2/07/2025

Tackle that stash - Snow into water

In the last ten years, I managed almost 100 Friday posts called "Tackle that stash" about making deliberate attempts at using mostly old stash of mine. I'm talking stash that has been around for years and years.
Maybe I even tried to use some of it before, but didn't have quite the idea or I wasn't happy with what I made and ripped it up again.
The last one was a year ago when I actually used up a ten year old bead soup and was very proud of it and a bit relieved.

I thought it was time to try that again, go through my drawers - although I'm still pretty harmless in regards to the size of my stash - and use some of the stuff that deserves to finally see the light of day.
One time it may be something quite small and not very spectacular, other pieces may take more time, effort or playing.

I started making jewelry a little over 15 years ago. Back then we did a Secret Santa among some friends and my Santa sent me a surprise mix of findings and beads that I still have leftovers from.
The white agate beads were part of that mix. There were not many and stringing has never been one of my techniques, so
I never really knew what to do with them and only used a few.

The clear Delicas are from a bead order more than nine years ago. That sounds incredible, but I mostly use clear AB, so I still had one unopened tube out of the three I had ordered back then.
The clear drop beads with a beautiful AB finish are from one of the surprises bead mixes I like to add to my orders because they often challenge me to try out different designs. They always make me think of water drops.
It looked like the perfect combination to me.

Only when I had finished the dangles, I went through the storage box with my single beads. One thought was to use clear crystals for a look of ice and water, but seeing the agate beads made me think of snow melting into water instead.



I hardly have any drop beads left, but there are enough dagger beads, so I might be getting back to the ice and water idea, maybe for the next stash tackler?

2/06/2025

The Exile

Surprise! I know you didn't expect a movie post this week from me for the "Winter of Fairbanks Jr." which Lisa from Boondock Ramblings does on her blog, but Lisa changed movies, so I'm here after all.

This week's movie is The Exile from 1947. Checking the plot, I was quite sure I had seen it before, but ages ago.
After watching it on YouTube - not in a very good quality unfortunately, but you take what you can get - I knew I had been right although I hadn't remembered everything in detail.

Film poster (fair use via Wikipedia)


The movie is about King Charles II. of England during his exile.
Charles is in exile in Holland waiting patiently for being able to return to his home as King.
When at a market to buy food from what little money he has, he meets Katie who has a tulip farm and runs an inn, but being in debt to her cousin, she's in danger of losing everything.
With "Roundheads" around (a derisive term for supporters of the Parliament after the hairstyle some Puritans wore at the time as opposed to the Royalist Cavaliers), Charles decides to cut his hair short and hide with Katie as a worker both on the farm and in the inn.

Then a man claiming to be the King turns up and stays at the inn.
Another guest is Countess Anabella, a former lover of Charles. She brings him a gift from the French king, a music box which Charles gets pawned the next day to pay off Katie's debt. Katie becomes jealous of Anabella and dismisses Charles before he can give her the good news. When she meets Anabella once more, though, who tells her about it, she eagerly waits for Charles to return. When he turns up again, she falls into his arms and they kiss for the first time.

Meanwhile, Colonel Ingram has come from England to find Charles and kill him, but as he hasn't seen him for years, he doesn't recognize him, but asks him to spy for him instead.
When the false King comes out of his room, Ingram thinks he's the real one and tries to kill him upon which the man admits that he is an actor without work who has pretended to be Charles to swindle his way to a room and food.
Charles tells Ingram to look at him and asks if he doesn't know a Stuart when he sees one.
As more Roundheads arrive, Charles escapes barely by taking the actor's horse when the Roundheads pull him off it, but not before telling Katie he will be back the next day. Much to Katie's surprise, Ingram tells her who Charles really is.
She follows Charles to a windmill for hiding, here they announce their love for one another. Ingram and his men have followed Katie, however, so Charles sends her away and draws attention to himself.
He and Ingram have a sword fight in the windmill and when Ingram's sword breaks, Charles throws his own sword away  and they wrestle during which Charles pushes Ingram to his death.
By now Charles' followers have arrived and he is informed that England wants him to come back without any conditions - God save the king.

Now what will become of Katie's and Charles' love?
His advisor tells him that he belongs to the country, not himself.
Katie and Charles talk, but they know they can't be together. It's a very sad and romantic farewell with a last desperate embrace before King Charles II. steps outside to meet his people.

What do you know about Charles?
When his father, Char
les I., was executed in 1649 under Cromwell and the Parlamentarians (I can't help hearing the Monty Python song which has been my cell phone alarm clock tone for a long time), he indeed had to flee the country and spent years in exile.
After Cromwell died, his son Richard took over, but resigned shortly after. Finally a new Parliament asked Charles back to reinstate the monarchy - therefore the term Restoration for this time - after he had made several promises including cooperation with the Parliament.
Again I can't help hearing a song, this time from "Horrible Histories" - "The King of Bling".



Indeed, Charles is also known as "The Merry Monarch", not only because he lifted Puritan restrictions, but because pleasure was an important keyword during his reign, very much including his own which for example shows in the number of his illegitimate children (most of them acknowledged) with his many mistresses, official and unofficial, while he didn't have any children from his marriage.
So yeah, it doesn't sound as if he would have loved Katie forever
😉
I'll leave it to you to look him up if you want to know what else he did and how good a king he was because that would really lead too far here. It's quite the story including the Great Fire of London.

To the movie itself.
It was based on the 1926 novel "His Majesty the King" by Cosmo Hamilton which you can read here if you feel the need. Douglas Fairbanks jr. bought the rights to the novel in 1941. After returning from World War II, he founded his own film studio, The Fairbanks Company.
"The Exile" was announced to be the studio's first movie.

I'm not very demanding in regards to movie quality in image and sound, but I really wish it would have been better because the movie would have been even more fun.
Yes, fun. Don't take it as a history lesson because you will be disappointed, just take it as a fun movie
for being "adventuresome, romantic and humorous", just as announced by the "producer-actor". Don't complain about the costumes not being perfect for the period, just look at how good our hero looks in them. He definitely does, you know, and this is the right movie to develop a crush on him if you don't have one already (which is one reason why I wish the quality had been better).
I'd say he did his father proud jumping through windows and on horses, sword fighting, and smiling irresistibly - and the torn shirt after the final fight ... 'nuff said.
The movie feels very much like a homage to Fairbanks sr. which I feel is helped by it not being filmed in color despite Fairbanks jr.'s wishes, and the icing on the cake is that the son used the sword of the father which was given to him by his associate in The Fairbanks Company who had worked with the senior and had owned the sword since 1930.
Oh yeah, and by the way, not just producer-actor, Fairbanks jr. actually co-wrote this movie. As mentioned before, he was an Anglophile, and he isn't the only one who thought Charles II. made for a good story.

Some say the movie is moving at a snail's pace, too much talk, too little action, but I wasn't bored at all.
If you want a slow story about Charles II., try "Royal Escape" by Georgette Heyer. As much as I love my Heyer books, as much I have to agree with one reviewer "He flees and flees and flees ....". I'm digressing, sorry.

So the set (all built on soundstages) looked quite artificial at times, especially the strange trees without any branches around their trunks, the trees with the glued on (?) blossoms or the tulips, but hey, so what? I found that more amusing than annoying and in some scenes it had something dreamlike, especially if there's fog.

So the love story isn't a wild, passionate one, but more on the tender side. I didn't mind that because it was clear from the beginning that there wouldn't be a happy ending for them.
Was Countess Anabella more fun? Well, she would have been, wouldn't she? Katie was a hard working young lady worrying about her debt, Anabella looked much more like one of the ladies Charles could have had a party with, and still he fell for Katie. I actually thought that was rather sweet.

Now I could try to talk about the mood director Max Ophüls (credited as Opuls in his US films) created with his takes, but I think it has been done much better already in some of the sources I added to this post. Why did Maria Montez get top billing? See the sources. Why did the movie have two different endings for the US (a shorter one) and elsewhere? See the sources. Both endings are included on YouTube, by the way.

Time to wrap this up.
If you are in for a bit of adventure and fun with a splash of romance thrown in, go for it and watch The Exile. I put it on my re-watch list myself.
What a pity it's not available on DVD!


Selected sources:

Wikipedia articles on The Exile and Charles II.

The Cairns Post, Sept. 10, 1946, page 6

Showmen's Trade Review, May 10, 1947, page 39

The Exile on IMDb

Meher Tatna: Restored by HFPA - "The Exile" (1947), posted on "Golden Globes", June 28, 2022

The Exile: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Carries on the Legacy of His Father, posted on "Prince of Hollywood", June 5, 2016

The Exile on Letterboxd

2/03/2025

January - A challenge

I haven't been touching anything jewelry related in a while. I had to look it up, my last piece of jewelry was the pair of tassle earrings more than two months ago!

What's wrong with me, you want to know? I wish I knew. I have a whole list of ideas, but I'm still in the middle of an embroidery project, and while I used to have several projects on the go, it's something I can't seem to do right now.

Of course, it would be the easiest to blame my thumb joint again, but while it is part of it, it is, well, exactly that, part of it, but not everything.
Some of it is probably my overall mood, news-related, which sometimes seems to paralyze me. Some of it is feeling as if I have been chasing my right audience forever and doing that year after year tends to get mentally exhausting time and again. I'm by no means alone in that, I have seen it in other jewelry friends, but of course also in other creatives, no matter what the medium. Some of it might still be hibernation mode.

Usually it takes me a bit to get out of that and then I'm back happily experimenting and playing, but this time it seems to be harder for me to just grab something and give it a go although that is something that has always worked pretty well for me before. Just slap a cab on some backing and start stitching. Just take a wire and my crochet hook and do it.
Weird about it is that my brain is actually creating in theory and waits for my fingers to follow suit.

So I thought a stash tackler would be perfect.
Nothing super experimental, just something to get myself kick started.
I took one of my labradorite cabs, glued it on, picked some colors for the bezel and started stitching. It's amazing how good that felt already although it was not very creative.
Bezel done, I started looking for beads to add and as the lab looked a bit gloomy so far, I went for a sparkly blue, separated by tiny hematite beads which created small open spaces between the crystals which I could fill up with button beads and how about some tiny silver beads on the other side ... yes, it seems the kick start had worked!

That's when it hit me - the January/February challenge at the Jewelry Artisans Community.
What had our challenge mistress written?
Symbols: Snowflakes, icicles, evergreen trees
Colors: White, silver, blue, dark green
Herbs and Flowers: Sage, pine, juniper, snowdrop
Crystals: Garnet, clear quartz, hematite
Themes: Reflection, introspection, purification, new beginnings


I had "ice" from the button beads, I had silver and blue beads, the lab is shimmering in blue and green, I had hematite, and this was my new beginning for jewelry this year - and nothing of it had been planned.
It was downright perfect ... until I cut the edges. Don't ask me how it happened, but snip snip, there went not one, but two important threads. Honestly, am I jinxed? Are my eyes too crooked to see a thread? I didn't know if I should cry or laugh like a madwoman. Crying wouldn't have helped much, though, so I saved what I could meaning I cut it down to the bezel, glued and sewed on another piece of backing and started all over again hoping for the best.
In the end it turned out just a tad different because I didn't remember exactly how I had placed the tiny silver seed beads and the hematite it the first time round, so maybe there is a tiny bit of experimenting in it after all.
It's so shiny and sparkly, the pictures can hardly do it justice, especially because I took them when it was already dark. I just couldn't wait until tomorrow to show that I'm back! Hopefully, that is.



2/01/2025

Random Saturday - Am I a psychopath?

I don't remember the exact quote and I don't remember the episode, I'm not even sure which Barnaby said it, but it was something along the lines of a house having no pictures of people at all and isn't that a sign for a psychopath?
For some reason the thought hasn't left me since then. Am I a psychopath?
To explain, the ex and I have always had our walls full of pictures, but we only had one with a person on it, and we didn't even know her. The ex bought it at a fleamarket because he thought it would fit the flair of our hallway with the vintage wardrobe and lighting and the stenciled walls, and she does fit in. He left her hanging there when he left, by the way.

Inside, however, it's animals all over.
Most of them are cat pictures in different mediums by different artists including friends of mine who made portraits of my own cats for me.

Only later, I started working on my fan wall of bead loomed celebrities, and there are the portraits I made of us children for my mother which came back to me after her death.
To be honest, even as a child I didn't quite grasp collections of family photos on walls, mantelpieces, or pianos. Not that I didn't love our old photos even if we didn't have that many, but didn't all old pictures have to be in albums or a shoebox like ours?
Maybe it has to do with myself always having been so picture shy? I can just about deal with the bead loomed portraits because they have an artistic touch, but basically I much prefer my painted animals for my own place. Funny, in museums I love portraits. Is it just the medium photography I have a problem with?
If I am a psychopath, though, I can assure you I will never be a criminal mastermind like some of the Midsomer Murders murderers 
😂

Let me show you our first cat painting. We were told it was by Arthur Heyer who was famous for his angora cats. I never believed it because Heyer's angoras have very different faces from this one.
It didn't matter anyway because we wanted the painting not for a name, but because it reminded us so much of our first cat. I never told Dude's story here on the blog, but it's on Ponder's blog (1 and 2) - how an abandoned old cat became a "foreign exchange kitty".

This is Dude. Sadly, these were pre-digital times, so I don't have that many pictures of him.


This is the painting (it's the one, by the way, that der Dekan likes to push when he wants my attention because he knows very well I don't want him to touch it, little devil).
Please ignore the broken frame, we got it like this, but I wouldn't know how to restore it.


Yup, I still prefer it over people pictures.

1/30/2025

The Young in Heart

Lisa from Boondock Ramblings is doing the "Winter of Fairbanks Jr." on her blog and I said I'd join her if I'd get the chance to watch the movies.
For today she chose "The Young in Heart" from 1938 which happens to be on YouTube, actually several times, so here we go.

Australian poster (public domain
AUS/US via Wikipedia)


Meet the Carleton family.
Anthony "Sahib", the father, a former actor claiming to have served in India. His wife "Marmy". Their son Richard and their daughter George-Anne, both looking for wealthy spouses.

Things don't look too bad at the French Riviera. Richard is engaged to Adela, the daughter of a former American senator. His father has managed to cheat the senator out of $4,500 at poker. George-Ann has a Scottish suitor, Duncan. Sadly he doesn't have any money, though, so he's not eligible.
Unfortunately, the police finds out about this family of con artists, they take the check back, tear it up, and tell the Carletons to leave town if they don't want to get in trouble. The senator even pays for the train to get rid of them
What now?

On the train to London, George-Anne meets an old woman named Miss Fortune and swindles her way into her first class compartment right away. Hearing that she has a big house and money, the family charms her with their stories.
When the train derails, they help Miss Fortune to safety. On saying goodbye, she asks George-Anne if they wouldn't like to be her guests for a while. While the lonely lady is happy to have found friends, George-Anne suggests to the family they should be acting as decent people hoping that they might make it into her will.
So Sahib and Richard head out looking for jobs or rather pretend they are. Meanwhile Duncan, who can't seem to stay away from George-Anne although he doesn't approve of the family and their intentions, sees Sahib's ad in the paper and comes to the house to tell him of a possible position as a car salesman for "The Flying Wombat". To make sure he doesn't mess things up, George-Anne insists on Sahib taking the job.
Richard, too, gets himself a job sorting mail at an engineering firm where he immediately falls for the secretary Leslie. They get along wonderfully until she finds out about the family's plans.

Spending time with Miss Fortune, however, the Carletons grow more and more fond of her, but none of them wants to admit it to the others thinking they are still after the inheritance.
Also Sahib proves to be so good at his job that he's appointed sales manager of his branch making enough money of his own.
Unfortunately, Anstruther, Miss Fortune's lawyer and a friend of her former fiancé who had left her his fortune, has found out what the Carletons are and advises Miss Fortune to get rid of them. She, however, won't hear anything of it, instead she tells him to draw up a new will with them as the beneficiaries. When George-Anne tells the family about it, they don't seem all that happy, but they still don't admit to each other how they are feeling about Miss Fortune by now.
Leslie and Duncan have already noticed a change in them - Richard, for example, has decided to go to engineering school which tells Leslie he may not just want to be an heir after all.
When they go out celebrating with Miss Fortune, she suddenly collapses. The Carletons wait outside her sick room worrying.
Miss Fortune calls on Anstruther to make sure the new will is signed, but he quite smugly informs the family that there won't be any money after all, in fact even the house will be gone if she will survive.
Now Marmy surprises everyone by saying that they don't want any money and Sahib adds that Miss Fortune will never have to worry as long as she lives because they are going to be taking care of her.

The ending shows the young people married and everyone including Miss Fortune living together in the Carletons' new house - happily ever after, no doubt
😉

"The Young in Heart" is based on the originally serialized novel "The Gay Banditti" by I.A.R. Wylie. I had never heard of her before, but over 30 movies were made based on her work in almost 40 years.
The novel, however, did not have a happy ending, Miss Fortune dies. Test audiences didn't react well to that, so Selznick recalled everyone to film the more positive ending. That also explains why it seems to be a bit rushed compared to the rest of the movie.

On YouTube, the movie is both in black/white and in colorized versions. I chose to watch it in black/white myself which I think works better for the atmosphere, but that's just my personal opinion.

It is a cute movie. Miss Fortune is such a sweet old lady opening her house and heart to the Carletons in such faith that those "hard as nails" con artists simply can't help growing to love her and change their ways gradually.
That she doesn't even lose her faith in them upon hearing about their plans, makes you think she's either very naive or she sees something in them that they only just now start to see themselves, but can't even admit to one another.

I really like the performances, too - although I have to admit that Marmy sometimes got on my nerves a bit, but that has more to do with her lines than the performance.
There's only one thing I can't seem to agree on with other viewers, if they mentioned him at all, that is. I absolutely hated the character of Duncan, right from the start, and that didn't just have to do with the terrible Scottish accent (rolling the r is not enough!). When he called Adela "very ugly and very stupid", he had lost me. She may have been a naive young lady, but putting a pair of glasses on a pretty girl doesn't make her very ugly and it doesn't make her plain as I read elsewhere, and I'm not just saying that because I wear glasses myself. I told myself that this was a 1938 stereotype, but he kept being rude and condescending throughout the movie. I think the only scene I thought he was okay was when he apologized to Miss Fortune for getting Richard drunk.
This paragraph being so long, tells you how much I despised him
😂 I wonder if he was the same in the novel and if the two marriages were even mentioned.

I think I liked Miss Fortune best of them all. She really has a few very sweet scences, for example when she cares for the drunk Richard telling him she has been intoxicated herself before and how someone with a little puppy helped her then which makes him go and look for the perfect puppy for her - just to ingratiate himself with her of course, at least he still thinks so himself at the time.

A short word on the Flying Wombat, an amazingly futuristic car which was "played" by the "Phantom Corsair", a prototype automobile which never went into production after the designer died in a car accident in 1939.
The car is now in the National Automobile Museum in Reno.
I don't drive and not that many cars can get me excited, but this is a real beauty.

If you don't know the movie yet and want to watch it, I'm sorry if I told you too much, but it's still worth it, promise!

The next two weeks I won't be able to join in as I don't have a way to watch the chosen movies, but I'll be back the week after that.

1/25/2025

Random Saturday - Cookbooks, part 1

I have probably mentioned one or the other time that I'm not much of a cook. That doesn't mean I'm not cooking at all or that I can't cook at all, but I rarely ever had the passion or the patience for elaborate recipes, and to be honest, these days it's even more difficult, also because I can't stand for too long and also don't really see why I should do some big cooking just for myself.

A few days ago, a friend mentioned having many cookbooks, but not using them anymore because of online recipes.
That made me think of my own cookbooks. Yes, I have a bunch of cookbooks, old vintage ones and new vintage ones. No, honestly, that makes sense. I bought vintage cookbooks at fleamarkets or online and I bought new cookbooks so long ago that they are also vintage now
😉 at least most of them.

I remember when we got a new kitchen. The saleslady showed us a hanging cabinet for cookbooks, very uncomfortable for me to use because I would have needed a footstool to open and close it. I said I'd prefer an open shelf and she said that the cookbooks would get greasy that way. She was so surprised when I said that that was absolutely fine for cookbooks in my opinion if they were used. She was even more surprised when she heard I was a librarian, but being used to what textbooks look after long use, a bit of grease can't shock me.
Actually, the cookbooks in my kitchen are not very greasy, but tend to get dusty on top because I hardly use them. Some of them have never been used except for looking at recipes and thinking how nice they looked.
At the moment I don't need the space they are taking up and they add to the kitchen look.

Of course only the "new vintage" and younger are there, not the really old ones.
I thought I could share one of my vintage ones with you every, now and then, something I haven't done often on the blog. I fear it will be completely theoretical, though. While I like the thought of trying out some of the old recipes, I'm very well aware it's probably not going to happen. Gotta stay realistic.

Today I brought you "Die fleischlose Küche für Gesunde und Kranke" by chef Kurt Klein, "The meatless kitchen for healthy and sick people".


You may see from the Fraktur typeface (not something everyone can still read, especially without practice) that this is an old book - and from the mold stains, fortunately the book doesn't smell bad - and although there's no year of publication, an inscription in the front tells us that Walter G. got it from his mother "for perpetual remembrance" in May 1937. I wonder if he was just interested in cooking or if he was or wanted to be a vegetarian and if he moved out from home at the time.


This book would have been a good start because it has 769 recipes including beverages (some longer, some just two or three sentences long, such as the one for lemonade for example)! I even found a few online recommendations for this book from not ten years ago.

Vegetarianism is nothing new.
I have to admit, however, that I hadn't been aware when they started making veggie meat, sausage, and cheese. Now there are so many companies jumping on the trend. When I stopped eating meat in the late 80s, there was nothing like that in sight. It was hard to get something vegetarian in restaurants and sometimes still is, depending on what kind of restaurant it is.
I remember my first visit to the US when in one place the waiter said he could only offer me a shrimp cocktail as vegetarian and was confused because I politely declined and in another place the waiter said they would just whip up a veggie plate for me if I was okay with that, and it was so good it made the others jealous.
In the Klein book there's an ad for "plant meat" by De-Vau-Ge, a company that still exists today. From what I have seen, some of their products are used in the book's recipes, not just veggie meat etc., but also granola and other cereals.


I thought I'd choose a random recipe to share with you. Just a second .... poke .... my finger chose recipe 292 "Kartoffelkruspeln". I didn't even know what that means, but it seems "Kruspeln" is an Austrian word for "cartilage", here used in the sense of "crunchy". If you suspect something now, you may be right. This is a recipe for potato croquettes (from the French "croquer" = "crunch").
- 1 kilo potatoes - peel, wash, boil until soft, and mash
- add 3 egg yolks, 100 g butter, salt and some grated nutmeg
- make little ball or sausage shapes, use egg and breadcrumbs or granola (semolina-like and of course from De-Vau-Ge) to bread them and deep fry them 3 to 4 minutes

Yeah, I also would have wished for something more exotic, but that's random choice for you. Maybe we will have more luck with the next cookbook.

1/23/2025

You're a better man than I am ...

Gunga Din!
That's the final line of Rudyard Kipling's poem "Gunga Din" (first published in 1890 in two newspapers and then in 1892 in a collection).
I know poetry has not been a topic on my blog before, but actually this post isn't about the poem, but about the 1939 adventure film of the same name that was inspired by it.
Lisa from Boondock Ramblings is doing the "Winter of Fairbanks Jr." on her blog and as I happen to own the movie (bought some years ago to add to my Cary Grant movies), I figured I'd join her.

When hearing the name Kipling, you can imagine that this will be a bit controversial, after all both the poem and the movie are set in the time of the British Raj.
Also, given the year the movie was made, you know that there will be brownface for the Indian characters and there will be stereotypes, both for the Indian and the British characters.

Gunga Din is an adventure film about three British sergeants in India - Ballantine (Fairbanks jr.), the romantic one, who is about to give up his military career to get married and go into the tea business, MacChesney (McLaglen), the tough one with the soft spot, and Cutter, the Cockney joker (Grant), who befriends the regimental "bhisti" or water-carrier Gunga Din and wants adventure - and treasure.

Public domain via Wikipedia

When the telegraph connection to Tantrapur is cut, the three friends and some Indian camp workers are sent there to repair the lines, but get attacked by a group of locals in the name of the goodess Kali. They barely make it out with some losses, and when reporting back, a weapon identifies the attackers as belonging to the ancient cult of Thuggee. The superiors agree that the return of Thuggee has to be nipped in the bud and decide to send back a larger force, but without Ballantine whose leave from the army is due soon.
To get rid of Higginbotham, the replacement whom they don't like, Cutter and MacChesney spike the punch at Ballantine's "betrothal dance" with elephant elixir. Higginbotham is indeed unable to join them the next morning and Ballantine agrees reluctantly to take his place, but wants the repairs to be done quickly before his enlistment ends. Before they are done, Higginbotham arrives with relief troops and Emmy, Ballantine's fiancée.

Meanwhile, Gunga Din has told Cutter about having found a temple of gold. MacChesney locks Cutter up to keep him from chasing after the gold, but with the help of Annie, the elephant, Din breaks him out and they head to the temple.
There they discover that the temple belongs to the Thugs. Cutter distracts the Thugs and gets himself caught, so Din can escape to get help.
While Higginbotham sends for backup from the regiment, MacChesney and Ballantine leave immediately for the temple with Din to rescue Cutter although Emmy tries to persuade Ballantine not to go. Of course them rushing in like that gets them captured as well.
They manage to take the guru of the tribe hostage and take him to the roof of the temple where they see how many Thugs are waiting for the regiment to arrive. As they don't want to abandon their guru, however, he kills himself, so they will fight the British.
Cutter and Din get wounded, but gathering his last strength, Din climbs to the top of the temple and blows his bugle before getting shot. That alerts the regiment and they can defeat the Thugs.
At Din's funeral the colonel appoints him a corporal of the British army, which had been Din's dream all along, saying "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din."

I admit that I struggled putting this together as I didn't want to make it too long, but there is so much happening in the movie I haven't even included, after all it's almost two hours long!
There is action, there is humor, there is drama ... and very little romance. Emmy doesn't stand a chance against the army and Ballantine actually re-enlists for the rescue mission and stays re-enlisted, definitely not what she has dreamt of.

This is a buddy movie. Three lads taking on the world and having adventures. Why does that make me want to slap my thigh and go "Jolly well, old boy, cheerio, pip pip"?
It's probably the "Hollywood Raj" feeling, a term for the English actors living and socializing in Hollywood in the 30s, but also including actors from other countries like Australia, South Africa, and the USA who liked the style. This led to the making of countless "British" movies outside of Great Britain, movies upholding the old stereotypes and values, inspired by British authors. Being strangely Anglophile myself, I get it although I do not condone British imperialism.

Talking about imperialism, the movie was actually banned in parts of India for that reason. I found a post with an article about Gunga Din written for filmindia, and as you can imagine it's not a positive one. It points out all the stereotypes and even remarks on Din's heroic death being exploited to prove that the movie is not Anti-Indian.
However, the comments on the post itself are interesting to read as well as some Indian commenters say that in this day and age, they are able to laugh about it or even enjoy it, but how they understand Indians would feel differently about it back then when India did not have her independence yet.

Obviously, Kipling's poem didn't offer enough content for a whole movie, so they mixed it with some of the stories from his collection Soldiers Three.
In fact, quite a few writers tried their hand at the script and there were several variations until the final result.

Much of the movie was shot at Lone Pine about 200 miles from Los Angeles where they built the regimental site, the village, and the temple, and the director George Stevens took so long that production manager Berman had to set an ultimatum which was funny as he had chosen him over Howard Hawks for being faster.
A lot of the gags, stunts and fight scenes were improvised, something Stevens had learned from being a cinematographer with Hal Roach for Laurel and Hardy comedies.
At nearly 2 million dollars, the movie was by far the most expensive one of its time which was even more unusual given that RKO was not one of the huge studios.

There were also several choices for the cast.
Originally, Grant was supposed to play Ballantine, but he wanted to play Cutter, so Fairbanks jr. was brought in for the role of Ballantine.
For the part of Din, RKO would have liked Sabu, but producer Alexander Korda didn't want to lend Sabu at the time because he prepared for "The Thief of Bagdad", so they tested several actors and decided on Sam Jaffe. Jaffe said that he told himself "Think Sabu" and played the role with his concept of how Sabu would have played it. I admit that I can't see that, but I might be biased by the movies with Sabu that I have seen. Despite playing the man giving the movie his name, Jaffe is only credited in fourth place and he's not even in the film poster!
Joan Fontaine, who played Emmy, was not a star at that time, but she hardly had any screentime, anyway.
Let's not forget Anna May who played Annie, the elephant.

A short word on Thuggee. There are different approaches to the history of Thuggee.
Thuggee - like other words used in English - is derived from a Hindi word, "thagi" in this case which means "deception". Native Indians refer to "Thugs" as "phansigars" meaning "stranglers", you also see the word "thag" used.
A lot of the popular idea of Thuggee (as in Gunga Din and Indiana Jones 2 which has taken a lot from Gunga Din), also as a religious cult, is based on the writings of William H. Sleeman (including "The Thugs or Phansigars of India") who was head of the "Thug Police" in the 1830s.
This is a veritable rabbit hole to dive into - for how long have there been "Thags", was it a hereditary practice within a tribe, was it an orientalist construction to legitimize the British taking over, was there any religious connection at all, was there one "Thug ruler" ... it would be way too long for a post about a movie, but if you are interested in diving into that rabbit hole yourself, I'm going to add some sources.

Now I have talked a lot, but you may want to hear what I think about the movie?

I'm a bit torn and I'm not the only one (even Bertolt Brecht wrote about it!).
The movie is considered a classic and I can understand why, but you can't deny that it is most definitely a product of its time.
If it weren't set in India, with the typical ingredients - the glorifying of the British Empire on one side, elephants, a temple, and murderous cult members in loin cloths on the other - but in a fantasy country, you wouldn't even have to think about it twice.
So yes, there were moments when I rolled my eyes - I have been a professional eye-roller for decades, my eyes muscles are probably the strongest ones I have - but I have to admit that I also couldn't help getting drawn in by this buddy story and enjoy some of it.
You will have to make your own judgement. If you do, let me know!


Sources:
Kipling Society: Gunga Din - the poem and readers's guide
Film historian Rudy Behlmer's commentary on the 2004 DVD (highly recommended!)
Memsaab Story: The Gunga Din tamasha, posted
January 31,2010
Kevin Jack Hagopian (New York State Writer Institute): Film Notes - Gunga Din
Gunga Din (film) on English Wikipedia
Back to Golden Days - an old Hollywood blog: Film Friday "Gunga Din", posted December 11, 2016
Park Ridge Classic Film: The Making of Gunga Din, posted January 14, 2014


Selected sources on Thuggee:
Darren Reid: On the Origin of Thuggee: Determining the Existence of Thugs in Pre-British India. In: The Corvette 4, 2017, 1, pp. 75 - 84 (Open Access)
Sagnik Bhattacharya: Monsters in the dark: the discovery of Thuggee and demographic knowledge in colonial India. In: Pallgrave Communications 6, Art.nr. 78(2020) (Open Access)
Kim A. Wagner: The Deconstructed Stranglers. In: Modern Asian Studies 38, 2004, 4, pp. 931 - 963 (Closed Access)