Gunga Din is a 1939 RKO adventure film directed by George Stevens and starring Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., loosely based on the poem of the same name by Rudyard Kipling combined with elements of his short story collection Soldiers Three. The film is about three British sergeants and Gunga Din, their native bhisti water bearer, who fight the Thuggee, a cult of murderous Indians in colonial British India.
On the Northwest Frontier of India, circa 1880, contact has been lost with a British outpost at Tantrapur in the midst of a telegraph message. Colonel Weed Montagu Love dispatches a detachment ofBritish Indian Army troops to investigate, led by three sergeants of the Royal Engineers, MacChesney Victor McLaglen, Cutter Cary Grant, and Ballantine Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., longtime friends and veteran campaigners. Although they are a disciplinary headache for their colonel, they are the right men to send on a dangerous mission. Accompanying the detail are six Indian camp workers, including regimental bhisti water carrier Gunga Din Sam Jaffe, who longs to throw off his lowly status and become a soldier of the Queen.They find Tantrapur apparently deserted and set about repairing the telegraph. However, they are soon surrounded by hostile natives. The troops fight their way out. Colonel Weed and Major Mitchell Lumsden Hare identify an enemy weapon brought back as belonging to the Thuggee, a murderous cult that had been suppressed for many years. ........
Source: Wikipedia