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My partner and I have been enjoying watching again this great old program that we grew up watching in the early 1960s. Good old fashion storytelling with a mix of old stars and interesting stories. Like William S. Hart the silent film star said of westerns, you could tell all of Shakespeare stories in an old west setting. This particular show was a season ending wrap with several "special guest stars" including: Linda Darnell, Marjorie Main, Dan Duryea, Margaret O'Brien, Roscoe Ates, and George Chandler! If you get a chance see it with the whole family and explain to the young ones who the old ones once were in the hey day of Hollywood's Golden Era.

In late 19th-century India, an incoming telegraph message from the outpost at Tanipur to the British fort at Muree is abruptly cut off. Major Mitchell sends three of his best, the resourceful but rowdy sergeants MaChesney (McLaughlen), Cutter (Grant) and Ballentine (Fairbanks) to investigate. Accompanied by their loyal native water boy Gunga Din (Sam Jaffee), they find the outpost strangely deserted and soon discover it's the work of the savage Thuggee cult who are out to ambush the regiment. Plenty of action, adventure and a large measure of comedy ensues. One on-going gag (borrowed from Screenwriters Hecht & MacArthur's hit play The Front Page) involves MaChesney and Cutter's attempts to thwart Ballentine's plan to resign from the army in order to marry his sweetheart (Joan Fontaine) and go into the tea business. ("The TEA business!!!") Plans had been in the works to make a feature film based on Kipling's poem as early as 1928 by MGM. Finally RKO acquired the rights and Howard Hawks was assigned to the project. RKO replaced Hawks with George Stevens before shooting began in the Sierra Mountains in California. The script was still being tweaked and written during the filming and many bits were improvised, including the entire bugle scene between Grant and Jaffe. Gunga Din was the most expensive film made to date by RKO and the money shows in the big battle finale, which includes 1500 men, several hundred horses and mules, not to mention the four elephants. The three sergeants are ideally cast with the dashing and under-rated Douglas Fairbanks Jr. giving the best performance of his career. Cinematographer Joseph H. August was nominated for an Academy Award.

In this second film version of the hit play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur The Front Page, New York newspaper reporter Hildy Johnson (played by Pat O'Brien in 1931) is now a sassy, confident woman (Rosalind Russell). Hildy has had enough of the newspaper life and is going to quit and marry dependable (boring) Bruce Baldwin (never-gets-the-girl Ralph Bellamy) and move to Albany. The thing is, her editor and ex-husband Walter Burns Cary Grant) doesn't want either thing to happen and tricks Hildy into covering just one more story – that of a deluded radical charged with murder. What follows is a super-charged side-splitting satire of the headline-hungry newspaper business and of course, a bit of romance.

Howard Hawks directs his stars and a brilliant cast of supporting players (Billy Gilbert, a real scene-stealing stand-out) at a breathless pace, using overlapping dialog to increase the feeling of frenzy. You'll want to watch this one again and again to catch all of the terrific dialog. Some of those witty lines (at least as legend has it) were improvised, such as when Grant describes Bruce Baldwin, saying that he "looks like that film actor, Ralph Bellamy." Later, during a rapid-fire telephone exchange, Grant responds to another actor's line with "The last person to say that to me was Archibald Leach just before he cut his throat!" (Archibald Leach of course, being Grant's real name.) Named to the National Film Registry in 1993.