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Released
1939 · FILM

Gunga Din

Three British sergeants and their loyal native water-bearer must stop a resurgent Thuggee cult and rescue a captured comrade during a perilous mission in colonial India.

Barbaric Splendor - Gasping Magnitude - Adventure !

Runtime
117 min
AdventureComedyWar

Synopsis

British army sergeants Ballantine, Cutter, and MacChesney serve in India during the 1880s, along with their native water-bearer, Gunga Din. While carrying out a dangerous mission to repair a telegraph line, they discover evidence of the suppressed Thuggee cult. When Gunga Din informs the sergeants about a secret temple made of gold, the fortune-seeking Cutter is captured by the Thuggees, and it falls to his friends to rescue him.

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 20

These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.

Why a floor?

This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.

Craft leads on file

Edited by Henry BermanShot by Joseph H AugustScored by Alfred Newman

Box Office

1939 · Box office

⚖️ Fell short of break-even — grossed 1.5× its budget

Why 2.5×?

Cinemas keep roughly half of every ticket sold, and a wide release’s marketing often costs about as much again as the film — so a movie needs to gross around 2.5× its production budget just to break even theatrically. It’s a rule of thumb, not the studio’s ledger (home video and streaming come later).

Worldwide gross

$2.8M

Budget$1.9M
Worldwide gross$2.8M
break-even (2.5×)

Also known as

  • Aufstand in Sidi Hakimde

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