Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 02/21/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

A Throw of Dice (Franz Osten, 1929)

Charu Roy and Seeta Devi in A Throw of Dice

Cast: Seeta Devi, Charu Roy, Himansu Rai, Modhu Bose, Sarada Gupta, Tincory Charkrabarty. Lala Bijoykishen. Screenplay: Niranjan Pal, W.A. Burton, based on a story from the Mahabharata. Cinematography: Emil Schünemann. Art direction: Promode Nath.

India would become one of the great filmmaking centers of the world, but the silent film A Throw of Dice, though one of the early classic films made in the subcontinent, was directed by a German, Franz Osten, who would be arrested in India in 1939 for being a member of the Nazi party. Osten was a prolific filmmaker who did much of his work in India, often in collaboration with actor-producer Himansu Rai, who plays the heavy in this story based on an episode in the Mahabharata. It's about two kings who fall in love with Sunita (Seeta Devi), the beautiful daughter of a hermit, Kanwa (Sarada Gupta), who has fled the corruptions of court life. When one of the kings, Ranjit (Charu Roy), wins the heart of Sunita, the other, Sohat (Rai), plots against him. He proposes a game of dice, with the stakes being each other's kingdom. Using loaded dice, Sohat not only wins Ranjit's kingdom and the hand of Sunita, but also tricks Ranjit into becoming his slave. But when Sohat's deception is uncovered, Ranjit's subject mobilize and attack Sohat's palace. In desperation, Sohat leaps from a high cliff. It's a slight tale in the telling, but the beauty of the north Indian setting and the opulence of the palaces give the story a sumptuous frame. There's also a cast of thousands on display and a whole menagerie of tigers and elephants and other animals.