Gunga Din is a 1939 American adventure film from RKO Radio Pictures directed by George Stevens and starring Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., loosely based on the 1890 poem of the same name by Rudyard Kipling combined with elements of his 1888 short story collection Soldiers Three.

The epic film was written by Joel Sayre and Fred Guiol from a storyline by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, with uncredited contributions by Lester Cohen, John Colton, William Faulkner, Vincent Lawrence, Dudley Nichols, and Anthony Veiller.

In 1999, Gunga Din was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Colonel Weed dispatches a detachment of 25 British Indian Army troops to investigate, led by three sergeants of the Royal Engineers: MacChesney, Cutter, and Ballantine, long-time friends and veteran campaigners.

Accompanying the detail are six Indian camp workers, including regimental bhisti (water carrier) Gunga Din, who longs to throw off his lowly status and become a soldier of the Queen.

Colonel Weed and Major Mitchell identify an enemy weapon brought back by the survivors as belonging to the Thuggee, a murder cult that had been suppressed 50 years previously.

Weed intends to send MacChesney and Cutter back with a larger force, in order to retake the town and complete the telegraph repairs.

Once he is discharged, Ballantine plans to wed Emmy Stebbins and go into the tea business, a combined calamity that MacChesney and Cutter consider worse than death.

When he sees that they are unwilling to leave him in enemy hands, he commits suicide to remove that obstacle; the Thuggee force moves into position, while other cultists swarm up the temple in order to kill the sergeants.

Gunga Din is also bayoneted, but manages with the last of his strength to climb to the top of the gold dome of the temple and sound the alarm with a bugle taken from a dead Thug.

On the other hand, according to a biography of director George Stevens by Marilyn Ann Moss entitled Giant: George Stevens, a Life on Film, the Cutter role was originally slated for comedy actor Jack Oakie until Grant requested the part because it would enable him to inject more humor into his performance, at which point Fairbanks Jr. was brought on board to replace Grant as Ballantine.

"[8] Douglas Fairbanks Jr. reported in a featurette interview on the DVD release that in his travels, he has met several Hindi Indians who were convinced the external scenes were filmed on location in Northwest India at the actual Khyber Pass.

Here Brecht reflects that "I felt like applauding, and laughed in all the right places, despite the fact that I knew all the time that there was something wrong, that the Indians are not primitive and uncultured people but have a magnificent age-old culture, and that this Gunga Din could also be seen in a different light, e.g. as a traitor to his people, I was amused and touched because this utterly distorted account was an artistic success and considerable resources in talent and ingenuity had been applied in making it.

It weakens the good instincts and strengthens the bad, it contradicts true experience and spreads misconceptions, in short it perverts our picture of the world.

The film was remade in 1962 as Sergeants 3 by members of the Rat Pack (Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop); the part of Gunga Din was played by Sammy Davis Jr.[17] while Sinatra portrayed a variation of the Victor McLaglen role and Dean Martin played Cary Grant's part.

(1965) the Beatles are pursued by a thuggee-like cult,[18] and in The Party (1968) Peter Sellers plays an actor starring in "Son of Gunga Din" and parodies the bugle scene.

Rian Johnson, the director of the 2017 film Star Wars: The Last Jedi, listed Gunga Din as one of the six movies for the cast and crew to watch before starting production.