Bhowani Junction: George Cukor

According to Andrew Sarris, the films of George Cukor can be summarized thusly: "The director's theme is imagination, with the focus on the imaginer rather than on the thing imagined." His adaptation of John Masters' 1954 novel Bhowani Junction is about not one dreamer, but three. The year is 1947, and the British are planning on soon leaving the sub-continent. Victoria Jones is an Anglo-Indian who serves as a WAC in the British Army. As a half-breed, she knows that once the British leave she will be rejected by Indian society. She dreams of finding her own place in the world. Patrick Taylor, another Anglo-Indian, despises his Indian heritage and dreams of somehow being accepted into the loving embrace of Great Britain. And finally, the third dreamer is India itself, desperate for emancipation for the British yet torn by ethnic and religious turmoil. Victoria, played with fierce power by Ava Gardner in a career-defining performance, seeks to rediscover her Indian roots after accidentally killing a British officer who tried to rape her. But during a ceremony where she is to be converted to the Sikh faith, she finds she cannot go through with it. The stories of Victoria, Patrick, and India are framed against the Indian people's attempts to force the British out sooner than they intended. The followers of Gandhi organize peaceful methods of protest such as clogging up train stations and delaying trains by laying down on the tracks (this leads to one of the film's best scenes where a number of high-caste Indians lying on the tracks are forced to move when the British make low-caste Indians throw sewage on them. This is comparable to forcing protesting Jews to eat pork.). But Communist forces want to throw the country into open revolution by sparking violent protests which lead to bloodshed. Bhowani Junction is a complex movie, but it never feels opaque or confusing thanks in large part to Sonya Levien and Ivan Moffat's screenplay. Cukor's masterful handling of exterior shots with seemingly countless extras proves that the man had sincere cinematic clout and was not just a tired director of stuffy literary adaptations and women's films. Bhowani Junction is sumptuously beautiful and thought-provoking. It might very well be Cukor's masterpiece.

9/10