Why is there being marketed this series of very great films (some not) at these sky rocket prices, with no considerable art work, no inserts, no trailers, no special features, and no chapters with any logic..every ten minutes there is a chapter demolish, and are they poor.
Buy,Download, Or Stream Bhowani Junction! Click Here
These are DVDS from tapes, sold to customers for end to $30.00 each.
Further, the restrictions on playing them are absurd, showing the nature of the copying. They are device over-priced knock offs, of the very terrible over seas variety.
Buy,Download, Or Stream Bhowani Junction! Click Here
Hard to understand, but beware, and if you have B. Junction, Private Lives, Sins of Rachel Cade etc., on VHS, gain on to those copies, they are mighty better.
At this imprint..a disgrace.
Filmed in 1956, Bhowani Junction is based on the book of the same name by John Masters and is status in India during the last days of the British Raj. The book is a minor classic in English fiction and was a best-seller wait on in the 1950’s and 60’s. The film, starring Ava Gardner and Bill Travers (a now unknown but then quite noted British actor), was quite a success in it’s day. Now however, 50 years on from the events depicted, it’s lost a lot of it’s immediacy and impact and the historical background is somewhat vague unless you’re a student of the history of the British in India. What really makes the film worth seeing is the historic flavor it brings. Support in 1947, India was a nation of 345 million people and about to wreck away from the British Empire. The British detached ruled, but were in the process of departing, albeit slower than the demands of many of the Indian nationalists, who wanted immediate independence.
The setting for the film is the Indian railway town of Bhowani Junction in 1946, a year before Independence. The British administrators are resigned to leaving India, but detached hope to expend an influence over the path the country will catch after independence. Hence their preference for the Congress Party over the pro-Moscow Communist Party. After all Jawaharlal Nehru, the Congress leader, was a wealthy, patrician Fabian socialist, a lawyer by training, and educated at public school and Oxbridge (Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge) - impartial like the British Prime Minister Clement Attlee (Haileybury and University College, Oxford) . Meanwhile, both the Congress Party and the Communist Party are doing all kinds of sabotage to persuade the British swiftly score out of India. Each party is doing it for their beget reasons - the Communists are attempting to frustrate the handover of power to the Congress Party by acts of sabotage, hoping to construct chaos which will enable them to retract power themselves. And some Congress activists are also trying to race the departure of the British by non-violent acts of resistance, although these often play into the hands of the Communists. The British meanwhile are left attempting to own a semblance of law and order. Unusually for a film about the Raj, the film does not concentrate solely on relations between the British colonialists and the native peoples of India. Several of the leading characters are drawn from a third group, the country’s Anglo-Indian, or mixed bustle, community. The Anglo-Indians were, and are, a obvious community within India, whisk together by the English language, an Anglo-centric culture and the Christian religion.
The main character is Victoria Jones (played by Ava Gardner), the daughter of an Anglo-Indian inform driver, and the film depicts the entangled relationships between Victoria and the three men in her life, Colonel Rodney Savage (played by Stewart Granger), a senior British army officer, Ranjit Singh, a Sikh active in the Indian independence movement, and Patrick Taylor (played by Bill Travers), an Anglo-Indian railway official. (Many Anglo-Indians worked on the railways) . The fact that Victoria’s lovers are drawn from the three different communities is symbolic of her uncertainty about her acquire cultural identity. The Anglo-Indians tended to identify culturally with Britain rather than India, although few of them had ever visited Britain, but were not fully approved by either the British or the native Indians, both of whom referred to them by the same derogatory term, “chee-chee”. It is noticeable that Victoria’s attempts to fit in with British culture are not always successful. She refers to her parents by the Latin terms “pater” and “mater”, unaware that in Britain this is an upper-class affectation; no British engine driver’s daughter would suppose in this manner. Patrick is also torn between different identities. He dislikes the British, largely because they will not glean him as one of them, but also despises full-blooded Indians, whom he refers to as “wogs” (another derogatory term) . Savage is far more liberal and tolerant about matters of hurry.
The crisis of the memoir comes when Victoria kills a British soldier while he is attempting to rape her. Although the killing was clearly in self-defence, she fears that the British authorities will not, on epic of her mixed-race origins, bear her version of events, so she tries to cloak the incident, thus allowing herself to be blackmailed by the Communists into assisting with one of their schemes, an attempted assassination of the country’ spiritual leader Mohandas Gandhi and future prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The movie works very hard to distinguishes between Gandhi’s composed and passive resistance movement and the communist and nationalist-inspired violence that in the event caused a bloody civil war between the Hindu’s and Moslem’s in 1947-48. The violence went on to lead to the assassination of Gandhi, by a Hindu no less, and is unexcited going on today with the partitioned conventional Indian province of Kashmir today as an ongoing flashpoint between India and Pakistan.
Back to the movie: Victoria feels that she doesn’t fit into the novel and soon to be formed Indian nation and is torn between her both fathers British and her mothers Indian roots. Together with her Anglo-Indian fiancée Pat Taylor, (Bill Travers), they awe that they’ll be left out when the native Indians rob over the government and that leaves them both in a bind with regard to either staying or leaving the country. Victoria at first slowly gravitates towards her Indian nationality when she’s attacked by British army officer Graham McDaniel (Lionel Jeffries), who had been eying her since she arrived at Bhowani Junction as a British/Indian transportation officer. Trying to fight the wild and lecherous McDaniel off Victoria, bashes his head in with an steel rod, killing him. Being taken in by Ranjit Kasel (Francis Matthews), who works with her at the transportation office, and his mother Sadani (Freda Jones), the two together with mutual friend Ghanshyam (Peter Illing), cloak up McDaniel’s death by hiding his body in a town garbage dump. It later turns out that there was also an Indian sentry murdered at the scene of McDaniel’s killing and even worse, Ghanshyam turns out to be none-other then the communist rabble-rouser and terrorist Davay! Victoria is now in pain of being implicated in not only a terrorist act but also in giving succor and comfort to the wanted terrorist leader, Davay.
Davay is trapped in Bhowani Junction and uses Victoria, by blackmailing her, to catch him out by rail, which alerts her old-fashioned lover and fiancée Taylor who, together with her now unique lover Col. Savage, and a platoon of British/Indian soldiers, corral the declare. A desperate Davay takes off on foot into a nearby insist tunnel. Having Davay trapped in the ensuing shootout Taylor gets hit and later dies from his wounds but Davay is blown away by Col.Savage who also disarms the sticks of dynamite that he left on the tracks to explode under the next advise. It’s then that Col. Savage realizes that he, Taylor and the soldiers under his mutter, prevented the kill of India’s future leaders, Gandhi and Nehru, who were passengers on that very announce. The film ends with Victoria in admire with Col. Savage, and him with her. At the same time Victoria smooth does not want to leave India with him - a slightly different slay to the film as opposed to the book and one that is not that convincing at all.
The book and the film attempt to meld the historical, and the inter-racial spot posed for the Anglo-Indian community, with historical events. The issues the book (and the film) deal with are both complex and now historical, and this makes the epic a cramped confusing and convoluted throughout, as well as posing a predicament for the director in how to include all the relevant information. Masters’ original offered everything needed to gain an myth, and overall the film is a stunning suited one, combining an gripping adventure fable with an luminous examine at some serious issues. Perhaps, however, I should have said say that it offered everything needed to create an story bar one thing - a major role for a big-name American star. Hence the rather eccentric casting of Ava Gardner as Victoria, who never seems convincing as an Anglo-Indian and whose accent wavers between British, Indian and American. There were, in fact, two big-name Anglo-Indian cinema actresses around this period, Merle Oberon and Vivien Leigh, but both would probably have been too passe for the role, and both normally passed as white. (Oberon, in particular, denied having any connection with India and claimed falsely to be Australian) .
Two people who may have given the outstanding performances of their careers are Ava Gardner and Bill Travers. Both play bi-racial people who don’t fit in either society. But they react differently. Gardner is going through a whole lot of angst, really seeing both the British and Indian point of idea. How she missed an Oscar nomination here is beyond me as she gives arguably the best performance of her career as the chee-chee Victoria Jones, the Anglo-Indian daughter of a Welsh mumble driver and an Indian woman, managing to bid with understated skill the frustrations and torment of being dismissed by the Indians as an Englishwoman, and by the English as an Indian (or `wog’ as they so succinctly do it) . Perhaps she saw the procedure Bill Travers decided to handle his role as her male counterpart - and initial romantic interest - and chose a path diametrically opposed to his outrageously over-the-top performance. Considering the fact that she also battles against a script that is sometimes a miniature turgid, and which fails to really purchase the ordeal of her kind in those tumultuous times, her performance is to be admired.
However, I personally belief this was one of Ava Gardner’s better acting performances. In section because she had a character with some meat and not unprejudiced all cheesecake and sex appeal. In her biography, Ava herself says it is one of her better roles. Bhowani Junction is one of the few movies where Ava Gardner was allowed to be more than unprejudiced a glorious, but inanimate statue. As Victoria Jones, she emotes in ways that one rarely sees her do. Like her character Julie in ‘Showboat’ Victoria is moxed-race, which is the main theme of the movie. She detested the locations shooting due to the heat, stench from the start sewers and nearly poverty level accommodations they had. She even contracted dysentery - so it was apparently not a astronomical memory. She said the worst section was the rape scene which was so realistic in the portrayal, that it caused her nightmares for some time. It looked rather tame o me (but this is 50 years later and we’ve seen a lot worse) . Also in her biography, Ava states that they were allowed to exercise a sacred Sikh temple in the filming of the ceremony with Rajit. She said it was the first time they let non-Sikh’s into the temple.
Bill Travers plays the railroad location manager and his whole life is his job. He focuses narrowly on that and his tunnel vision leaves him oblivious to the momentous changes around him. Except for the fact that when the British leave he might lose that microscopic section of authority where he is, that which gives him stature in the Raj society. Stewart Granger, as the British Colonel in charge of the whole mess in Bhowani, said that Bhowani Junction was one of the few films he was really proud to be associated with. In the film, his character really does peep the Indians as human beings and not unprejudiced “wogs.” He’s quite knowledgeable about their customs in the book, and this makes it through clearly into the film..
The issues are complex, but in the hands of a kindly director like George Cukor, the characters and their struggles become dependable and even more indispensable, the tale is collected entertaining. The film’s obviously a bit dated now, the myth is complicated but for all that it’s well told and paced. The characters are attractive, well presented and well-acted and the film is beautifully shot. It’s almost faithful to the book and a superb portrait of the chaos in India at the demolish of the second world war. Ava Gardner is shiny as always, and Stewart Granger makes kindly foil for her.
Over all, it’s a friendly movie from the fifties. Not a classic, but if you’re eager in India, and the British in India, it’s worth watching..
Pros:
Location: Interestingly, permission to shoot the movie in India was refused, so Pakistan was customary as a substitute. The Pakistani backdrop is gorgeously photographed and it’s certainly a testament to residence shooting as opposed to studio backdrops. Cukor deserves fat credit for capturing the ambiance of the romantic North Western Railways, its first class coaches, the engines and goods wagons. A eager observer will tag that some of the shots of goods wagons showed vintage wagons, while others showed contemporary ones (well, contemporary when the film was made anyhow….) . As one who has spent some distinguished time in India, to me the film caught the Indian ambiance perfectly, fair up to the Railway quarters for its staff.
Directing: The film is well directed by Cukor, especially the interior, dramatic scenes that he was so illustrious for. The final sequence is a demolish from that, however, with darkly lit chases and cancel.
Cons:
Racism: A major drawback is the producers decision to expend non-Indian actors in the roles of Indians. Most of the Indian characters were played, with some very dodgy accents, by white actors. Using respectable Indians would have been a loyal improvement. Considering however when the film was made, I guess it was a brand of the times. Sadly though, no matter how satisfactory the accent, and how well the make-up has been applied, the result is always going to be a unpleasant second to the precise thing and this detracts somewhat from the film. Perhaps the casting of Gardner seems less eccentric when one considers that the film-makers changed the ending of the current, in which Victoria ends up marrying Patrick. An ending in which a dashing white officer loses out to a mixed-race railway bureaucrat would not be in keeping with normal cinema conventions, so it was changed; Patrick dies heroically and Victoria marries Savage. Racially mixed romances were, however, a controversial subject, for some reason felt to be more acceptable on shroud if the mixed-race girl who loves the white boy was played by a white actress. The Eurasian heroine of “Adore is a Many-Splendored Thing”, for example, another American film situation in a British colony, is played by Jennifer Jones. It is ironic that films which region out to explain racism in the British Empire should also have unconsciously revealed some of the racist attitudes which prevailed in Hollywood instead.
Cuts to the film: Apparently the film was also prick unmercifully in the editing room and some of the better sequences were left out, which seems a valid shame. Guess it’s filmed too long ago now to design a “Directors Lop” for a DVD release.
Too many voice-overs: There are also a astronomical number of voice-overs done by Granger’s character (Savage) . The technique is ancient to rep in all the history and the details leisurely the political climate of the time but it does high-tail the film down in places.
Trivia:
Bill Travers, one of the two leading male actors opposite Ava Gardner, served under John Masters in the British Army on the Burma Front of WW2.
The film was shot on spot in Pakistan. The studio went to gigantic expense to haul all the critical equipment and personnel to such a far away region. Apparantly this was the nail in studio head Dorry Sherry’s coffin. Because Bhowani Junction didn’t have mountainous box office success and cost quite a bit, he was soon kicked out. Considerable in the same design Louis B Mayer was 5 years previous. No loyalty in Hollywood.
Hollywood normally left films about British rule in India to the British themselves (”The Drum”, “Sad Narcissus”, “North West Frontier”), but “Bhowani Junction” is an exception. Certainly, John Masters’ unique offered everything needed to compose a thinking man’s myth - an exotic setting, plenty of action, a thrilling finale and a serious theme - in this case racism. When Hollywood examined racial issues, it often preferred to do so in the context of European colonialism rather than in the context of America itself.
