Gandhi 1982

The Film:

Another British epic - even bigger than the last one! This is the second film on the list (after A Man For All Seasons) that is going to suffer from over-use in my day job. This has been a favourite for RE teachers for years, but not the whole thing (it would take a few weeks' worth of lessons to get through) and so there are several scenes that I've seen more times than I can remember - Gandhi getting kicked off the train, Gandhi burning work permits, Gandhi getting shouted at by Fred Elliot from Corrie (for it is he...)

Having said this, I can't remember the last time I saw the whole thing. It's probably more than 20 years ago. And I've probably only seen it all the way through once. I don't really remember anything else about it - except that it's epic!

I'm a big fan of Richard Attenborough's other two films from the 80s - A Chorus Line and Cry Freedom - and I've seen them both more often and more recently than this one. I'll concede that A Chorus Line isn't very good, and that I'm just a sucker for a Broadway musical. However, Gandhi is going to have to go some to be better than Cry Freedom.....

The Ceremony:

April 11th 1983 at Dorothy Chandler. It lasted three hours and fifteen minutes and was hosted by Liza Minnelli, Dudley Moore, Richard Pryor and Walter Matthau. What a line up!

There doesn't appear to be very much else to say about this ceremony that is interesting, unusual or significant. Except that George C Scott was there - this was the only ceremony that he attended!








Other Notable Winners That Night:

Gandhi won eight of the eleven awards it was nominated for, so there wasn't a lot else to go round.

Ben Kingsley beat impressive competition (Hoffman, Newman, Lemmon and O'Toole) to take Best Actor. Louis Gossett Jnr became the first African American Best Supporting Actor, Meryl Streep won her second Oscar, and Jessica Lange won Best Supporting Actress after being nominated in both Actress categories - the first time that had happened since the 1940s.


Best Song:

Continuing the absolute 80s classics - it had tough competition from Eye of the Tiger, but Joe and Jen smashed the competition - and did a great performance on the night, complete with a whole parade of white-clad officers!

What We Could/Should Have Been Watching:

Four Oscars to phone home about.

It was always going to be Gandhi. With all those nominations, all those famous faces, the crowd scenes, the cultural significance etc etc. However, there were other great films from 1982 - including a couple of personal favourites, Victor/Victoria and The World According To Garp.

The other films that were up for Best Picture were Tootsie (good film, but Sydney Pollack would have to wait a few years), The Verdict (another good one, but never going to be a winner), Missing (which I'd never heard of, but it sounds interesting) - and the one that has most stood the test of time, ET The Extra Terrestrial. ET did very well with the technical awards, as well as bagging John Williams one of his five Oscars. The comparisons between the small brown alien and the small brown Indian were sometimes funny, sometimes unkind, but far too obvious - and not altogether inappropriate!

Our Verdict:

I think I've got a worksheet somewhere to go with this clip

There's one thing about this film that I had not forgotten - it is, indeed, epic! It's a great piece of film-making in all sorts of different ways. For a start, the cinematography is impressive - in the way it captures crowds and also quiet landscapes, among other things.

It's the divine Mr C being clerical again.

The story is one that is definitely worth telling (and, to be fair, this film has already become the most familiar record we have of these events) and it is generally told really well. Considering that it is quite a long film with relatively few key characters and a fair bit of wordy politics, it does move at a reasonable pace and there are key set pieces well placed throughout. There is a bit too much reliance on white people popping up to explain things to each other (ie. to us) which comes across as clunky and bit crass. Mind you, those white people include Ian Charleson and Martin Sheen who both do it so well that I can almost forgive it as a device.

B%*#ards.....

Which brings me to the other great thing about the film - the acting is, on the whole, really good. Yorkshireman Sir Ben Kingsley (aka Krishna Banji) may have become almost a cliche in his most famous role, but he is superb. He manages to inhabit the character really well without ever quite crossing the line into impersonation. It helps that he looks so much like the man himself - but the fact that he also manages to convincingly look like the man himself over the course of five decades is great acting not just genetics! The supporting cast is also very good - a veritable who's who (and "where do I know them from") of the British and British-Asian acting fraternity.

Where's Wally, India version.

The big set pieces - some with casts of thousands - are very well directed. Of them all, the massacre at Amritsar is the most confronting, from the coldness of Edward Fox's General to the unflinching way in which the crowd is filmed trapped and panicking. I'm amazed that I didn't remember this from my earlier viewing. It's the scene that stuck with me most.

Overall I am pleased to confirm that this is a very good film indeed. It's not perfect, not without historical inaccuracies (or omissions, certainly in the case of the character of Gandhi himself) and it is not beyond criticism - much of which you can find online if you look. It wouldn't have been made the same way today, but it still holds up well 36 years on. Is it better than Cry Freedom? Objectively, possibly. Subjectively, definitely not. But it was good to watch it again.