after the war that the allies ran in Germany to try to like a shock the the German people into what it transpired around them. A great book, if anyone is interested, called Five Came Back, which is the story of five Hollywood directors, including George Stevens, who went to serve in the war and what their experiences are. It's been turned into a great three-part documentary series on Netflix. And I highly recommend it if you if you're interested in the topic. That's George Stevens, John Ford, Frank Capra, John Houston and William Wyler are the five directors, and it follows them through their experiences with the war. When he got back from the service, George Stevens films took on much more somber tones, and he never made another comedy or musical again, with the exception of I Remember Mama in 1948. And it's a very marked change because pre-war, when he was doing the films like Woman of the Year, he was doing a lot of light hearted comedies and musicals, and he just stopped. Many people attributed this to what he saw, the horrors that he saw when he was in Europe, but his output, even though it was severely lessened, he turned out some incredible classic films. He did A Place in the Sun with Montgomery Cliff and Elizabeth Taylor, he did Shane with Alan Ladd, he did The Diary of Anne Frank, he did Giant with James Dean, and he did the greatest story ever told. And he actually won two Academy Awards for Best Director. He won for A Place in the Sun and for Giant. Cary Grant, of course, became one of the most iconic movie stars of all time, and he shifted effortlessly from comedies to dramas before he retired in the 1970s, never actually having won a competitive Oscar. He was given a Lifetime Achievement Award, Academy Award, but during his active career, he never won an Oscar. The closest he came was a nomination for Penny Serenade, which he made, which was a very interesting drama, a little off the pace for the typical Cary Grant film, which got him his so best actor nomination and he did not win. But he's clearly at the top of the list on many people's list of iconic movie stars on the actor side. And his legacy endures, the Cary Grant persona endures through all kinds of actors working today. George Clooney, some people liken him to Tom Hanks, so on and so forth. There's a lot of films that actually can trace their influences directly back to Gangadine. Contemporarily with the film, you had films like The Four Feathers, which is great, The Charge of the Light Brigade with Errol Flynn. And then following Gangadine, there are films that are clearly influenced by Sahara, 12 o'clock High, Bridge on the River Kwai, The Man Who Would Be King with Sean Connery and Michael Cain. Pretty much the entire Indiana Jones series. And according to the director, Star Wars The Last Jedi. In fact, prior to shooting that film, Ryan Johnson, who directed The Last Jedi, gave his cast a list of six films he wanted them all to watch before they commenced. And Gangadine was one of them. And even if you remember, for those of you who were Beatles fans, if you remember in Help, the Beatles are being pursued by a cult. That's very much like the one that appears in Gangadine. Many of the events in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom are taken literally directly from Gangadine. There's the gorge and the bridge. There's the temple that they infiltrate. There's the palace. There's all, I mean, it's very, very heavily influenced by Gangadine. So it's extended down through the years right up to the present day. In 1999, Gangadine was deemed culturally historically and aesthetically significant by the Library of Congress, and it was selected for preservation of the National Film Registry. Absolutely, without a doubt, one of my all-time favorite films, one of the great epics ever made. And I'm very grateful that you've spent some time listening to me ramble on about it. If anybody has any questions or thoughts that they'd like to share, please do so. You can use the Q&A button. And if not, I want to thank you very, very much for attending. We are going to be back in three weeks with Classic Tuesdays doing a great Paul Newman film, Cool Hand Luke. What we have here is failure to communicate. And then two weeks after that, we're doing a film, Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer called Gaslight, which is a terrific thriller. And we hope that you'll join us for those Classic Tuesday evenings. So any thoughts? And if not, we're going to say good night. Thank you very much for joining us. And we hope to see you again in a couple of weeks. Have a good night, everybody.