I’ve been waiting 50 years to see BHOWANI JUNCTION on a big screen, ever since I read Gavin Lambert’s book of interviews with Cukor, where he described how Ava Gardner grew as an actress here, and of a scene where she washed her mouth with gin, in his eyes tragically edited out and a great loss to the film and the prestige Gardner could have garnered by having it seen. . For me, it’s an amazing discovery of gifts I didn’t know Cukor possessed, here for the epic, for making drama out of the composition of hundreds of figures onscreen, in Cinema Scope and Eastman Colour. The colour design is some of the most beautiful, subtle and dramatic I’ve ever seen, and gorgeously filmed by Freddy Young (with Nicholas Roeg contributing). And someone really must do a book about Cukor’s collaborations with Gene Allen and George Hoyningen-Huene: their work here is at least on the level of A STAR IS BORN or HELLER IN PINK TIGHTS. Sublime. And sublime is also the word to use in relation to Gardner, not only astonishingly beautiful, but externalising all the anguish of a split identity, failed searches for identity, an alienation from groups, people, society; a search for an authentic self that fails and fails again. So much of the internal struggles are externalised in many, varied and sometime extreme close-ups so that it comes across as silent movie acting of the highest order. It’s hard not to read this as a dramatization of Cukor’s own sexual identity mapped onto that of this particular Anglo-Indian. Ava Gardner as Victoria Jones, c’est lui; or could be; certainly the character’s questions and struggles, were not unknow to the director, at least in the abstract. The film was ostensibly butchered in the edit reducing it in Cukor’s eyes from a serious work into trite melodrama. There is a sense in which Indian independence is reduced to a kind of imperial romance amidst colonial independence struggles with Gandhi and the Brits as the good guys, the communist as the bad etc. In a wonderful introduction to the film, curator Anumpa Shanker discusses the problem of ‘brown-face’ and some of the film’s politics while praising Gardner, the film’s sweep, and its in dramatization of action. i was surprised to see the film described as British, though it makes sense, particular as a kind of pre-cursor to the ‘run-away’ production. A film to re-discover and discuss in spite of evident problems.

José Arroyo