DVD of the Week: Bhowani Junction

In the clip above, I discuss “Bhowani Junction,” from 1956—a drama, set in India in 1947, during the country’s struggle for independence, starring Ava Gardner as Victoria Jones, a half-Indian, half-British woman who is uneasy about her future in the rising new nation. At a crucial moment in the story, Victoria—who is being courted by a young Sikh man who got her out of a jam—considers converting to the Sikh faith and marrying him, motivated both by gratitude and by the desire to gain an acceptable identity. The film’s director, George Cukor, was a gay man whose sexual orientation was something of an open secret in Hollywood, yet nonetheless a secret. He knew about maintaining appearances and placating benefactors, and he invests the scene of Victoria’s conversion (which we’ve included in this clip) with an extraordinary, nearly mind-bending intensity.

Cukor is not usually considered to be an action director or a political filmmaker; he is most famous for what are called “women’s pictures,” including the 1939 film “The Women,” with its entirely female cast. Yet Cukor, a supreme visual stylist, was as much at home with a grand tableau as with an intimate one (and the film that preceded this one in his filmography, “A Star Is Born,” is remarkable as both). In making “Bhowani Junction,” he joined a lucid intellectual view of the story’s multiple lines of conflict (and it suffices to read any substantial interview with Cukor to get a sense of his wide-ranging intelligence) with a distinctive visual—and thereby emotional—analysis of the vast physical and social forces it brings together.

Here’s Patrick McGilligan, from his biography of Cukor:

In India, Cukor seemed to luxuriate in the logistically complicated crowd scenes, narrowing in on faces and descriptive details. The street riots of Bhowani involved thousands of people running rampant through the streets, and took several days to shoot—“really spectacular footage that impressed them in Hollywood,” according to [the screenwriter] Ivan Moffat.

But, Moffat added,

“Even in the middle of the making of a film, something would occur on the set—perhaps the way a curtain was blowing, or the unexpected combination in the pattern of some dress—it sort of pleased him and seemed to give him pause. As it were, for the moment, the rest would be forgotten by whatever forced his attention at the time.

“He would emphasize that and go after it—it probably looked very nice in the rushes. I even thought, occasionally—it’s a purely subjective view based on ‘Bhowani Junction’—that he was sometimes sort of seduced away from the essential story line itself into a lovely picturesque irrelevancy.”

That’s why Moffat was a screenwriter, not a director; what seemed to him irrelevant was what made the film no mere depiction of story but also an experience—an experience for a viewer, and one that is based on the experience that the director himself had in the course of shooting the scene. Cukor’s personal sense of what it was like to be in the thick of the action sometimes converged with that of the film’s characters and sometimes stood outside it critically, and the wealth of external details he grasped in the maelstrom conjured the nuances of their inner life as well as a varied range of perspectives on the action. His virtual presence as the film’s animating conscience, arising from his own involvement with its ideas and its material, is the defining quality of a great director.

P.S. Soon after making “Bhowani Junction,” Cukor directed a play, which, he told Peter Bogdanovich (in the indispensable collection of interviews “Who the Devil Made It”) was “a disaster”:

I’d just done a picture in India where I would say, “Well, yes, run those four railroads through and then we’ll have five thousand people and they’ll riot.” Now I’m back working for the theatre and they said, “Listen, that tray—they want sixty dollars and we are only going to pay fifty.” And it depressed me thoroughly.