Turner Classic Movies just played this nearly three-hour Indian epic and I decided to give it a try, despite TCM host Robert Osborne's caveat that its length might seem a daunting viewing challenge, but one that would prove rewarding by its eventual conclusion. Alas! I failed to make it past the midway point. My capacity for submitting to movie masochism had reached the full-to-satiation level. In fact it had long since overflowed, much like the farms after a terrific monsoon during one of the film's earlier episodes.
The video transfer of the original Gevacolor negative (apparently an unstable single-strip process), with prints by Technicolor, looked pretty good on Turner's presentation, with some ravishing shots during the opening wedding sequence and the occasional insert of glowing sunsets, etc. But, oh! the tedium of the endless travails of the central protagonists, bedevilled by the almost cartoonish evil of Sukhilala (played by an energetic actor named Kanhaiyalal), a villain so heartless he makes Simon Legree look like the endlessly compassionate Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
The actress Nargis, playing Radha, the matriarch around whom this mostly sad tale revolves, is a standout in a cast most of whom seem to have been encouraged to overact to an almost absurd histrionic intensity. With some contrasting subtlety, she more than holds her own and appears to have been subjected to some extraordinarily difficult torments in order to realistically depict her character's many agonies.
But this early example of what has become known as the Bollywood school of international cinema is definitely an acquired taste. If you like screen exotica, liberally spiced with production numbers sung in Hindi that frequently seem to exceed the length of an entire Hollywood film from the Golden Age of Movie Musicals, then this just may be your dish of curry. But for this viewer it seems less a "classic" and more a prime example of how Indian audiences have been traditionally willing to submit to films that are routinely as long as those blockbusters that bombarded our roadshow houses back in the late Fifties through the 1960s. I can still watch one of those English-language spectacles with a degree of satisfaction, but I confess, this epic from the Indian subcontinent was more than I could digest.
The video transfer of the original Gevacolor negative (apparently an unstable single-strip process), with prints by Technicolor, looked pretty good on Turner's presentation, with some ravishing shots during the opening wedding sequence and the occasional insert of glowing sunsets, etc. But, oh! the tedium of the endless travails of the central protagonists, bedevilled by the almost cartoonish evil of Sukhilala (played by an energetic actor named Kanhaiyalal), a villain so heartless he makes Simon Legree look like the endlessly compassionate Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
The actress Nargis, playing Radha, the matriarch around whom this mostly sad tale revolves, is a standout in a cast most of whom seem to have been encouraged to overact to an almost absurd histrionic intensity. With some contrasting subtlety, she more than holds her own and appears to have been subjected to some extraordinarily difficult torments in order to realistically depict her character's many agonies.
But this early example of what has become known as the Bollywood school of international cinema is definitely an acquired taste. If you like screen exotica, liberally spiced with production numbers sung in Hindi that frequently seem to exceed the length of an entire Hollywood film from the Golden Age of Movie Musicals, then this just may be your dish of curry. But for this viewer it seems less a "classic" and more a prime example of how Indian audiences have been traditionally willing to submit to films that are routinely as long as those blockbusters that bombarded our roadshow houses back in the late Fifties through the 1960s. I can still watch one of those English-language spectacles with a degree of satisfaction, but I confess, this epic from the Indian subcontinent was more than I could digest.