Guru Dutt remembered on birth anniversary - Page 3

Shyam Benegal on his cousin: Guru Dutt
April 16th, 2006

I finally finished uploading the last segment of my marathon interview session with film-maker Mr. Shyam Benegal. An engaging conversationalist, Mr. Benegal can effortlessly talk on a wide range of subjects. I had a hard time hovering undecided between asking him a series of standard questions or letting the conversation flow. I chose the latter technique and I am glad I did.

His older cousin actor/director Guru Dutt was an early inspirational figure for Mr. Benegal. He says that Guru Dutt "made it big," with his first film in 1950, and that appears to have had a significant influence on him. "Suddenly he (Guru Dutt) had become enormous in my eyes. He had become this incredible figure and I said to myself that is what I want." Mr. Benegal was still in high school then. He first developed an interest in films as a child, and that interest persisted. He was one of the co-founder's of Hyderabad's Film Society.

After completing his master's degree in economics from Hyderabad, he relocated to Bombay to become a copy writer in an advertising agency. He took a circuitous route to the world of film-making. He spent 14 years working in advertising before he transitioned into making feature films.

When he arrived in Bombay his cousin Guru Dutt was a famous actor and director. He says that he had an opportunity to work for his cousin, but decided against it because of the kind of films he was interested in making. Mr. Benegal was interested in making films that were different from the ones that his cousin was making. He wanted to make films like his mentor Satyajit Ray, whose film Pather Panchali opened up his path to film-making. After watching the film he realized that he could make a film of his own style and method.

His cousin's films were grand romances. "He made films that were young people's films with young people's sensibilities." Unfulfilled love was a dominant theme in his films. His cousin's films were influenced by Bengali Renaissance and the bhadralok culture he points out. Guru Dutt grew up in Calcutta and started his career as a dancer in Uday Shankar's dance troupe before relocating to Bombay.

Mr, Benegal points out that his cousin had very sharp mood swings and the failure of his film Kagaz Ke Phool was a huge disappointment for his cousin. Guru Dutt was only 39 years old when he died. Ironically, the film was a huge success long after his death.

You can listen to Mr. Shyam Benegal talk about his cousin here.

Shyam Benegal Guru Dutt Hindi Films India Indian Podcasts

Entry Filed under: Books, Movies, Music, Televison, People, Podcast Post, Bollywood

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Chaudhvin ka Chand
(Moon of the 14th Day, i.e. Full Moon)
(1960) Hindi, 169 minutes

Produced by Guru Dutt for Guru Dutt Films. Directed by Mohammed Sadiq. Screenplay by Saghir Ushmani, from his story "Jhalak" ("A Glimpse"). Dialog by Tabish Sultanpuri. Music by Ravi Lyrics by Shakeel Badayuni. Cinematography by Nariman Irani.
Starring: Waheeda Rehman, Guru Dutt, Rehman, Minoo Mumtaz, Johnny Walker.

[Notes by Corey K. Creekmur]

The exquisitely produced Muslim social Chaudhvin ka Chand seems relatively neglected within the pantheon of Guru Dutt's late films. Perhaps because it appeared between the now-undisputed masterpieces Kaagaz ke Phool (1959) and Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam (1962), the former the last film Guru Dutt is officially credited with directing, and the latter the final film he produced, Chaudhvin ka Chand shines less brightly in its setting, surrounded by striking gems. Nevertheless, the film was (following the box-office disaster of Kaagaz ke Phool) Guru Dutt's biggest box-office hit, and his first to play in an international film festival (Moscow, 1962, which Guru Dutt attended). But even Guru Dutt's greatest champion, Nasreen Munni Kabir, describes Chaudhvin ka Chand as "most conventional in story and in treatment" in her seminal Guru Dutt: A Life in Cinema (Oxford, 1996). However, the film is in many ways a remarkable work that deserves critical rediscovery and reevaluation.

There remains some speculation surrounding the production circumstances of the film, though Kabir's critical biography clears up most of the facts: though the critical and commercial failure of Kaagaz ke Phool may have prevented Guru Dutt from signing his name to another film, he seems to have chosen M. Sadiq to direct this film because he simply felt that a Muslim subject demanded a Muslim director, though Dutt supervised the picturization of the film's songs, employing color cinematography for the first time. (Dutt's offer to Sadiq was also a generous way to help the commercially unsuccessful director improve his career and finances.) The project also perhaps derived from Guru Dutt's desire to make a film based upon a qawwali story, as the director adored the Sufi musical form. In any case, while behind the scenes a number of new names were assembled for this production, the film's cast again gathered many of the performers who had become closely associated with Guru Dutt's increasingly tragic vision of the world.

As the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema notes, the film "pivots around the Islamic practice of purdah, which forbids women to show their face to men outside their immediate family." In fact, the film richly expands and complicates this basis in a cultural practice by constructing an extended study in vision and veiling, treated in both comic and tragic variations that structure the film's plot of misidentifications and misunderstandings as well as its rich stylistic pattern of blocked and obscured views. Recent film critics invested in the power and erotics of the gaze would do well to discover this veritable treatise on the subject of focused looks and momentary glimpses, which intersects the essential looking of cinema itself with the specific visual conventions of Muslim India.

The film initiates its focus immediately, when we meet a nawab, Pyare Miyan (Rehman) and his comic friend Shaida (Johnny Walker) on the streets of Lucknow. Though Shaida is chastised for peering at women, his more sophisticated friend is thunderstruck by his glimpse of the face of Jamila (Waheeda Rehman) when she lifts her veil. Our own view of the striking face of one of Indian cinema's most beautiful stars has the effect of immediately implicating us in the film's moral tensions: we have paid for our right to gaze freely upon the faces of cinema's stars, yet this undeniably erotic look – and others the camera will offer us – occurs within the dramatic and cultural context which forbids such invasive views. And while the film is obviously set in a world that supports male privilege, it often complicates matters by regularly shifting its point of view between men and women. In the first elaborate musical number, as the nawab peeks at the women gathered in his home for his sister's wedding party, the women recognize his presence and watch their watcher. As he hides – blind beneath a sheet – in his room, Jamila and a friend comically dissect his painted portrait which "watches" over the room. Thus begins the film's rich and varied play with screens, veils, curtains, performances, and disguises, together rendering all of the film a constant circulation between clear-eyed vision and (often preferable, or more alluring) distorted views.



The unfolding of the plot moves from the misidentifications of Shakesperian comedy to the misunderstandings of well-intentioned people that result in tragedy. The nawab's ailing mother is anxious to see her son married, and has arranged his marriage; still seeking his briefly glimpsed Beatrice, he asks his poor friend Aslam (Guru Dutt) to marry the girl his mother has secured – who is of course Jamila. The film will then trace the series of errors and obligations that complicate this situation and results in the three friends understanding the prices they have paid attempting to insure one another's happiness. The film's long-delayed revelation, when the nawab finally realizes that the woman he desires is his best friend's wife, is a brilliant sequence that shifts our attention between visual perspectives (as well as external and internal voices) that are intricately composed through reflections in mirrors. The scene summarizes the film's catalog of visual structures as well as the moral consequences that they generate.



If the extended misunderstandings seem implausible (despite their grounding in a social system that isolates men and women from casual contact), the emotions that link the characters to one another and motivate their attempts to perform extreme sacrifices feel plausible and real. Although Jamila is central to the plot, the film concentrates on the obligations of male friendship (dosti), one of the great topics of popular Indian cinema but rarely given the depth and sincerity of this example: as in Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam this film's ostensible "happy ending" for a couple is outweighed by the painful cost of such joy. (One continually senses that the three friends at the center of the film are playing out their off-screen, longtime affection as well: Johnny Walker's comic role is especially tempered by moments of convincing affection for his suffering friends.) Friendship forces these fellows to take action by acting: attempting to play the part of the wayward husband that will allow the wife he adores to divorce him and marry his best friend, Aslam's joyless visits to a brothel make him resemble Devdas, the great Indian romantic anti-hero (Guru Dutt fans will recall that the ill-fated film being made in the ill-fated Kaagaz ke Phool is a remake of Devdas, a story of self-destruction that Guru Dutt's own life seemed to sadly replay.) Shaida, on the other hand, approaches his roles – and costume changes – with great relish, disguising himself as a elderly holy man to photograph women in the bazaar, and finally donning the uniform and self-important mannerisms of a police inspector.

As in all Guru Dutt films, the song sequences are notable highlights, featuring the voices of perhaps Hindi cinema's three greatest playback singers, Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, and Mohammad Rafi, the latter shifting effortlessly between Guru Dutt's heartfelt and Johnny Walker's comic songs. Two numbers are given special treatment by being filmed in color (see note below), and Guru Dutt's tendency to advance his story through songs, with the rhythm of music and editing in collaboration, is as strong as ever. For example, the first major number, Sharma Ke Ye Kyon … ("Why do these women adjust their veils?") cuts between the nawab and women peering at one another while the lyrics comment upon this action (and the tradition of purdah), all within a tightly organized interchange of sound and image. If this film doesn't finally achieve the overall impact of an earlier masterpiece like Pyaasa, the technical skills that made Guru Dutt one of the masters of Hindi cinema's golden age, and unsurpassed in the art of song picturization, are still on display in this penultimate work.

[Chaudhvin ka Chand is available on DVD from both Yash Raj Films and Eros/B4U. The image quality of both versions is generally very good, through both include some rough spots and choppy transitions. The subtitles on both copies are fairly straightforward but necessarily fail to capture the rich texture of the original Hindi-Urdu dialog, though the Eros copy may be somewhat more accurate (it at least correctly identifies the final swallowed object as a diamond, not the "poison" that the Yash Raj copy provides.) However, the Eros DVD does not subtitle the film's songs, and its subtitles tend to slip off of the bottom of the screen. A more significant difference between the copies is that the Yash Raj DVD includes only the title song in color, whereas the Eros DVD includes both the title song and the brothel number "Kabhi Raazi Mohabbat" in color . (The Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema claims that these two color sequences appear in "later release prints … although designed for b&w," a rather confusing claim since the sequences were clearly filmed in color.) The Yash Raj DVD, like all of the company's Guru Dutt Collection titles, also includes Nasreen Munni Kabir's illuminating documentary "In Search of Guru Dutt." Guru Dutt fans may be fated to owning both versions, since each provides something the other lacks.]

KAAGAZ KE PHOOL ("Paper Flowers," Hindi, 1959)

B&W, 153 minutes. Directed by Guru Dutt.
Cinematography by V. K. Murthy. Screenplay by Abrar Alvi. Lyrics by Kaifi Azmi. Music by S. D. Burman.

Guru Dutt's melancholic masterpiece, and India's first cinemascope film, weds visionary and often breathtaking cinematography to an archetypal but anachronistic (and heavily morose) storyline. The feeling of having seen the latter one too many times (in DEVDAS, PYAASA, etc.) may have contributed to audiences rejecting this rendering, a rejection that is said to have contributed significantly to the director's own descent into depression, culminating in his suicide in 1964. Seen from hindsight and read against the (now looming) legend of Guru Dutt, the film thus intertwines three narratives: two that we know but never see (the tragic and twice-filmed DEVDAS story—of a melancholic hero who drinks himself to death—which Dutt's hero is filming yet once again; and Dutt's own larger-than-life tragedy, prophesied by this film) with the one presented to us: the tale of the self-destructive genius cinephile and director, Suresh Singh (Guru Dutt), and of his discovery, the extraordinary beauty Shanti (Guru Dutt's discovery, Waheeda Rehman).

Unfolding in flashback, as the alcoholic and prematurely-aged Suresh sits in an empty soundstage of Ajanta Studios, where he once directed hit films, singing Dekhi zamaane ki yaari ("I have seen the age of glory"), the story opens with a series of gloriousy operatic tableaux depicting the zenith of Suresh's career, when cheering crowds acclaimed his movies (this sequence recalls the climactic moments of PYAASA when the presumed-dead poet Vijay enters the theatre where his work is being "posthumously" celebrated). Here, the Ajanta emblem, dominating both the studio lot and the lobby of its flagship theatre—of a giant Garuda-eagle, atop which a divine figure sounds his conch-shell trumpet—seems to evoke the cinema's magical ability to give wings to the imagination and cause the world to reverberate with song. Yet this joyous heraldic image will acquire a cruel, almost fascistic overtone, as its stone face gazes unpityingly on Suresh's precipitous fall, and in a crane shot we see his wasted form framed between the sandaled feet of its rider, which resemble those of a haughty Roman emperor. Sic transit gloria—and the transit here is mercilessly swift.

The storyline is simple, though its development is at times uneven. The brilliant and lionized Suresh has an abiding sorrow: his separation from his daughter Pammi (Baby Naaz). She was taken away from him by his estranged wife, the aristocratic Bina (Veena), who (together with her equally snobbish and ludicrously Anglophile parents) despises the world of cinema and its inhabitants—this portrait is not as extreme as it may appear, since a disdain, real or pretended, for Indian films and their makers is often effected by the elite. Attempting to see Pammi in her boarding school in Dehra Dun, Suresh encounters Shanti, who works there, offering her his overcoat during a downpour. Later, she comes to Bombay seeking employment and returns the coat, leading to her accidental screentest and discovery. Her radiant beauty as the heroine Paro, embodying the simplicity of a "pure Indian woman," makes Suresh's DEVDAS a smash hit, but the budding mutual love between the pair—expressed in the poignant song Waqt ne kiyaa ("What has time done?," sung by Guru Dutt's wife Geeta), which is heard but not mouthed as the two principals gaze at one another on an empty soundstage—is stifled by Pammi's doomed effort to reunite her parents by removing Shanti from the picture—and from Suresh's films.

Without Shanti's companionship and her faith in him, Suresh succumbs to a depression fueled by a combination of alcoholism and pride, the latter preventing him from accepting numerous offers of help, including several from Shanti herself. That Suresh is so clearly his own worst enemy makes it difficult for viewers to sympathize with him—an outcome that Guru Dutt may doggedly have intended. After Suresh has half-heartedly directed a string of flops, his studio bosses finally cut him loose. His subsequent downhill slide is broken only by the occasional walk-on antics of Johnny Walker (who plays Rakesh, the horse-racing and womanizing brother of Suresh's estranged wife; this vidushaka role, however, is not well integrated into the story) and some wrenching melodramatic coincidences—as when Pammi drives past her father living in the derelict garage of his former chauffeur, or when Shanti recognizes him among the scruffy extras brought in for a "mythological" in which she is starring—itself evidently another sendup of the much-filmed legend of the poet-saint Mirabai, who spent her life pining for her absent "bridegroom," Lord Krishna.

In the end, though one may wish that Suresh had gotten some decent therapy ("Prozac," my wife announced, "could have done wonders for him"), it is the cinephilic images of his tormented memory that linger before the mind's eye: the transfiguring spotlights of deserted soundstages, the misty make-believe distance of sets, the transcendent and unapproachable beauty of Shanti, wrapped in a star-aura we watch being created yet succumb to all the same. Indeed (and again in hindsight) the film constitutes a twilight-elegy for Bombay's director-dominated studio era, and prophesies the dawning one in which the shots will be called by megastars. Beyond this, it offers a still higher allegory: of cinematic artifice as the emblem of this world of "paper flowers" and broken hearts, the subject of mournful Urdu ghazals and of renunciant sant songs—such as that which opens and closes the film. Flaws and all, KAAGAZ KE PHOOL deserves to rank—with Fellini's 81/2—among the all-time great films about filmmaking and life.

[Corey Creekmur adds, on possible cinematic influences on Guru Dutt:
"In addition to its Indian allusions, the film seems to explicitly evoke the storyline of WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD? (1932), remade more famously as A STAR IS BORN (1937) and as a hit musical in 1954--the latter, with Judy Garland and James Mason, is Dutt's most plausible inspiration. All chronicle the rise of a female star and the fall of a male mentor (through alcoholism, among other things): all present a male "hero" who is somewhat unsympathetic and, against Hollywood expectations, cannot be cured. I suspect Vincente Minnelli's THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL (1952), another Hollywood expose and an even more direct commentary on the end of the studio system, starring Kirk Douglas and Lana Turner, might have informed Dutt too: like Kaagaz, it's told in flashback."]

Waheeda looks like a Chaudhvin ka Chand.. she is so beautiful 😊 😊 😊

Thanks for the articles.. Bob Ji

Originally posted by: uknaik99

Waheeda looks like a Chaudhvin ka Chand.. she is so beautiful 😊 😊 😊

Thanks for the articles.. Bob Ji

Here is Guru Dutt.!!!!!

thanks for all the artcles...i have a few more left to read.....will do on my next visit. 😊

MR. & MRS. '55
(1955, Hindi, 157 minutes)
Produced and Directed by Guru Dutt
Dialogues: Abrar Alvi; Lyrics: Majrooh Sultanpuri; Music: O. P. Nayyar; Cinematography: V. K. Murthy; Art Direction: D. R. Jadhav

This clever romantic comedy is one of the lighter products of the Guru Dutt team that would later craft such heavyweight masterpieces as PYAASA and KAAGAZ KE PHOOL. Evoking debates over social legislation and women's rights in the immediate post-Independence period, the narrative pokes fun at upper-class liberal reformers who seek to impose their ideology on society at large. Since the reformers in question happen to be women, the film delivers an essentially reactionary message vis--vis gender: its Westernized, bespectacled feminists are man-hating harpies out to deprive "good" Indian women of the simple happiness they ostensibly derive from traditional roles as cooks, servants, and baby-machines for their menfolk. The predictability and (now) political incorrectness of this theme (for which the director perhaps atoned in his probing and female-centered meditation on gender inequity, SAHIB, BIBI AUR GHULAM), is offset by the witty plot, atmospheric mise-en-scne, fine ensemble acting, strong score, and inventive camerawork—all trademarks of a Guru Dutt production.

After the credits (superimposed over a newspaper front page that alludes to a climactic courtroom scene) the film opens with feminist firebrand Sita Devi (Lalita Pawar) presiding over a meeting in support of a proposed divorce bill that will give women more scope to terminate marriages. Though parliamentary passage of the bill appears imminent, Sita's cadre of upper-class housewives seem more interested in debating the relative merits of skin-softening facials, and her unmarried niece and charge, Anita (Madhubala), slips out at every opportunity to drool over a tennis pro named Ramesh. Anita's escapades lead to a chance meeting with the impoverished Preetam Kumar (Guru Dutt), who instantly falls in love with her. Preetam is an out-of-work cartoonist (the film's few glimpses of his drawings feature the handiwork of famous satirist R. K. Laxman) whose single rumpled suit and fedora, as well as his silence throughout the first two scenes (finally broken with the song Dil par hua aisa jadoo, "Such a spell has been cast on my heart"), contribute to the Chaplinesque quality of his character—though understandably Guru Dutt's version, unlike Raj Kapoor's "Raju," evokes the soulful and melancholic rather than the manic and clownish sides of the Tramp.

Sita Devi's plans to mold her niece according to her own ideology as an "independent" woman are further frustrated when it is revealed that Anita's late father—anticipating the aunt's designs—stipulated in his will that his daughter must marry within a month of her 21st birthday, or lose her inheritance of seven million rupees. With the deadline fast approaching, the would-be heiress eager for conjugal bliss (signaled by the song Thandi hawa kaali ghata, "A cool breeze and dark clouds," with which she attempts to woo Ramesh in a swimming-pool scene), and no Suitable Boy in sight (Ramesh having spurned Anita's proposal and departed for Wimbledon), the scheming aunt contracts a marriage of convenience—to be terminated after one month—with a hired groom, who is expected to be poor but educated, and willing to forego further contact with his bride after their cursory civil ceremony. In fact, he turns out to be Preetam, who is uninterested in the promised fee but hopeful that Anita will fall for him too. She of course does, eventually, but not before the plot has taken several unpredictable twists, in part through the machinations of Preetam's rakish friend and benefactor, the newspaper photographer Johny (Johny Walker). The latter has his own love interest—a secretary at the newspaper office—whom he woos with the song Jaane kahan mera jigar ("God knows where I've lost my heart").

For those able to pardon (or laugh at) gender stereotyping and an implicit appeal to male fears that women's rights will threaten family values—fears that have not yet been laid to rest in the ensuing half century—there's plenty of good fun and good music here, including notable vocal performances by Geeta Dutt, the director's wife. Simple yet highly inventive song picturizations are enhanced by fine use of outdoor locations—Bombay teashops, bus stops, and a swimming pool. Madhubala looks radiant in Murthy's chiaroscuro framing, and Guru Dutt himself appears lovably wistful but not yet tragically doomed.

MEMOIRS Eerie connection AJIT DUARA

The letters confirm that Guru Dutt was not acting when portraying suffering on screen.

a vital addition to biographical material on Guru Dutt.
Yours Guru Dutt, Intimate Letters of a Great Indian Filmmaker; Nasreen Munni Kabir; Roli Books; 2006; Price not stated YOURS GURU DUTT is a brief anthology of 37 letters that Guru Dutt had written to his wife, Geeta Dutt and their sons, Tarun and Arun, between 1951 and 1962. Even though Guru Dutt died in 1964, two years after the last published letter in the book, this collection gives you some idea of his state of mind. Dutt's films we know and love. What is unsettling is the eerie connection between the way he writes to his wife and the emotions that are reflected in some of his films. As we know, Dutt died of an overdose of sleeping pills (probably combined with alcohol) on October 10, 1964, at the age of 39. At the time of his death he had separated from his wife and was living alone in an apartment on Peddar Road, Bombay. His difficult marriage and his equally complex, and ultimately broken, relationship with actress Waheeda Rahman was said to have led to this tragedy. But is that true? Beautifully presented If you read the letters carefully and objectively, you can clearly see that Guru Dutt had started suffering from depression way back in 1951, even before he married playback singer Geeta Dutt (nee, Roy). The letters are written in Hindi and English and are beautifully presented in this book by Nasreen Munni Kabir. A young man of 26 writes to a young woman who has agreed to marry him in principle but cannot do so at that exact moment (they eventually married in 1953). Yet he seems to be depressed about the delay and talks about how she is making him unhappy. Then, in 1952, Guru Dutt indicates that he is aware of his mood fluctuations though he doesn't understand its causes. Is she the cause of his unhappiness? Clearly not. This is a man with clinical depression who has some idea of what is happening to him but sees it as simply being 'moody'. Guru Dutt's friend and collaborator, the great Urdu poet and lyric writer of "Pyaasa", Sahir Ludhianvi, intuitively understood the artiste's condition and portrayed it in a couplet that translated as: "We are flowers, we brought happiness to others/ For ourselves, only the dark stain of sorrow." Guru Dutt, as Nasreen Munni Kabir points out in her Introduction, had the shortest career of any outstanding film maker in India, making films for just 13 years between 1951 and 1964, and yet made a hauntingly beautiful film in every genre of Hindi cinema: the crime thriller ("C.I.D."), the costume drama ("Baaz"), the Muslim social ("Chaudhvin ka Chand"), comedy ("Aar Paar", "Mr &Mrs 55"), social melodrama ("Pyaasa") and the period film ("Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam"). His creative inspiration in writing scripts, his versatility as an actor, his inventiveness in picturising songs, and his direction of camera are still unparalleled in Hindi cinema. Yet he was so terribly unhappy. Is that necessarily the human condition of a truthful artist? Solcae in cinema Probably not. But what do you say about a man in his twenties who writes to his beloved in these words: "I sometimes wish I was not born, or sometimes I wish I was dead, or sometimes I wish I am not that what I am and didn't know you. Like a madman I roam about trying to find solace, which I don't get anywhere." The solace he speaks about looking for, he found in cinema. In his hands the medium turned to poetry, consistently and eloquently in every film he made. As audiences we are grateful for it. But reflect, for a moment, on what the effect of these letters could be on young playback singer, Geeta Roy? Unfortunately, we have no record of the letters she wrote to him. Guru Dutt evidently didn't keep them. But we do know that just eight years after her husband's death, this talented artist who sang some of the songs that Guru Dutt is best known for picturising, died of cirrhosis of the liver. She was 42. These letters published in the elegantly produced book, Yours Guru Dutt, are a vital addition to biographical material on Guru Dutt. They function as sub-text to his films.

They confirm that Guru Dutt was not acting when portraying suffering on screen in "Pyaasa".

All alone with Guru Dutt