Gunga Din
TCM is airing my father's favorite movie right now. His favorite movie was Gunga Din, a 1939 adventure flick loosely based on the Kipling poem of the same name.
I have no earthly idea why this movie was his favorite, but he said it was.
I think my dad always enjoyed military movies because the complete inaccuracy and unreality of the depictions of military life amused the ever-living crap out of him. My dad was the original one-man Mystery Science Theater 3000, though he typically only commented when asked or to react to other people's comments. He loved to watch military pictures, B movies of all kinds and bad sci-fi in particular rolling his eyes the whole time. When something particularly unbelievable would happen I would look to him for an answer. Almost inevitably the answer was a shrug and "it's in the script."
Dad was not one to propagate myths. At least not in the movies.
Real life on the other hand was something else. For some reason Dad liked to talk about the Great Tapioca Mines of West Africa and one of my siblings made it to adulthood not knowing that tapioca came from a root and was not, in fact, a mineral.
Another scam he perpetrated along with my late brother-in-law occurred on the battlefields in historic Gettysburg, Pennsylvania with a young yours truly as the victim.
(Distraction - they've just gotten to the point in the movie where Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. are throwing rocks down at the Thuggees. I can almost see a ghostly image of my father saying "yeah right" on the couch...I also never realized how much Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom borrowed from this flick).
So where was I? Oh yeah, Gettysburg. So my dad and my late brother-in-law talked up how even though it was over 110 years after the battle here in nineteen seventy-whatever it was they still never found all the spent ammo and you could still find bullets in the trees or wedged in between the stones if you looked hard enough. Of course this was total BS, but it was a fine way to keep a kid occupied for a while. Dad and my brother in law took it to the next level by buying a replica souvenir bullet at the souvenir shop and actually wedging it into a hole in a tree for me to "find" (after being pointed to that tree by them, of course). As you can imagine I was over the moon with joy as only a little boy who just found a "hundred year old bullet" in a tree could be.
As things worked out, the last road trip I took with my parents was to Pennsylvania, not to Gettysburg but to Lancaster County. The last movie I saw with my dad in the theater was Russel Crowe's "Gladiator". I remember looking over at him as he sat in his wheelchair and sharing a couple of eye-rolling moments not knowing they would be the last. As I wheeled him out of the theater I asked him what he thought of the picture.
"My ass hurts" was the reply.
I helped him into the van and we drove home, oblivious to what the future would bring. I still use his final review to describe overly-long movies to this very day.
The film just concluded, Gunga Din's face smiling from the afterlife as he is dressed in his long-desired regimental uniform. The bagpipes are playing "Auld Lang Syne". I'm still not sure why this picture was his favorite, though I could see why he would thoroughly enjoy its cheesier aspects. Maybe telling us that Gunga Din was his all time favorite was another little scam he pulled on us. I'll never know now, but every time it's on it's a nice reminder of the time I had with him.
I have no earthly idea why this movie was his favorite, but he said it was.
I think my dad always enjoyed military movies because the complete inaccuracy and unreality of the depictions of military life amused the ever-living crap out of him. My dad was the original one-man Mystery Science Theater 3000, though he typically only commented when asked or to react to other people's comments. He loved to watch military pictures, B movies of all kinds and bad sci-fi in particular rolling his eyes the whole time. When something particularly unbelievable would happen I would look to him for an answer. Almost inevitably the answer was a shrug and "it's in the script."
Dad was not one to propagate myths. At least not in the movies.
Real life on the other hand was something else. For some reason Dad liked to talk about the Great Tapioca Mines of West Africa and one of my siblings made it to adulthood not knowing that tapioca came from a root and was not, in fact, a mineral.
Another scam he perpetrated along with my late brother-in-law occurred on the battlefields in historic Gettysburg, Pennsylvania with a young yours truly as the victim.
(Distraction - they've just gotten to the point in the movie where Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. are throwing rocks down at the Thuggees. I can almost see a ghostly image of my father saying "yeah right" on the couch...I also never realized how much Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom borrowed from this flick).
So where was I? Oh yeah, Gettysburg. So my dad and my late brother-in-law talked up how even though it was over 110 years after the battle here in nineteen seventy-whatever it was they still never found all the spent ammo and you could still find bullets in the trees or wedged in between the stones if you looked hard enough. Of course this was total BS, but it was a fine way to keep a kid occupied for a while. Dad and my brother in law took it to the next level by buying a replica souvenir bullet at the souvenir shop and actually wedging it into a hole in a tree for me to "find" (after being pointed to that tree by them, of course). As you can imagine I was over the moon with joy as only a little boy who just found a "hundred year old bullet" in a tree could be.
As things worked out, the last road trip I took with my parents was to Pennsylvania, not to Gettysburg but to Lancaster County. The last movie I saw with my dad in the theater was Russel Crowe's "Gladiator". I remember looking over at him as he sat in his wheelchair and sharing a couple of eye-rolling moments not knowing they would be the last. As I wheeled him out of the theater I asked him what he thought of the picture.
"My ass hurts" was the reply.
I helped him into the van and we drove home, oblivious to what the future would bring. I still use his final review to describe overly-long movies to this very day.
The film just concluded, Gunga Din's face smiling from the afterlife as he is dressed in his long-desired regimental uniform. The bagpipes are playing "Auld Lang Syne". I'm still not sure why this picture was his favorite, though I could see why he would thoroughly enjoy its cheesier aspects. Maybe telling us that Gunga Din was his all time favorite was another little scam he pulled on us. I'll never know now, but every time it's on it's a nice reminder of the time I had with him.
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