Tag Archives: film review

Biraj Bahu (1954)

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I have to admit I have never watched this film in all my years of watching and blogging about old Hindi cinema. Part of the reason is, I suppose, that this film—directed by Bimal Roy—somehow always tends to get sidelined in all the praise that’s showered on his better-known works: Do Bigha Zameen, Bandini, Devdas, Parakh, Sujata, Madhumati… then, too, there’s the fact that Kamini Kaushal has never been one of my favourite actresses. I’ve always found her a little affected, her diction and expressions too exaggeratedly innocent.

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Il Giorno della Civetta (The Day of the Owl), 1968

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AKA Mafia, the singularly apt title of this Franco-Italian film for its release in America. Based on a novel by Leonardo Sciascia, the film was directed by Damiano Damiani and starred Claudia Cardinale, Franco Nero, and Lee J Cobb.

Claudia Cardinale was the reason I watched this film: she passed away on September 23, 2025. I had just paid tribute then to Robert Redford, and coming on the heels of his death, Cardinale’s death was even more saddening. Two greats of Golden Age cinema, one after the other. Two people who were contemporaries (though they didn’t co-star in any films). Two people who left a mark.

Claudia Cardinale was born in Tunisia and made her debut in 1958 opposite Omar Sharif in the French-Tunisian film Goha. She went on to act in several Italian films, and then moved to Hollywood—for a few years, after which she returned to Europe and resumed work in French and Italian films.

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Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

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RIP, Robert Redford.

I will not pretend that Robert Redford was my favourite actor. In fact, offhand, I’d be hard put to remember how many (or, embarrassingly, how few) of his films I’ve watched. All the President’s Men, yes; A Bridge Too Far, yes. A few others, none of them (like Captain America: Winter Soldier) films for which he’s known.

Mea culpa. It isn’t a reflection on Redford, but on me, because most of my life has been spent watching Hollywood from the 30s to the 50s; my favourite era in Hollywood was over by the time Redford burst upon the scene. But it says a lot for him that despite that, I liked him in the few films of his that I watched. A great actor (and so handsome!). Deeply committed to the cause of environmental conservation, and by all accounts, a genuine, warm-hearted person.

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Anita (1967)

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When, for May 31st this year (the 100th birth anniversary of film director Raj Khosla), I wanted to review one of his films, Anita was on my shortlist. Over the course of the years I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve reviewed several of Khosla’s films, including two of the three films (Woh Kaun Thi?, Mera Saaya and Anita) that comprise Khosla’s Sadhana suspense trilogy. Since Manoj Kumar had also passed away earlier this year, it seemed fitting to watch and review Anita, the last of the three films, and a film that starred Manoj Kumar opposite Sadhana.

For a tribute to Khosla, I ended up reviewing Kaala Paani instead. But I did watch Anita (a film that I’d last seen so long back, I remembered only the basics of it). And it seemed appropriate to review it too.

Therefore…

The film begins with a short, rather abrupt scene in which Seth Biharilal (Sajjan) visits a somewhat shady-looking pandit (Ulhas). Biharilal has brought along the horoscope of his 19-year-old daughter Anita for the pandit to have a look at, and to comment upon. The pandit has a peek, and says that this year is going to be really vile for Anita.

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Sapphire (1959)

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Not even half an hour into this 1959 British film, directed by Basil Dearden, and I was wondering: “Why isn’t this one better-known? How come I hadn’t heard of it before?”

Having finished watching Sapphire, I think I know the answers to those questions. It’s not as if Sapphire is an obscure film; in Britain, in knowledgeable film circles, it’s probably fairly well-respected, given that it won the BAFTA Award for Best Film in 1960. But here in India, while British cinema of earlier years (Hitchcock’s early cinema, the films of Laurence Olivier and Leslie Howard in the 30s and 40s, for instance) were the stuff of my childhood film-watching—thanks to Doordarshan, which would air the great classics—by the 1950s and 60s, the cinema that seemed to be most popular was Hollywood. I am not talking of what English-language films were actually screened in India back then; I am talking of the 50s and 60s English-language films that were aired by Doordarshan in the 1980s and early 90s, when much of my film-watching was on TV.

Anyway, better late than never, I guess. I finally watched Sapphire (because of a serendipitous discovery on YouTube; the film is available here). And this, I can safely say, is one of the more unusual noir films I’ve seen. While it is a solid police procedural, a whodunnit revolving round a murdered woman, it is, too, a comment on society, on norms, what is right and what is wrong.

The story begins on Hamstead Heath, where two little children, playing with their ball, tumble onto the body of a young woman (Yvonne Buckingham) who’s been stabbed to death. The police are called in, and Chief Inspector Bob Hazard (Nigel Patrick) comes with his team to examine the scene of crime. The young woman’s body is taken away for autopsy.

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Aar-Paar (1954)

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I saw this on the big screen, on August 10, 2025.

Given that getting to see a Hindi film as old as this on the big screen, as a proper commercial release (re-release, in this case), is a very rare treat, it needs to be put up front.

To mark the birth centenary of Guru Dutt, the National Films Division Corporation of India (NFDC) and the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) collaborated to restore and re-release several of Guru Dutt’s films. These were shown at PVR and Cinépolis cinema halls across India on August 8th through to 10th. Left to myself, I would happily have seen all the films that were being screened; but duty calls. August 9th was rakshabandhan, and we had family coming over for lunch. I was busy all through the previous day cleaning and cooking and generally preparing, and then again through half of the next day. But, once our guests had eaten, I scurried off cinema-wards to watch Sahib Biwi aur Ghulam. The following day, I managed to watch Aar-Paar.

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Where the Boys Are (1960)

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RIP, Connie Francis, the voice of my teenage years.

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Baaz (1953)

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Today, July 9, 2025, marks the 100th birth anniversary of one of Hindi cinema’s best-known film directors. Born in Mysore on this day in 1925 as Vasant Kumar Shivshankar Padukone, Guru Dutt studied in Calcutta before joining Uday Shankar’s India Culture Centre (in Almora, present-day Uttarakhand) to train in dance. By the time he turned 19, he had moved to Pune, where he began working as a choreographer for Prabhat Studios. By the time Prabhat Studios folded up (in the early 1950s), Guru Dutt had formed a close friendship with Dev Anand, because of whom he received his first break as a director: in 1951, he directed Navketan’s Baazi, starring Dev Anand, Geeta Bali and Kalpana Karthik in a noir thriller that was to become a defining film for Navketan: edgy, stylish, dark, very urban.

Guru Dutt is today revered more for the hard-hitting, cynical cinema he made: films like Pyaasa, Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam and Kaagaz ke Phool hold up the mirror to a world that is selfish, cruel and opportunistic. These are bitter films, films that plumb the depths of human nature; films that—despite following most of the standard tropes of commercial Hindi cinema (a romance between the lead couple; a fair number of songs; a comic character invariably played by Johnny Walker)—were quite different from other Hindi films.

These, too, are the films for which Guru Dutt is mostly remembered today. Is that because over the decades, people have seen how the tragedy and turmoil of Guru Dutt’s personal life was probably reflected in films like these? Is there a voyeuristic tendency to try and spot the man behind the director?

But Guru Dutt also made other films, on other subjects. This one, for instance, an adventure/patriotic film set on the high seas, with Geeta Bali starring as the eponymous ‘Baaz’ (falcon), a woman who becomes a pirate to free her land of a colonial tyrant.

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Udan Khatola (1955)    

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Does Udan Khatola hold some sort of record for largest number of love/lust triangles?

Here’s a rough count:

There’s the unnamed aviator, the pardesi (played by Dilip Kumar) who is in love with the local peshwa’s daughter Soni. Who, in turn, loves him back.

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Beyond This Place (1959)

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Given that I reviewed Raj Khosla’s 1958 film Kaala Paani—based on AJ Cronin’s novel Beyond This Place—last month, I thought it appropriate to also watch and review an English-language adaptation of the same book. And, as always happens when I do something of the sort, to compare the two, see what they do with the same source material. Here, I must point out that that I haven’t read Cronin’s novel, so I cannot say how much Beyond This Place (directed by Jack Cardiff and with a screenplay by Ken Taylor) resembled Cronin’s book.

But, to begin at the beginning.

As the credits roll, we see a man, Patrick Mathry (Bernard Lee) and a boy, Patrick’s son Paul (Vincent Winter) running through the woods, laughing and obviously happy in each other’s company.

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