The people make their daily pilgrimage to the Ganges River: bathing in its holy waters, filling their ceremonial vessels, attending a reading of the scriptures by the entrance steps. The Ray family has left their ancestral home (in Pather Panchali) and has settled into a ground floor apartment in the city of Banaras. Hari (Kanu […]
A young girl named Durga (Runki Banerjee) ventures into the neighbor’s orchard that was once owned by her family, and picks some guavas for her great aunt, Indir (Chunibala Devi). The neighbors detect the incident, and complain loudly of Durga’s undisciplined behavior for her mother, Sarbajaya (Karuna Banerjee) to overhear. Sarbajaya, in turn, scolds Indir […]
Harriet (Patricia Walters) is a pensive, awkward, and fanciful adolescent growing up in Bengal near the banks of the river. The eldest child of a jute factory manager (Esmond Knight), she spends most of her days writing poetry in her diary and observing life pass by over the garden walls with her attractive and self-confident […]
The opening scenes of La Grande Illusion provide a subtle reflection of the old European social order during the First World War, as Captain de Boieldieu (Pierre Fresnay) studies aerial surveillance maps from the safe distance of his office in order to plot out military strategy. There is an aberration in the photographs, and de […]
A lone automobile arrives at an unassuming rural inn appropriately called the Frontier Café and Hotel on a bucolic northern border town, as a cheerful and genteel businessman named Meunier (Henri Guisol) provides a cursory orientation of the couple’s proximity to the border before bidding a sincere, fond farewell to his two visibly exhausted, but […]
A meek and unassuming office clerk, Maurice Legrand (Michel Simon), declines an invitation from his goading co-workers to turn the evening’s dinner banquet festivities into a night of carousing, citing his need to be home before his wife’s preset midnight curfew. On the way home, he encounters a physical altercation between a wanton young woman […]