Cinema: The New Pictures, Sep. 26, 1960

The World of Apu (Edward Harrison) completes, in alternations of suffering and joy, one of the most vital and abundant movies ever made. Based on a bestselling Bengali novel by Bibhuti Bannerji, the picture was written, produced and directed as three separate pictures by a 39-year-old Calcutta film buff named Satyajit Ray (pronounced Sawt-yaw-jit Rye). Each of the three lasts about an hour and 45 minutes and stands as a separate and complete cinema experience in its own right. But the moviemaker intended his trilogy ultimately to be seen and judged as a single immense discursive epic in the Indian tradition—as a modern Mahabharata.

Part 1, called Father Panchali (The Lament of the Path), describes the hero's childhood in the innocence and violence of a village in Bengal. Part 2, Aparajito (The Unvanquished), tells how he lost his father and left his mother in order to make himself a modern man. Part 3, called Apur Sansar (The World of Apu), begins with a slyly humorous description of how the young man (Soumitra Chatterjee) spends his can't-afford-salad days of bohemian genius in Calcutta's slums. Suddenly one day a college friend carts him off to a country wedding that has an unexpected and fateful conclusion. The bridegroom proves to be insane, and in order to save the bride (Sarmila Tagore*) from the curse that will fall upon her if she is not married at the appointed hour, Apu makes the noble gesture and marries her himself. To his amazement he falls in love with the girl, and for a year they live a garret idyl in Calcutta. Then she dies in childbirth. Almost insane with grief, Apu throws his novel, his career and almost his life away, but he finds himself again in his relation to his son, in his duty to the future, in his love of life.

As a piece of craftsmanship, The World of Apu is the finest film of the three. Director Ray, who had never turned a camera before he started shooting Father Panchali, began his trilogy with incredible strokes of beginner's luck, but he ends it with deliberate mastery of the medium. He has superb control of his camera. His images are continuously beautiful but never obtrusive; they rise out of the story as naturally as thoughts rise out of the pool of Vishnu—there is nothing arty in Ray's art. By the same token his actors act, not with the usual bombinations of Oriental drama, but as though the camera had found them alone and simply living; and they live, as few characters in pictures do, real lives that swell to the skin with pain and poetry and sudden mother wit. Actor Chatterjee, as a young man too gifted to be strong, provides an unforgettable object of the Biblical lesson (Luke 16:8): ". . . the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light." And Actress Tagore, though she looks as mysterious and lovely as an Apsaras, nevertheless comes off the screen as a lustily healthy young woman, essentially down to earth and up to tricks.