Anurag Basu

Films of Anurag Basu:

• Stories by Rabindranath Tagore - Anurag Basu (2015)
• “Chokher Bali”, Stories by Rabindranath Tagore, Episodes 1, 2, & 3 – Anurag Basu (2015)
• "Atithi", Stories by Rabindranath Tagore, Episode 4 – Anurag Basu (2015)
• "Maanbhanjan", Stories by Rabindranath Tagore, Episode 5 – Anurag Basu (2015)

“Kanchenjungha” - Satyajit Ray (1962)

Kanchenjungha (1962) was a novel and innovative film for Satyajit Ray in several respects.  It was his first color film, and it was the first time he fashioned a film from his own original screenplay. The structure of the screenplay was, itself, innovative, since it involved multiple, parallel narrative threads involving a number of separately focalized characters.  This kind of narrative structure, which has been featured in such classics as Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939) and Altman’s Nashville (1975), has sometimes been referred to as a hyperlink film; but it was then unknown to Bengali film, and it confused some critics at the time. 

The story of Kanchenjungha features a group of wealthy people from Calcutta who are vacationing in the remote northern Bengal hill station of Darjeeling, which lies at the foot of Kanchenjungha, the third highest mountain peak in the world.  The vacationers in this story have come to this outlying natural locale to “get away from it all”, and they seek to both revel in nature’s wonders and hopefully catch glimpses of Kanchenjungha’s majesty, which is often obscured in clouds and mist. In fact the ever-shifting mists in Darjeeling presented production problems for Ray, since they could interfere with shot continuity.  But Ray put up with and even exploited this situation – the shifting mists offered a visual metaphor for the evolving psychological moods and understandings in the story.
                       

Another distinctive feature of this film is that it was shot entirely on location in Darjeeling.  Under such conditions it meant that Ray and his small production crew did not have access to artificial lighting equipment.  Instead, they used bounce-lighting reflectors, a technique that had been pioneered by Ray’s innovative young cinematographer, Subrata Mitra [1,2,3].

Ray had chosen the Darjeeling location, because his grandfather, the writer and eminent intellectual Upendrakishore Ray, used to sometimes retreat there for inspiration.  So Ray went to Darjeeling for a ten-day visit and wrote a detailed scenario for the film while there.  Ray was a meticulous production planner, and he came up with a detailed scheme as to how he could incorporate elements of Darjeeling’s natural surroundings into his film. As a result and despite the unpredictable weather conditions that had to be accommodated to, Ray completed the film with a low shooting ratio of three-to-one. These and other interesting production details – including how Ray, who had no musical training, scored all the music for the film –  are related by Ray’s biographer, Marie Seton, who was at Ray’s side during the entire location shoot and post-production [4].

Note that the idea of educated urbanites leaving their customary trappings and going off into natural surroundings leading to new perspectives was something that Ray would cover again in his superlative Days and Nights in the Forest (Aranyer Din Ratri, 1970).
  
In this story of Kanchenjungha, a family from Calcutta is on the last day of their visit to Darjeeling.  The key issue for them is the semi-arranged and impending marriage proposal that will presumably be proffered to one of the family’s daughters that afternoon.  There are a number of individuals, nearly all of whom are given some narrative focalization (i.e. we see things from their perspectives) along the way:

• Indranath Roy (played by Chhabi Biswas, who had appeared in Ray’s earlier Jalshaghar (The Music Room, 1958) and Devi (The Goddess, 1960)) is the imperious Anglophilic patriarch of the family visiting Darjeeling. He is the chairman of five companies and is accustomed to getting his own way.  He and his wife have three children – Anima, Monisha, and Anil.
   
• Labanya (Karuna Banerjee, who was featured in Pather Panchali (1955) and Aparajito (1956)) is Indranath’s long-suppressed wife.
               
  
• Jagadish (Pahari Sanyal) is Labanya’s widowed brother and an avid bird-watcher.  He is more or less a sympathetic onlooker to what transpires.
   
• Monisha (Alaknanda Roy) is the Roy’s unmarried nineteen-year-old daughter who is currently in college and is now targeted for a marriage proposal.
   
• Anima (Anubha Gupta) is the Roy’s elder, married daughter, who was pushed (i.e. coerced) by her father into an arranged marriage ten years earlier.
   
• Shankar (Subrata Sen) is Anima’s dissatisfied husband.  Shankar and Anima have a young daughter who has accompanied them on this trip.
   
• Anil Roy (Anil Chatterjee), the Roys' son, fancies himself to be a hip, modernist playboy.
   
• Bannerjee (N. Viswanathan) is a mannered and self-satisfied engineer who has been selected by Indranath to propose to Monisha.
   
• Ashoke (Arun Mukherjee) is a young man from Calcutta who meets Monisha on a scenic walking path.  To some extent Ashoke shares with Jagadish the quality of being a free spirit seeking inspiration from nature.

The film opens with brief sequences introducing the principal characters and then settles into the coverage, more or less in real time, of several parallel and interleaved conversations that make up the core of the film. 

• Monisha and Bannerjee.  The driving conversation in the film is the artificially arranged stroll of Monisha and Bannerjee, during which Bannerjee is expected to politely lodge his marriage proposal.  Bannerjee is gentlemanly but has a quietly pompous demeanor.  Monisha appears to be sensitive and not ready to commit herself to an arranged marriage organized by her father and based on social status.  This conversation, which keeps getting interrupted and makes little progress towards its goal is shown in five separate segments that are interleaved with other conversations.
   
• Anima and Shankar.  Another key conversation is that between Anima and her husband Shankar.  Taking advantage of the opportunity to be alone together, Shankar tells Anima that their ten-year marriage is a failure, and he indicates that he knows she has long been having an affair with another man.  They both acknowledge that their arranged marriage, similar to what Indranath has proposed for Monisha, was a bad idea from the beginning.  Shankar now says he is willing to give Anima her freedom and offers her a divorce.  But there is an innocent child to be considered.  Is reconciliation possible?
   
• Ashoke and Indranath.  Ashoke is from a family well below the upper-class status of the Roys.  He is a recent college graduate looking for a full-time job, and when he incidentally meets and converses with Indranath, the idea of Indranath offering Ashoke a job becomes a topic of discussion.  From their discussion the viewer can see the contrast between Indranath’s haughty presumptuousness and Ashoke’s more natural and spontaneous style of relating to others.  When Indranath imperiously offers the young man a job, Ashoke has the courage to stand up to him and say that he himself can manage by his own efforts.
   
• Monisha and Ashoke.  During these walks Monisha and Ashoke meet by happenstance and have a few brief conversations.  Despite the obstructions of social class, family demands, and impending obligations, it is clear that they share a natural affinity for each other.  In particular, Monisha is attracted to Ashoke’s free-spirited optimism about finding future opportunities.  At one point Ashoke waxes rhapsodic about hoe the natural surroundings they are now in inspired him to look inside himself and stand up to Indranath’s job offer.
  

  “Maybe this place did it. . . . here I’ve never seen such scenery. The majestic Himalayas, these silent pine trees. This sudden sunlight, sudden clouds, sudden mist!  It’s so unreal, like a dream world. My head was in a whirl.  Everything changed inside.  As if I was somebody. . . A hero, a giant.  I was full of courage.  I was reckless, undaunted. Tell me, a place like this fills one with strength, doesn’t it?”

  Ashoke’s revelation of personal authenticity in turn inspires Monisha about what she should do about her own situation.   

By the end of the film, some important decisions have been made, and they imbue their affected parties with hope about  the future.  Indranath’s smug assumption of control, and, by association, the assumed general acquiescence to the way things have always been, has been challenged.  New doors of opportunity have been opened up.  Getting off into nature, away from the artificial confinement of human conventions, enabled some people to get in touch with their authentic selves.  This was the key theme of the film.


Kanchenjungha was not a big hit at the box office or with critics when it was first released.  But it has since come to be more appreciated, despite neglect of the original color negative, which  has limited modern viewers to watching digital restorations that cannot recapture the original splendor of Ray’s original color cinematography [5]. 

In some ways we could compare this film to The Rules of the Game, because there are multiple  social issues and outlooks on life portrayed.  I don’t think Kanchenjungha quite measures up to that level, but there were some moments in the film that I very much liked and that resonate in my memory.  In particular there was the exquisite moment when Bannerjee was in the process of popping the marital question to Monisha but was interrupted by the appearance of a herd of bell-laden donkeys that were shepherded past them on their path.  The clamor of the donkeys’ bells stopped Bannerjee short, and Monisha seized the opportunity to break away.  This sudden appearance of the donkey herd was actually an interruption to Ray’s shooting of this scene and was entirely unplanned. Ray improvisationally decided to incorporate it into the scene, to heightened aesthetic effect [4].  Thus this scene shows by example how Ray could be both a meticulous planner, with everything worked out beforehand, and also a flexible improviser who could take advantage of opportunities when they arose.
★★★½

Notes:

1. Marie Seton, Portrait of a Director: Satyajit Ray, (1971), Indiana University Press, pp. 118-9.
2. “Reflector (photography)”, Wikipedia, (6 December 2017).   
3. “‘The World of Apu’ - Satyajit Ray (1959)”, The Film Sufi, (4 September 2013).   
4. Marie Seton, op. cit., (1971), Indiana University Press, pp. 230-250, 270-281.
5. Omar Ahmed, “KANCHENJUNGHA (Dir. Satyajit Ray, 1962, India) – ‘Why accept a life of endless submission?’”, Movie Mahal, (20 October 2014).   

“Power of Attorney”, TAHH, Season 3: Ep. 24 - Harvey Hart (1965)

“Power of Attorney” (1965) was an episode (Season 3, Episode 24) of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-65) TV anthology series.  It was directed by Harvey Hart and scripted by James Bridges based on a story by well-known British mystery author Selwyn Jepson.  Bridges is famous, in my mind, as the scriptwriter of the brilliant Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode “An Unlocked Window”  (Season 3, Episode 17).

This episode here under discussion starred three veterans of stage and screen – Richard Johnson, Geraldine Fitzgerald, and Fay Bainter.  The story concerns an unctuous swindler, Jarvis Smith (played by British stage veteran Richard Johnson), who preys on lonely older women who are charmed (or seduced) by his emotionally forthcoming and solicitous advances into believing him to be their dear friend.  He poses as a financial investor who is investing his own money in promising selected ventures and urges his new woman companion to take advantage of his expertise and invest her own money, too.  But of course it is all a scam, and the money soon disappears along with Jarvis Smith.

In the opening sequence we see an example of how Smith operates, as he swindles a woman who thinks she is his beloved out of her savings and then vanishes.  From the outset he evinces such an oily and phony manner that one would think his fraudulent nature would be evident to anyone he meets.  This is a weakness of this episode, and the obviousness of Smith’s phoniness seems laughably artificial.

Next Smith is shown introducing himself to two fellow airplane passengers seated across the aisle – the widow Mary Caulfield (Fay Bainter) and her spinster companion Agatha Tomlin (Geraldine Fitzgerald). Mary quickly succumbs to Smith’s entreaties for friendship, but Agatha is resolutely standoffish. 

Smith soon sets his sights on seducing Agatha, and for much of the rest of the episode we see his strenuous (and persistently fake) efforts to insinuate himself into her affections.  The viewer’s sympathies will clearly be on the side of Agatha’s skepticism, so it becomes disturbing when Agatha is shown slowly beginning to soften her resistance to Smith.

Smith eventually does manage to swindle Mary out of her considerable life savings, and Agatha seems to be now of two minds about him.  But it is not evident that Smith has broken any laws, so how can justice prevail?  In the concluding scenes we see that Agatha was tougher and more mindful than we had been giving her credit for being.  She comes up with a lawful way to exact her own “justice”.

This episode, like many in this series, sets up a vain and reprehensible villain for the viewer, and tortuously winds its way towards a supposedly satisfying revenge.  The pleasure you take in this will depend on your sensitivities on this score.  The presentation is marred by Richard Johnson’s grossly over-the-top characterization of the slimy Jarvis Smith.  But it does also feature the redeeming performance of Geraldine Fitzgerald as the continually pondering Agatha.  She is the one who sustains our interest.
★★★

“Random Harvest” - Mervyn LeRoy (1942)

Random Harvest (1942) is a romantic drama directed by Mervyn LeRoy that was a hit at the box office and received seven Oscar (US Academy Award) nominations (for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Screenplay, Best Score, and Best Art Direction).  The film was based on the best-selling 1941 novel of the same name by James Hilton, two earlier best-selling novels of whose had also been made into highly popular films – Lost Horizon (novel - 1933, film version - 1937) and Goodbye, Mr. Chips (novel - 1934, film version - 1939).  A common feature of Hilton’s romantic stories is the depiction of a protagonist in search of sustained bliss who allows mundane concerns to distract him from recognizing that the path to his goal has been right there in front of him all the time.  This is the poignant theme of Random Harvest, too.

The story of this film concerns a shell-shocked soldier from World War I who is suffering from amnesia.  He is physically okay, but he doesn’t know who he is.  There are some implausible elements to this narrative, but it does concern a basic truth about all of us: our self-conceptions are built out of the narratives we construct about ourselves and that are held in our memories.

If you don’t know anything about the story of Random Harvest and are thinking of reading the novel, I suggest you stop reading this review after this paragraph and read the novel first (as I happened to do).  This is because the novel contains a major plot element that leads to a dramatic twist at the end of the story, which is key to the novel’s special appeal.  Although the film is enjoyable, its narrative presentation doesn’t have this twist and suffers accordingly.

The film’s protagonist (played by Ronald Colman) embodies two separate persona at different times in the story:

• Charles Ranier is the scion of a wealthy and well-connected English family with major business interests.  He goes off to fight the Germans in World War I, suffers a traumatic injury in 1917 that causes him to lose his memory, and winds up in a mental institution not knowing who he is.
   
• “John Smith”, aka “Smithy”, is the name given to the amnesiac in the mental hospital.  Upon the occasion of the armistice in 1918, the chaotic celebrations of the hospital staff enable Smithy to walk out of the front gate unnoticed and start a new life.  He is befriended by a musical-hall dancer known as Paula Ridgeway (Greer Garson), who shields him from the authorities.  They run off to the anonymity of the countryside, fall in love, and get married.  Smithy doesn’t know anything about his past prior to 1917.

Smithy and Paula are enjoying a blissful life and madly in love.  Smithy gradually evinces a talent for writing and in 1920 gets an offer from a newspaper publisher in Liverpool to come there to be interviewed for a position.  He travels to Liverpool alone, because Paula is looking after their newborn child.  When he arrives in Liverpool, though, he is hit by a taxi on the street and suffers another traumatic head injury.

When Smithy wakes up in a hospital, he has recovered his memory of being Charles Ranier, but has forgotten all about his existence as Smithy, including his memory and awareness of his beloved Paula.  The romantic Smithy has disappeared. He is now Charles Ranier once again, but with a three-year gap in his memory.

The now-rehabilitated Charles returns to the Ranier estate and learns that his father has just died and that he is to come into a substantial inheritance.  Although Charles had wanted to resume his academic pursuits, he discovers that the family estate’s business assets are in disarray, and he takes over their management. After a few years, Charles’s business activities are so successful that newspapers are touting him as the “Industrial Prince of England”.  Although his teenage step-niece Kitty (Susan Peters) develops a crush on him, Charles’s business activities take up all his time, and he doesn’t seem interested in romance. 

The many businesses that he has to deal with require a competent support staff, though, and over the years Charles has come to increasingly rely on his executive assistant, Margaret Hanson.  When Margaret finally appears on screen, we see that she is his Paula (“Paula Ridgeway” had been her stage name), though Charles doesn’t recognize her.  She had been searching for Smithy since he had disappeared, and when she saw Ranier’s picture in the newspaper, she had applied to become his secretary.  But partly on the advice of a doctor friend, she didn’t want to inform the still-amnesic Charles about her being his wife, thinking he would reject her.  She is still hoping that Charles will eventually recognize her as his lost love.

But Charles doesn’t seem to have a trace of memory of her.  He does often have a distracted look in his eye, though, as if he looking for something that he can’t find.  The still-enamored Kitty notices his distracted demeanor, and she finally gives up on her long quest to marry Charles.  Margaret hasn’t given up though, and when one time Charles goes to Liverpool to learn what he was doing there when he suffered the head injury, she joins him.  But it all comes to nothing; Charles cannot remember anything of that day.

Charles becomes increasingly successful in the outer world, and he even wins a seat in Parliament.  Now more in the public eye, he decides he should have a wife, and he proposes to Margaret that they have a passionless marriage of convenience.  Still keeping her secret, Margaret sorrowfully accepts.

After three years of this lifeless marriage, Margaret despairs of ever regaining her Smithy, and she tells Ranier that she is going to go off on an extended trip abroad.  Just before she can leave, though, some events transpire to turn things around.  A labor dispute involving one of his companies, causes Ranier to visit the town where he had been confined in a mental institution.  Trace recollections start occurring for him, and as he follows their lead, he eventually finds himself coming upon the countryside cottage where he had lived with Paula.  A chance remark from an innkeeper also leads Margaret to return to the same cottage.  When they see each other and she calls him Smithy, Ranier’s full memory of Paula returns.  They passionately embrace as the film ends.

Hilton’s story in Random Harvest of paradise lost and paradise regained can be told in more than one way, and the novel and the film take different perspectives and unwind according to different temporal patterns (using flashbacks, for example). The novel takes the perspective mostly of Smithy/Ranier, and the reader follows his search for fulfillment.  The reader only learns that Ranier’s wife is actually Paula on the last page of the novel, and this delivers a concluding dramatic wallop.  That narrative avenue would have been extremely difficult to follow for the filmmakers, so they chose a different scheme.  For much of the film, the viewer sees things more from the perspective of Paula/Margaret, and this has its own virtues.  In particular, the glowing performance of Greer Garson in that role is what carries the film.  In fact I found the performance of Ronald Colman, who can often be fascinating, to be on this occasion too laid-back and sometimes almost wooden.  It is left to Greer Garson to inject warmth and romantic longing into this tale.  Even her glances at Colman carry an authentic aura of true love.
★★★½

Mervyn LeRoy

Films of Mervyn LeRoy:

• Random Harvest - Mervyn LeRoy (1942)