59: Mother India (a.k.a. Bharat Mata – Original Hindi title)

            Mehboob Khan’s* Mother India (1957) was the first film from the Asian subcontinent to garner an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.  The nomination no doubt drew attention to the burgeoning film movement that would eventually become the world’s largest in terms of production.  It’s a curious movie, as it so clearly was influenced by the Hollywood musical’s visual style, but carries with it a sometimes exaggerated socialist message.  Much attention has been paid to the fact that the Mehboob studio used a hammer and sickle as a logo, and thus the print of the film screened for Oscar voters in the anti-communist 1950s was altered to edit the opening credit icon.  While there is no denying that the film sides with a proletariat mentality, I found it to be much more of a human drama than a piece of political rhetoric.

            The story follows the life of the village woman Radha (Nargis) over decades, beginning in her old age as she is asked to christen the viaduct that will bring her tiny enclave fresh water.  As the water begins to flow she pauses to reflect on the struggles of her life.  As a young woman she was to be married to a grain farmer, Shamu.  In order for her wedding jewelry to be purchased, her mother-in-law borrowed 500 rupees from a loan shark, to be repaid with the interest of a portion of each crop.  Because no one in the family was able to read, the percentage of the crop was unknown.  At the first harvest the money lender comes to collect his due, revealing that he is legally owed a much larger portion than Radha expected.  For years, through the birth of three sons, she and Shamu work the fields, never able to get out of debt.  She is forced to pawn the wedding jewelry back to the money lender for more credit.  When Shamu tries to supplement the family income by plowing a field full of boulders, he loses his arms in an accident.  Ashamed by his handicap, he deserts the family, leaving Radha to both plow the fields and rear the children.

            She struggles for years, losing her youngest son to starvation and being forced to pull the plow without the help of an ox.  Though her humiliation is evident, she refuses the hand of the money lender, who would forgive all of her debt if she would marry him.  As her two remaining sons, Birju (Sunil Dutt) and Ramu (Rajendra Kumar), grow to manhood they come to hate the unscrupulous loan shark.  After Radha’s tireless work has inspired the village to produce its best crop in decades, Birju strikes him when he comes to collect his portion.  When Birju hides in the haystacks to avoid retribution, the money lender has the entire field set on fire.  Radha ages as tragedies continue to befall the village and her family, all the while refusing to accept the loan shark’s proposal.  Ramu marries and honors his mother, but beside himself with hatred, Birju flees the village.  He returns as a thief with a band of murderers in tow, intent on killing the money lender. 

            This is a lengthy film that leads up to an almost unthinkably tragic ending, and though the drama contained herein is tangible I can’t say that it’s presented effectively.  Mother India is a Technicolor epic that represents the beginning of the movement toward the contemporary Bollywood musical style, but I feel it would work better as a strait tragedy.  While some of the musical sequences are beautifully shot and scored they ultimately detract from the film’s depth.  Yes, I know that Hindi speaking audiences enjoy these interludes which temporarily shift a picture’s mood, but they just don’t work here.  They also tend to move the film in a direction that is likely to mislead Western audiences.  In Hollywood musicals, if a guy and a gal sing a song together, we know that it has thus been decreed by the god of the movie universe that they shall be together.  Not so here.  Romantic implications regarding Birju and several of the women in the village never come to fruition.  Perhaps it was simply lost in translation that nothing is consummated because he’s so distracted and overcome by his anger.    

            Interestingly enough what it is beyond dispute is the legitimate love that bloomed on the set between Nargis and Dutt.  During the crop fire sequence she was unintentionally trapped in a ring of flames when Dutt, throwing a blanket over himself, ran in to rescue her.  He saved Nargis and the sequence made it into the film.  Thankful and enamored, she grew sweet on the man costarring as her son and the two were married less than a year after the film’s release. 

            I noted last June in my review of Deewaar (1975; #140) that it is listed on the IMDb as a remake of this film.  I saw some thematic connections, but I think it a stretch to call this a remake.  Looking into the Mother India IMDb page, I am told that it is also a remake of an earlier Mehboob Khan picture.  While there appears to be more legitimate connection there, I’m comfortable calling the relationship between Deewaar and Mother India a variation on a common theme, something rather prevalent in Indian cinema.    

Language: Hindi

Runtime: 172 Minutes

Grade: 1 Hat off        

*Billed only as “Mehboob”

60: Cairo Station (a.k.a. The Iron Gate; a.k.a. Bab El Hadid – Original Arabic title)

            As I perused the internet for additional information about Youssef Chahine’s Cairo Station (1958) I was surprised by what I found.  While I didn’t scour the farthest reaches of the web to find them, I did not, in a preliminary search, come across a single negative review of the film.  Nearly every write-up I found hailed the movie as an “underappreciated masterpiece.”  While I don’t deny the authors of these reviews their right to that opinion, I have to believe that I can’t be the only person who didn’t get much out of Chahine’s film.  Part Hitchcockian thriller and part Rossellini-esque realism, this picture gets lost in the cavernous area between those two styles. 

            The setup for Cairo Station is rife with possibilities, as hubs of transport offer almost endless dramatic combinations of characters and stories.  Here, in the main rail terminal in Cairo, there are scores of porters, passengers, police, and peddlers.  Some are passing through and some make their living providing goods and services for those in transit.  The crippled Qinawi (Chahine) sells newspapers and pines for the beautiful Hanuma, who jumps between trains selling cold drinks, all the while evading the station cops who want to put her out of business.  She flirts with Qinawi, but is engaged to marry Abu Sri', a respected porter who’s trying to unionize his fellow handlers. 

            Though another character narrates the story, most of the action unfolds from Qinawi’s perspective.  He’s convinced he can win Hanuma’s heart before her marriage, and though his efforts are sad to watch he does not evoke any real sympathy.  Hanuma doesn’t spurn his affections because of his handicap or his modest circumstances.  She simply loves another man.  It’s difficult to tell if her interactions with Qinawi are based in pity or genuine friendship, but it is clear that she doesn’t intend to leave Abu Sri'.  When this finally becomes obvious to Qinawi his thoughts turn to violence. 

            There is so much potential for story here that goes unexplored.  The rumblings about the labor movement are absent from the film’s second half, replaced by a subplot about a serial killer that may or may not connect to the characters present at the station.  This is never made clear and, as such, feels as unresolved as the workers’ tangent.  There’s so little connection between the characters as well.  They all seem to be present because they need to be for the story to advance, and rarely does a minor character seem defined by more than their job.

            Cairo Station is, at times, beautiful to look at, but the onscreen compositions rarely rise above their mise en scène to have any meaning.  From a narrative standpoint, subplots seem only to exist within the film as pretexts for characterization.  Nothing ever really emerges from them.  They come and go without resolution.  At 76 minutes the film moves quickly despite itself.  It barely has time to contain anything and thus dwells in simplicity.  Roger Ebert says that “no good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.”  Cairo Station seems to openly defy this principle.  It is the rare film that I disliked because it needed to be longer, and to contain more…or perhaps (like Rock Hudson at 2001: A Space Odyssey) I just missed the elements that make it a masterpiece while I was searching for the elements that make it a film.    

Language: Arabic

Runtime: 76 Minutes

Available from Netflix.com

Grade: 1.5 Hats Off  

61: Sons of the Desert

            It’s an old theatre adage that comedy is harder than drama to perform but easier to gage the reaction to.  If the audience isn’t laughing, you’re not doing it right.  I suppose that one of the supporting factors of this belief is that what is dramatic about the human condition rarely changes, while what is humorous about life often changes rapidly.  What’s funny one day is dull the next – we’ve already heard the joke.  The same thing can be true when it comes to the movies.  What was funny one year is boring and old hat by the following season’s releases. 

There are occasional films that avoid this trend, some of which have survived significant lengths of time.  I cannot imagine not cracking a smile at the sight of Chaplin’s Tramp, and the thought of not laughing at Some Like it Hot (1960) is about as ridiculous to me as Jack Lemmon’s makeup.  Most motion pictures fade from memory rather quickly in the scope of things, but the ones that get remembered tend more often to be dramatic rather than comedic.  Only fifteen of the AFI top 100 are comedies.  Still, if you ask most people what their favorite movie is, you’re likely to hear a comedic title thrown back at you and perhaps a claim that it is “the funniest movie ever.”

            People love comedies and always have, and at one point the work of comedic duo Laurel and Hardy rivaled that of Chaplin in popularity.  When I sat down to view their Sons of the Desert (1933; dir. William A. Seiter) I was looking to be entertained yes, but I was also looking for evidence that in some way they did rival the great artist.  I realized rather early that the bar was set far too high.

            When Stan and Ollie want to attend the annual Sons of the Desert Lodge convention in Chicago they have to cook up some whoppers to get their wives to let them leave the house.  Oliver claims to be suffering from a nervous breakdown and arranges for Stan to have a “doctor” prescribe a cruise to Hawaii.  He knows his wife would never travel by boat and that she’ll ask Stan to accompany him.  Then it’s off to Chicago for the convention.  They need only to pick up a few props to convince their wives that they’ve been to Honolulu.  Of course things go wrong with the deception before, during, and after the convention, but the boys are able to keep up the lies until the ship they were to be returning from the islands on sinks.

            The fun only really picks up in the film’s second half after the girls get wise.  Stan and Ollie put themselves through hell, and quite a few pratfalls, just to keep up appearances, and their wives allow them to suffer through it.  Yes, this is a fun movie, but by going in expecting brilliance I’d done an injustice to an otherwise enjoyable film.  There is a tendency in life to gravitate only to those things of the past that have been proclaimed great.  Most of us do this.  On the other hand, listing 1001 films means that some middle of the road pictures, as well as some stinkers made the cut.  It’s not that Sons of the Desert isn’t funny.  It is.  But it isn’t endearing unmistakable genius in the way that Keaton and Chaplin pictures certainly are.  It makes the list on its own merits I’m sure, but I can’t help but feeling that it’s padding; juxtaposition for the truly great movies.

Language: English

Runtime: 68 Minutes

Grade: 2.5 Hats Off

62: The Cloud-capped Star (a.k.a. Meghe Dhaka Tara – Original Bengali title)

            One of the things I find fascinating about cinema is the ways we choose to interpret what we’ve seen through our own experiences.  People use movies both to escape themselves and to gain a greater understanding of their own lives.  Thus, movies force us to insert ourselves into alternate times and places, and through narrative ask us to make judgments and decisions about the world that unfolds before us.  Though some films ask us to suspend our disbelief more so than others, there are pictures that present a world we know to be real, but have never personally experienced.  Good films attract audiences because they do justice to the worlds they present.  The best films retain greatness because the happenings within those worlds reflect the human experiences on the other side of the screen.  I’ve never been to India, and I know relatively little about its culture.  I’ll likely never experience anything specifically similar to the events portrayed within Ritwik Ghatak’s The Cloud-capped Star (1960), but through the magic of cinema I can briefly experience an alternate reality.

            The reality in question here is the life of Pakistani immigrants trying desperately to retain middleclass status as refugees in Calcutta.  The Cloud-capped Star presents its account through the perspective of one family, over the course of several years, and though the lives of each family member are important to the story, the oldest daughter, Nita, is the focus.  She is pretty, but plain; intelligent, but quite.  Her parents both love her, but have different ways of showing it.  Her father, a teacher, encourages her in her studies and accepts that as such she can only contribute a small bit to the family’s monthly income.  Her mother would prefer that she worked fulltime, or be married away as one less mouth to feed.  She’s engaged to a former student of her father’s, but is in no hurry to wed.  Her mother thinks that the young man is better suited for her second daughter, the beautiful but self-centered Gita, and openly declares as much. 

            There are two sons as well, neither of whom have any interest in school.  One dreams of becoming a famous singer, filling concert halls with music and his family’s bellies with the resulting income.  The other seems to have no ambition at all.  From the outset it’s evident that Nita’s efforts at balancing studies and work and her siblings’ demands for money are what essentially hold the family together.  Though she’d hardly complain it’s clear that she’s weighed down by these burdens.  A letter from her fiancé declares her a “cloud-capped star”, beauty incarnate obscured by the trappings of life. 

            One tragedy after another seems to befall Nita.  Her engagement falls apart after she decides to continue her studies.  Then she is forced to leave school after her father suffers a stroke.  One brother is maimed in an industrial accident, while the other continues to drain the family’s income as he waits to be discovered.  Through it all, Nita struggles to hold her family together.  As a melodrama, The Cloud-capped Star borrows heavily from American cinema of the period.  Ghatak, whether directly or through channels, seems to have been influenced by the Douglas Sirk films of the 1950s.  Viewers familiar with Sirk’s work will undoubtedly recognize the framing and lighting at work here.   

            In this respect The Cloud-capped Star stands out from other Indian cinema of the time.  Though it’s more stylized, portions of Ghatak’s film feel more authentic than the work of Satyajit Ray.  Much of the discussion about the picture that is available on the web centers on this authenticity.  As I’ve noted, I’m in no way qualified to make any such judgment, but what I can say is that this picture seems more relatable to a Western audience than, say, Pather Panchali (1955).  Does that detract from its authenticity? Perhaps.  Does it diminish its quality as a film?  Not at all.  It does what it does to display its story within this world. 

The Cloud-capped Star isn’t an unquestioned masterpiece.  It has weak points and overreaches with its melodrama.  Still, it does have some beautiful and heartbreaking moments that make it worth viewing.  It’s not high on the watchability scale, but those who commit to it are likely to find some value therein.  Where it is most valuable is as a comparison to other period cinema of the subcontinent.  Contained within this film seem to be the first seeds of the Bollywood style. 

Language: Bengali

Runtime: 126 Minutes

Grade: 2 Hats Off

63: The Lavender Hill Mob

            Sorry for the long silence readers.  The start of a new semester has brought with it both exhilaration and a cramped schedule.  Still, I’m glad to continue writing, and particularly happy to be reviewing this gem.  Charles Crichton’s The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) is another delightful farce from London’s Ealing Studios.  Like so many Ealing comedies, the film stars Alec Guinness, and here, in an Oscar nominated performance, he proves to be worth his weight in gold as an actor who can disappear into a role.  Guinness once noted that he often attended his own films at theatres, and was never once recognized.  Here his undistinguished features prove valuable as he takes on the role of a meek bank clerk looking to retire high on the hog after years of thankless service.  Even his name, Henry Holland, seems to suggest a life of anonymity that would suit him for crime.

            And what a crime it is! As a supervisor of gold bullion transfers, Holland knows the ins and outs of every delivery route.  What he could do with all that gold, if only he had a way to smuggle it out if the U.K.  Enter the boisterous Alfred Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway), a professional smelter specializing in French souvenirs who moves into Holland’s flat on Lavender Hill.  The two men become fast friends and formulate a plan for early retirement.  They recruit two career criminals, Shorty and Lackery, to assist with the heist but soon find out that neither could steal his way out of a paper bag. 

            Still, the plan is set, and has to be enacted soon, before Holland is transferred to another division of the bank.  When the capper goes awry, Holland is mistaken by the media as a hero, having appeared to escaped the hardened thieves and prevented some of the bullion from being taken.  This turn of events makes it difficult for him to arrange transfer of the gold, which has been formed into statues of the Eiffel Tower, out of the country, as he’s often busy searching through Scotland Yard’s catalogue of criminal faces, ostensibly trying to identify his own accomplishes.

When he finally does get away to France with Pendelbury things get even more out of hand, as a miscommunication has caused some of the miniatures to be distributed to tourists atop the genuine Eiffel.  This sequence includes some of the picture’s best cinematography and editing, raising the bar for each in studio comedy.  While this scene is brilliant from a technical standpoint, it is Guinness’ function within it that makes it a standout.  He simply exudes the idiosyncrasies of a bookish imp forced into extreme circumstances as he rapidly descends a spiral staircase, trying in vain to catch up with a parade of English schoolgirls intent on taking his booty back across the channel.

There are plenty of surprises and fine sequences in this film, most of which I’ll leave to be discovered, but I’d be remiss not to note Audrey Hepburn’s major film debut in the picture’s opening sequence and the blink and you’ll miss it appearance of Robert Shaw as a forensics cop.  The Lavender Hill Mob is a joy, and watching it you should have no trouble seeing why it garnered an Oscar nod for Guinness and a statue for its screenplay.  It doesn’t quite top Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), but it would serve as a great introduction to anyone looking to delve into the Ealing Studios’ catalogue.

Language: English

Runtime: 78 Minutes

Available through TCM.com

Grade: 3.5 Hats Off