As Samir pointed out in a comment on my last post, Pyaasa was one of the films (in fact, the only Hindi film) to find a place on Time Magazine’s all-time 100 best films list. That’s something Pyaasa shares in common with this film. Metropolis, a silent film made in Germany thirty years before Pyaasa, is also on the list. It was directed by Fritz Lang, who co-wrote the screenplay along with his wife Thea von Harbou. The result is a film like none other.
While I was writing the review of Ek Saal last week, I was reminded of this film. And that for what might seem an obscure reason to some: I S Johar was the man who suggested the story idea for Ek Saal, and he – now as actor, not writer – plays one of the important characters in this superb adventure film.
Despite everything more fashionable cinema viewers may say, I love The Sound of Music. I love the songs, I love the mushy romance, I love the children. I love Julie Andrews. I love Christopher Plummer.
Which is why it’s always bothered me that Christopher Plummer used to refer to the film as The Sound of Mucus. Why, I wondered.
Well, this might just furnish some sort of answer to that question. Plummer stars in Triple Cross as a war-era safe breaker who offers his services to the Nazis as a spy in Britain. It’s not a frightfully demanding role, but it offers a glimpse of what Plummer was capable of. And I can understand why he might have thought of his role as Georg von Trapp as a little too much of a cakewalk.
Sharmi has been reviewing one brilliant Bengali film after the other over at her blog. I ended up begging her to slow down, because I can’t possibly keep pace when it comes to obtaining—with subtitles, mind you—and watching so many great films. So what do I do? I watch and review a Bengali film of my own.
Chiriakhana (‘The Zoo’) is based on the famous crime novel of the same name by Saradindu Bandopadhyay. It features the detective Byomkesh Bakshi (which those of you who watched Doordarshan during the early 1990’s might remember from the superb TV series starring Rajit Kapur). The film was directed by Satyajit Ray, and though most feel that this is Ray’s worst film, it isn’t as bad as all that. It even won Ray a Golden Lotus at the National Film Awards.
The past year has been a rather tragic one when it comes to classic cinema: Jean Simmons died in January; Lena Horne passed on in May, and then, just a little over a month back, Tony Curtis died. And, about a week ago, I got an e-mail from blog reader and friend Bawa to say that Spanish director Luis García Berlanga had died. Berlanga, the audacious film maker about whom Franco is supposed to have said, “Berlanga is not a Communist; he is worse than a Communist, he is a bad Spaniard.” Berlanga, creator of the superb Bienvenido, Mister Marshall!, which Bawa gave to me and helped spark off an enthusiasm for the work of this immensely talented film maker. Berlanga, who with this film derided capital punishment and made himself so unpopular with the Spanish government that they tried to stop the screening of El Verdugo at the Venice Film Festival… RIP.
When I think of I Soliti Ignoti (literally, The Usual Unknown Thieves, though the English title of the film is Big Deal on Madonna Street), this is one of the scenes that comes to mind: one evening, a pawnshop is about to close for the day. A thief’s decided to hold up the pawnshop and steal all the jewellery in the safe. He arrives at the shop with a pistol in his hand, a newspaper draped over it.
When the last customer at the counter has gone, the thief steps up to the counter, points the gun at the man behind the counter and says, “Do you know it?”—indicating the gun.
The man behind the counter reaches over, grabs the gun, and has a quick look at it before saying, “Sure I know it. It’s a small calibre Beretta, in very poor condition. One thousand lira.”
When the thief stands there, gaping, the man adds, impatiently: “Well?!”
The thief snatches his gun back and leaves the pawnshop, too disgruntled to bother holding it up.
Or Ogni Porikkha, if you want to be phonetically correct.
Over the last twenty-odd years, I’ve heard countless Bengalis rave about Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen as the ultimate onscreen romantic couple. I’ve seen both of them act (separately) in a few (admittedly Hindi) films, and have been very impressed.
So, finally: an Uttam Kumar-Suchitra Sen film, and one that was a big hit too. Agni Pariksha: ‘trial by fire’.
Years ago, when I was a child, Bronenosets Potyomkin (The Battleship Potemkin) was shown on television. I must have been about 10, perhaps 11—but no more than that. Five minutes into the film and I got bored of the grainy, jerky picture (this was an unrestored version) and the lack of dialogue. A silent film? And that too about a mutiny? Um, no.
For some 25 odd years, that remained my only memory of Bronenosets Potyomkin, even long after I’d discovered that it’s regarded as a sort of cult classic.
An omission, I realised, that needed correction. It was time to dust off Sergei Eisenstein’s magnum opus and see what it was really about.
Okay, one last post for Shashi Fest.
There’s something a little strange about seeing a film you’ve heard so much about. An English film, but with a primarily Bollywood star cast? With a story line that wavers between the usual hiccups of a middle class urban couple, doing the painful transition from carefree single existences to married life—and an American, floundering about as he tries to reach for a higher spirituality? Part Indian, part foreign outlook? And all of it with its roots in the Manusmriti, which says that of the four states of man, that of the grihastha (the householder) is the most important…?
The first time I heard about this film, it was in connection with the Hindi film Do Bigha Zameen (1953), the story of a poor family that tries desperately to cling on to the one thing that stands between it and utter destitution—a tiny plot of land. I’d heard that Do Bigha Zameen was based on Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di Biciclette (The Bicycle Thieves).
Having finally seen this, I have to admit I find little similarity between the two films. True, as in Do Bigha Zameen, here too only one thing can save the family from starvation: in this case, a bicycle. And here too, it’s the father and his young son who set out together in a desperate attempt to save themselves. Other than that, the tone, the story and the general mood of the two films is very different. And much as I admire Bimal Roy, I have to admit: De Sica wins. Ladri di Biciclette is much more powerful and haunting than the relatively melodramatic Do Bigha Zameen.
