Gunga Din

"You may talk o' gin and beer
When you're quartered safe out 'ere,
An' you're sent to penny fights an' Aldershot it;
But when it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An' you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it."

That's him, that's Kipling alright: colourful and rough, earthy and tough..... God! you start rhyming like him after you've read his poem "Gunga Din". And you can see why people have so taken against him for his "British Empire love" when you read stuff about the water carrier, Gunga Din: "You limpin' lump o' brick-dust Gunga Din"; "It was Din! Din! Din! / You 'eathen, where the mischief 'ave you been? / You put some juldee in it / Or I'll marrow you this minute / If you don't fill up my helmet, Gunga Din": "An' for all 'is dirty 'ide / 'E was white, clear white inside".
Etc.
But under this storm of abuse and bad-naming there's a warmth of feeling for the abused, slave-like Indian who carried water for the company of men. At the end I can't stop tears forming at my eyes: "Yes, Din! Din! Din! / You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din! / Though I've belted you and flayed you, / By the livin' Gawd that made you, / You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din".
They made a film called "Gunga Din" back in the thirties but it wasn't so much a film based on the famous poem but one based mostly on the story by Kipling of Three Sergeants - played by Cary Grant, Victor McClaglen and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. It was an all-action film, the sort you might call "good fun". They were showing it in New York recently and Anthony Lane of The New Yorker talked about the director, George Stenens's "crisp direction". Maybe he was crisp then but he became rather mannered later I thought.
The actor who is most memorable to me was Sam Jaffe who played Gunga Din. In the poem Din saves the narrator from death but is shot himself; in the film he climbs slowly, since he's wounded, to the top of a golden temple so that he can blow a trumpet and save the troupe who are about to be ambushed. Sam Jaffe could play any part except romantic roles. He was a sort of hand-me-down actor who could be called on to play a mathematics professor or a well-dressed gentleman crook who ogled lovely young girls ("The Asphalt Jungle") or a man of about 200 years old in Shangri La or an Indian in a "uniform 'e wore / Was nothin' much before, / An' rather less than 'arf o' the be'ind, / For a piece o' twisty rag / An' a goatskin water-bag / Was all the field equipment 'e could find."