Abhijan (the Expedition, Satyajit Ray, 1962) is the story of Narsingh (dependable Soumitra Chatterjee), a Kshatriya taxi-driver, who after having had his professional license taken away from him for imprudent overtaking, becomes jobless, and heads towards the Shyamnagar province in Bengal. There he gets involved in opium trading. A man he had given a lift to, Sukhanram (Charuprakash Ghosh, very good), is the one who lures him into the business, and that same man also deals in buying women for a time because he has the money. This time he has Gulabi (Waheeda Rehman) with him, and she, aware of her plight, tries to catch the attention of Narsingh who seems to her an honest guy, so as to escape her present master and her future downfall. But Narsingh isn’t interested in her; he looks upon her as a cheap prostitute. He has dreams of respectability, and together with his projects of association with Sukharam, he plans on gaining the attention of the local schoolteacher, Milli (Ruma Guha Thakurta). She happens to be the sister of a distant relative he has encountered upon arriving in this Bengali village of the hills.

This man’s name is Joseph (Gyanesh Mukherjee), a name he has been given after he became a Christian. Alas, unfortunately for the valiant taxi-driver (who by the way has the privilege of owning his 1931 model Chrysler), Milli is secretly engaged towards another man, a one-legged fellow who, believing he was punished as a result of being “naughty” when a boy (he fell down a cliff), is now busy with good deeds and pious reading. Narsingh doesn’t know this, and asks Milli to teach him English, so he can rise socially. She accepts, and we have pleasant hopes for both until they are dashed one day with Milli asking Narsingh to enable her and her cripple to elope together. He agrees to it, but he’s hard hit, resumes drinking, and, perhaps as compensation, asks Gulabi to his bed.

Meanwhile, his affairs with Sukharam are moving ahead, and after some moral wrangling, he decides to take the risk of becoming his partner. He will continue to deliver the illegal cargo of opium, and gets tied to Gulabi (who’s lent him by Sukharam!). He has in effect fallen into the spider’s web, and willingly, but he can only blame himself. On top of that, he’s a rather solitary, haughty guy who thinks himself better than, for example, other taxi cabbies. He’s wounded by his wife’s having left him for another man (we learn this at the beginning of the movie). He’s imbued with the notion that his caste (the Kshatriyas, or warriors) obliges him to a certain social and personal standard. He refers to his “blood”, that doesn’t allow him to stoop to ask the policeman’s favours, or his ancestors' code of values according to which he cannot let himself cheat others. In fact he’s fundamentally an ambitious, proud man, who has dreams of grandeur, and who feels limited in his purposes by obstacles he wishes he could overthrow. His caste has put him at an intermediary social level, and he resents this position as insufficiently rewarding.

The film tells the story of his being tempted, and his resisting, his hoping and his yielding. One symbolic moment is when he is seen sitting against a tree practising his English reading. The word he is spelling is “SLY”: this seems to me as a good definition of who he is. A smart, cunning intellectual (he’s often criticised for “acting smart”), but full of devious compromises with the values he isn’t simple enough to accept at face value. He’s in stark opposition with Rama (Robi Ghosh, excellent), his diminutive hand, who represents unsophisticated loyalty and practicality. Rama proudly looks after his boss’s grand vehicle, cleans it incessantly, wards off the swarms of fascinated children that continuously run after it, and relishes the moments when Narsingh, tired or busy, lets him drive. He’s developed an adoration for the Chrysler, and fancies himself responsible for it as you would a religious object. When at one stage, his master speaks about selling the car, we see his face aghast as if the order of the Universe had broken apart! Rama is like a faithful dog, happy and quick. But Narsingh is the sly wolf.

On the other side of the moral divide, there are the Christians: Joseph, Milli, her lover, their mother. They are egalitarian, caste-critical people full of generosity and disinterestedness, and they delineate Narsingh’s shadiness all the more. Milli loves with a cripple, thus living out Christ’s call to be on the side of the poor and the destitute. Her love, socially, means social salvation for him. Thanks to her and her profession, he won’t be obliged to depend on alms or worse. Joseph too saves his new friend out of a nasty brawl with jealous taxi cabbies in which he has got involved, and warns him about Sukharam’s opium trade. At his arrival in Shyamnager, he takes him to see his family, and they walk past the “Uncle-nephew”, or rock of sins, because a travelling preacher had commented that this unusually balanced rock looked like the weight of sins ready to crush the sinner underneath. At one stage, Narsingh asks Milli about that Christian God of hers, and gets told that the outcome of sins is death. So we are in a moral or religious perspective all along. The film could almost be a sort of Indian Pilgrim’s Progress. This would tie in well with the title of the movie, “the Expedition”: we could then see Narsingh as a kind of Everyman driving himself on the road towards self-accomplishment and truth, now falling into the traps on his way, now being saved by his God-sent friends. But the pious simile stops there, because Ray has made him into a more complex character than the XVIIth century roadside hero.

There is for example the powerful theme of competition in Abhijan. Because of Narsingh’s fiery spirit, he constantly fights (he’s a “warrior”) against other drivers – on the road: the taxi-drivers, the bus-drivers, but also on the rail, and we witness a superbly filmed race between the Chrysler and a train in which he recognises the driver. This vanity makes him of course take risks, and endanger his passengers’ lives. Ray films their faces during one such race, and subtly makes us understand that they are torn between the fear of an accident and pride of having chosen a faster and technologically superior form of transport than the bus and all riff-raff. But when he drives, Narsingh is transformed, he becomes a fearless warrior like his ancestors used to be (Ray at one stage visualizes for us his horseman’s dream), and then knows no rule but speed and bravery. But this attitude attracts the attention of others: the police inspector who takes away his licence (causing him to wander off, deprived of the professional safeguards which a regular job gives) and Sukhanram the opium dealer who sees in his zeal something he might manipulate to his won ends. The risk-taking also has a moral twist to it, because that’s exactly what Sukhanram hints at, saying in a clever sophism that no business is ever straight through and through. If one deals with money, one somehow deals with soil, one has soiled hands. The good businessman is the one who can adapt to the necessary compromises which business demands… In other words, cheating is part of dealing, and one would say, isn’t he right? Who said capitalism was, not the best, but the least bad economic system we had?

Cheating was precisely what Narsingh thought he could not do. The virtues inherent to his caste forbade him any such practice. But Na rsingh doesn’t believe in these virtues deeply. He wishes he could become a warrior once again, because when a warrior wages war, the moral constraints can be shifted due to the existence of higher, war-connected imperatives. What’s the good of a warrior in peace-time? Right at the beginning of the film, in this revealing talk with a barman who tries to talk him into a business partnership, we can see Narsingh in the broken mirror (his flawed personality?) saying:

And this line shows his essential distrust of others, and his solitude as a result. Perhaps this is why, in spite of his unpleasant character, we still feel interested in him: he’s a wounded loner, and one wonders how he’s going to find peace. All he has is his horse, that is, (as he himself jokes to Joseph) the 26 horse-power of his car. That car for him comes to represent his independence, his superiority, and the frequent night-rides that we see him use it for are like his secret in-roads into forbidden lanes. Interesting that Ray films the headlights from in front, so that when Narsingh drives at night, all we see are the two glaring (almost drunken) lights, but the car and himself disappear. Just as the lights shine too brightly in the dark, obscuring everything else around, so does his alcoholic habit blot out his conscience and prepare him for his shady deeds. He hesitates before deciding to accept Sukhanram drug-offer, but the drug of his sick will was already inside him.

So one might say that the film is a drive, a drive around cheating, then deep into cheating and then finally out of cheating. Along this night-drive, he meets the Devil (Sukhanram), whose laughter should have chilled his spine, and whose gun-shaped lighter should have warned him that sin meant spiritual death. He also meets his guardian angel, Joseph, who does all he can to protect him and keep him on the right path. He meets Milli, the bright star, but her light shines in heavens too far above his cloudy gloom. Then he meets Gulabi. She doesn’t seem a positive influence at first sight; compared to Milli the Christian schoolteacher, she’s a tainted woman who is trying to ingratiate herself with Narsingh. The latter’s dreams of elevation can hardly hope to succeed with her. But she is the one he holds on to in the end, isn’t she? And I think the clue to her moral importance in that story she tells about her orphan youth, when she was molested and shut up in a room and almost committed suicide, but found the strength to remain in life in spite of what the future held. She’s really an innocent girl, and if at one stage she’s seen trying to seduce Narsingh, it isn’t, as I’ve read that she’s ready for physical intercourse, but she’s doing this out of a survival instinct. She’s hoping Narsingh will keep her, and anything is better than being some rich man’s pleasure object. Anyway, he’s saved thanks to love, thanks to Gulabi’s love.

Narsingh changes his trajectory when Joseph discovers he’s lied to him. It’s a powerful scene, the warrior’s fall is painful to see, and Ray makes him pathetically run after his guardian angel in order to explain, to say he’s sorry… His head is delineated against the blackening sky, and compared to the Rock of sins close by. But the Rock is also the symbol of Christ (cf. 1 Cor 10,4) who has accepted to carry all men’s sins (2Cor 5,21), so that, when he confronts Joseph’s denouncing eyes, Narsingh is like Peter in the gospel, he cannot but understand that everything he’s done was betrayal. He understands his guilt, and knows he was sinfully proud and vain. He goes back to Sukhanram’s place, gives back the opium he was supposed to deliver, and wrenches Gulabi from her master.

Needless to say that Abhijan is another one of Ray’s masterpieces; this guy has apparently done nothing but that. The special quality of the film is the superb symbolism it displayed and integrates into the story. The car allegory for example contains a wealth of meanings and emotion; it’s almost a living being. And the atmosphere and geography of the Bengal countryside lends the film an eerie quality which sticks to it and isn’t easily forgotten.

Tere ghar ke samne (1963) has a Molièresque quality to it. I don’t know if English-speaking readers know about Molière, but this story of two young lovers who want to marry in spite of their cantankerous fathers immediately made me think of L’Avare, or Le bourgeois gentilhomme, where such situations are standard fare. The line that made the connection was this one, where Sulekha (Nutan)’s father, Seth Karamchand, actually admits he was a fool to counter-bet his arch-enemy Lala Jagganath, for the purchase of a plot where to build his future house:

But foolishness doesn’t stop these rich neighbours from waging a very serious war, a war of influence and bad-tempers, a war of old men stuck in their seriousness. Old men indeed, because both young folk and womenfolk denounce their foolishness, but even if they themselves see it, they won’t budge. Old age is when you are stuck in foolish attitudes which hurt yourself and others, and that you don’t want to change because you think it will imperil your dignity. Compared to some more recent movies, where the stubbornness of fathers seemed rather easily overturned (even if at first it looked formidable), in TGKS it takes an enormous amount of energy, and only the confrontation with the whole town, invited to a wedding which neither father was going to accept, and the public singing of words which appeal to their sense of humanity, make them change finally and accept the dreaded marriage. But the refusal had formerly been so absolute, that in fact the reversal looks a little contrived.

Anyway, the feud between two grumpy grandpas wasn’t, you faithful readers know it, why I had been watching this film. (Here we go again, another Nutan eulogy!!) (I thought he'd gotten over it) (No, sadly he's still smitten) (How can one be so  Nuts about Nutan?) Ahem. Nutan shot this film in 1963, after she had taken leave from the movies to marry and have her son, Mohnish, born on Feb 14 of that year. The film shows how right she was to have come back, and how glorious maternity made her. I could also say, how little it shows that she’d just been a mum. It shows in fact how much she wanted to return to the cinema, because TGKS is a delightful Dev + Nutan powerhouse. Nutan’s exquisite looks are complimented by Dev the charmer’s expressions, and they form a perfect couple. I don’t know what Lieutenant-Commander Behl thought about this quick return to the dazzling limelights! Just look at this:

Doesn't she seem tenderness incarnate? One word has got to be said for the famous scene (and song) in Qutub Minar, the inside of which I have read somewhere has been reconstructed in studio (so that when I was watching the movie, and called my boy to come and have a look because last year when we went there, the tower was no longer open to the public, he probably did not see what the inside really looked like!). The ascent to heaven it represents, with the pauses at the various levels, is peppered with songs filled with allusions, jokes, innuendoes and gags: in short it’s so full of fun that it’s pure joy to watch and rewatch. There’s this delightful moment when Dev is ordered to hush because, taking advantage of their seclusion, he starts praising her appearance. So he complies, and walks up behind his mirthful companion with a finger on his mouth, and she just melts at seeing him.

At one level, hearing all noise fade throughout the building, she stops:

And she says "can you hear the sound of silence?" As far as I'm concerned, I could hear many silent thoughts and feel many silent aspirations... But the expressions on her face, as she focuses on the stillness of the moment, and then on Dev’s remarks that the only noise he can hear are the beats of his heart, are almost too much for a lover of her looks. We have other hilarious moments when they banter and are surprised by other visitors, and they play, like children, pretending they’re suddenly serious, or hide under Dev’s overcoat. At one stage, he gives her his binoculars to watch her brother and his girlfriend flirting down in the grounds. She takes a peep, but Dev is gone somewhere else, and she hands the binoculars to a stranger, before realising he’s accepted the offer, and she has to wrench the thing away from him! She turns around, and her back to him, shakes her hand in a gesture which means, wow, silly me, quick, let’s leave! And she rushes back to an expectant Dev.

They exchange looks, smiles, pranks, reproaches, impressions, giggles, his coat, his cap, her love of life, her fears, her girlish seriousness and her mature fun-loving candour. This climb and descent belongs to the anthology of cinema. It’s probably been done before, but who cares, both actors have pit-patted their way to the top of fame in this scene.

I should perhaps also underline how much Nutan reigns again here. As it’s said later in the film, she’s the granddaughter of the queen of Ayodhya, or perhaps the queen of Ayodhya herself! Nobody’s sure. But what’s sure is that we do have a queenly person in front of us! It’s not because she’s called Rani, but the only person I can think of who comes a little close to Nutan’s charming and fun persona in today’s Bollywood is Rani Mukherjee. She’s perhaps a little too much on the side of fun (Kajol would be too much), and not enough interiorised as an actress, but who else do you see as her aunt’s successor? Nutan is rivalled really only by actresses of her times: Nargis, Meena Kumari, Waheeda Rehman, Madhubala. Shabana Azmi is greater than her in her serious roles, but I’ve yet to see her in lighter ones where Nutan is as much at ease as in her dramatic roles.

As for Dev Anand, I like him more and more. He had a genuine knack for comedy, that’s where he’s at his best, perhaps. And romance. I don’t know too much about drama though. Has he played in more sombre films? I haven’t seen him in any of his later movies. In this one, at any rate, he shines as the dependable young urbanite, whose authority and sense of responsibility manage to tilt the stubbornness of foolish elders.

Here's the song:

I’d like to attract your attention (and at the same time extend my thanks) to Harvey, who recently has made on his blog a wonderful selection of songs on the occasion of Nutan’s birthday. And if you want to see more of Tere ghar ke samne’s photos, refer to the icon on the left banner!

Gulzar’s acclaimed Achanak (Suddenly, 1973) suffers from a bothersome defect, its well-meaning intentions. The film contains much worth, but it is too preoccupied by the demonstration process for its own good. What a film says is as important as how it says it, and what it says is important. But Gulzar uses too much the story in order to demonstrate his argument, instead of letting the story unfold and the message flow out of it naturally. I wonder whether this doesn’t happen because of Gulzar’s honesty as a poet (see his profile here), but I’m not sure, this being the first Gulzar movie I watch. Somebody says that the film is very un-Gulzar like in so far as it doesn’t correspond to his style of subject and contains no songs (Gulzar insists on the high value of music in his movies). Still, if one can put this aside (and many people have been able to do it, apparently!), the film’s can be watched with interest.

The story is that of a valorous officer, Major Ranjeet, played by Vinod Khanna (nice performance), rewarded by a coveted military award for military courage, who comes back home one day only to find his beloved wife in his friend’s arms. He cannot stand it, and kills both of them. He doesn’t evade the law, and surrenders to the police. But while back home to pray for his wife’s soul (a wish the judge – who has condemned him to the death penalty -  has granted him), he is reminded that he had to go and immerse her marriage necklace in the Ganges. He knows the police will not accept the mission, and escapes, deciding to do the job himself.

A manhunt ensues, and the soldier is shot, severely wounded, brought to hospital and, whereas he should have died, survives. The doctor (Om Shivpuri) doesn’t understand, and marvels at the miracle. So does the nurse (a young Farida Jalal), who marvels too, but this time at the pleasant sight in front of her. But when the major’s health is back to normal, the police step in once again, and ask to take him to serve his sentence, death by hanging. The film doesn’t let us imagine any other possibility (in spite of not showing the actual event, and even if some websites say the end is “inconclusive”), and so it diverges away from the source which Gulzar was inspired by, a real event which saw the officer condemned to a prison sentence only.

It does seem that Gulzar wanted to tackle some specific issues, notably that of the death penalty, and of militarism. Because in an aggravation of the real Nanavati case, he makes Ranjeet kill his wife, and stages the hospital “miracle”. Thus he clearly denounces the excesses of a certain type of state justice, which doesn’t consider individual situations. This is strengthened by the fact that Ranjeet’s wife (Lily Chakraborty) is the daughter of Colonel Bakshi (Iftekhar), and that the latter might well feel the impulse to further condemn Ranjeet. But on the contrary, perhaps out of a sense of military duty, he supports Ranjeet, and tries to overturn his sentence at the high court. It doesn’t work, and we see him accept his defeat by wiping his tears. Gulzar is telling us here that even the army can be in favour of a softening of its rules for exceptional individual cases. The attack is therefore clearly directed at the state, and its unrelenting system of police and justice who, it seems, has forgotten its Gandhian model.

The other question the movie addresses is that of the value of human life: the fact that Majoor Ranjeet has successfully been healed from his wounds symbolically means that it was wrong to shoot him, that notwithstanding his crime (made double in the movie), it had some sort of justification. The two cheating lovers deserved their punishment. On top of that, the crisis triggers in Ranjeet a reconsideration of his soldierly attitude. He tells this to his wife, shortly before he kills her (a bit unrealistic, isn’t it? This kind of sequence is an example of what I was mentioning at the beginning, the precedence of the movie’s intentions over the story’s requisites):

This classic scruple of the sensitive soldier is associated here to his outraged feeling of dispossession when he comes to learn of his wife’s unfaithfulness. He kills her, but, paradoxically, remains faithful to her since he will later risk dying by escaping the police and trying at all cost to immerse her necklace in the Ganges. I wonder whether there isn’t here in Ranjeet’s attitude some enactment of what Hinduism considers “right action” or proper sacrifice. From a purely western perspective, his attitude is not very coherent. But according to the principle of duty or renunciation (Tyaga), the hero’s self-justice and then sacrifice is understandable, and explains why Ranjeet is considered redeemed to the point that he doesn’t die of his wounds. At any rate, his story puts forward the question: what is human life worth? Isn’t that life greater than justice seems to hold it? Some  people (Veracious at “So they dance”) say that Gulzar hasn’t developed his criticism of the death penalty as he might have done. It’s true, but he does implicitly ask the question, and clearly the film answers that there are principles of action, which are condemned on the basis of human justice, which deserve another type of justice, less systematic and more open to personal worth. 

One might nevertheless examine the claims of human justice in this story. After all, isn’t the police only doing its duty when it comes to hospital to fetch a person who has been condemned to the maximum sentence? The question might have been, why spend precious time and money healing a man on death row, when one knows that he would have to be executed when back to health? The paradox and contradiction reside in the fact that two sets of laws conflict here. One of them suspends the enforcement of justice for any individual who is deemed in need of medical care, because to function justice needs the health and understanding of the condemned person; the other underlines the fact that killing is worse than wounding, and that it doesn’t make any difference if the executed person was wounded once he’s dead. Justice allows the restorative medical care of its wrongdoers, because it prides itself on being humane, but this principle finds its limit precisely concerning death penalty. If this penalty can be considered humane, more humane than life imprisonment, for example, why care about the physical health of the condemned? One has to say that the human body (and all it stands for) is giving its silent lesson to human justice: the death penalty is a violence which should not be applied in a civilised society where one values human health and human integrity in general. The proof if this is given in Achanak.

There is still one difficulty in the movie: Ranjeet looks like a sort of mouthpiece for a more compassionate justice. Yet he’s the one who murders two people! Can it be right to take his stance concerning the absurdity of war and the killing of unknown enemies on the one hand, and accept his bloody revenge on his wife and friend? Isn’t an independent justice, with its universal laws, absolutely necessary, even if in some extreme cases, it becomes inhuman? I’d say that the film’s interesting in that it leaves this contradiction unanswered: Ranjeet is in the middle of it and suffers from it, as we all do. We all strive for an answer.

C.I.D (Raj Khosla, 1956), starring Dev Anand, Shakila and Waheeda Rehman, unlike some other classic golden-age B’wood stuff, has been amply reviewed, and very aptly so too. Leading the gang is Corey Creekmur, at UIOWA.edu, who writes an extremely well-informed analysis of the Guru Dutt production. It’s a masterful historical and artistic contextualisation review, where Creekmur underlines the influence of the Navketan cinematographic Institute, and focuses on the meaning of the songs as part of the Circle and encircling symbolism of the movie. In dustedoff’s review one will find a summary of the action and a very good description of the rhythm of the movie, a feature which all commentators have underlined. Madhu also solves the riddle of the dumb parrot! On thebollywoodfan’s blog, you will discover a very interesting account of the « communication etiquette » in the film, and Sharmi at oldfilmsgoingthreadbare will explain why she likes a movie she has seen 23 times! So, coming after all these reviews, what can I say? I enjoyed the film, of course, who can’t, but aren’t I at risk, like Richard S., to admit that everything has been said (especially after Corey’s fantastic job)?

Well, that’s where a masterpiece is a masterpiece. You can always find new things to say about it! Since everybody underlined the movie’s pace, and its clever balance of suspense and romance, its easy style, its “top-notch execution” (as Sharmi puts it), I thought I had to go and look at why all this was so well done, and where the smoothness all comes from. So this is what you’re going to read about: C.I.D.’s mechanism. As Corey Creekmur puts it, “Much of the film takes place at night and in deep shadows, and a consistent pattern of framing encloses “trapped” characters within windows and behind bars.” Yes, indeed, but what he doesn’t say (or not enough) is that the whole movie is based on the structure of hunting, traps and escapes. It’s the story of a hunter, inspector Shekar (Dev), who tries to trap the villains, but gets trapped as a result, and therefore has to escape that trap, before entering the trapper’s trap and trapping him! C.I.D. is like a game of cat and mouse, only one doesn’t know who’s the cat and who’s the mouse. Or you might say it’s like snakes and ladders: when you think you’ve climbed out, you’re precipitated down again!

What is a trap? It’s a mechanical device whereby you can catch an enemy or troublesome opponent in such a way that he knows he’s been caught only after  he's caught. You’re using this ignorance as the means to lead him to his detention or worse. In almost all such pursuits, the prey senses that “something” is going to happen to it. The element of ruse means that a certain time is required before the trap can work, and in that time, the prey can react and try to avoid it.  Now this is why this technique is essentially cinematographical: the cinema uses this duration before the catch climax, and that's called suspense. And once inside a trap, another type of suspense is created, because now escape can take place. Countless stories use  situations of “impossible escape” which nevertheless happen.

In keeping with this first aspect, the romantic pattern also takes the form of a pursuit, where women are like spiders on their web (Bollywoodfan says “Through the case-solving process, though, he is caught in a web of lies”), the queen of spiders being of course Kamini (an entrancing Waheeda), who ensnares the poor little cop until she gets trapped herself, as we shall see. Hunting the baddies, Shekar is busy at the same time laying his own personal traps, and not too long after, he manages to catch Rekha (Shakila), after she had first succeeded to catch him unawares (the episode of the car pursuit at the beginning). It wasn't so clear then whether Dev was going to be a goodie all along (see the rather scary pic below)! Personal beauty and seductiveness belong to this trap-structure too. And this isn’t reserved to women: the handsome inspector’s good looks turn him into a dishy bait as well!

The film is like a game of chess (or hide and seek) between the two adversaries: Shekar, and Dharamdas the villainous mayor who pulls the strings of power and corruption, and who had started the story by having the Bombay newspaper editor (presumably about to reveal facts about him) assassinated. Who’ll be the cleverer of the two? Who will manage to catch the other at his own game? The film focuses first on the initial moves of the two players, with a decisive advantage for Dharamdas, who manages to trap Shekar, and have him condemned for killing his suspect in prison. With the help of his female assistant (Kamini, what a queen on his board!) he seems to be able to play with Shekar as he wishes, drugging him and transporting him here and there at will. But he knows that his opponent will eventually reach the “House” where he was once driven, and where the queen spider (and her telephone threads) reigns among a bevy of silent submissive women.

And this is the arch-trap: Dharamdas knows that Shekar (having escaped the trap of the court condemnation) will want to come there to find the information he needs. He tells Kamini to expect him. But Shekar arrives wounded, and Kamini falls into this new trap: pity for the handsome Dev! (more on this later on) So when he wakes up, having been looked after and almost healed, he cannot believe at first that she isn’t up to some kind of new trick. But anyway, he’s got to accept her version, because the owner is now coming, ready to close the trap on him. What can be done, wonders Kamini, now free from her boss’s spell? Escape, of course! But Shekar has now honed his strategy: he’s staying, he’s sacrificing himself to trap the trapper (at chess, sacrifices are often the only move a player doesn’t foresee). He knows that Dharamdas is counting on his fear, he knows he’s inside his enemy’s lair, and therefore assumed vulnerable. So his best move is to stay, and outtrap him. Meanwhile, Kamini tries to ward off the danger, and stop her evil master from finding Shekar (the famous song Kahin Pe Nigahe Kahi Pe Nishana), but the confrontation is inevitable.

It happens in the trap of traps, Dharamdas’s cellar, which opens with a secret mechanism and a lifting trapdoor. According to his sacrificial strategy, Shekar enters the trap, becomes the prey and waits for the revelation: the villain’s face. Everything depends on this, because Shekar now has a witness with him, who will be able to testify in court, like Master (Johnny Walker), the petty thief who had been present when the Bombay newspaper editor had been murdered, and who was instrumental in nailing the murderer. So the cop should see his enemy, and hopefully, not be seen by him. But, inside the cellar, Dharamdas switches on the light! What’s Shekar next move? Switch it off? No, break the light! And this indeed enables the fleeing pair to escape the villain, who sees them too late. The metaphor of light and darkness is essential to the “film noir” (and is enhanced by the black and white cinema): it dramatizes the heuristic dimension of the enquiry, and here it is associated to the judicial necessity of visual proof. But light can of course be deceptive, and evidence manipulated. So it is coherent that the villain is discovered in darkness instead!

One might also add (while we’re at it) that Master, the comical thief played by Johnny Walker, increases the importance of the theme: as a pickpocket, he needs to be invisible, or at least to be unseen, when he steals, and the same is valid for Dharamdas and his female counterpart, who in a very Hitchcockian fashion, we only see from the back at first. But this aspect connects also with the trap structure: indeed, if you see the trap, it ceases to be one. Traps have an essential invisibility, and so have hunters, up to a degree. If one wants to trick the hunter, one has to fade, or darken. Within this symbolic frame, what, then, can act as a revelation agent? Shall we say darkness reveals? But full darkness is purely negative; there has to be some object, in the darkness, which can see or be seen.

The film answers, I believe, by saying that feelings are the revealing agents. When it’s dark, you have to recognise your way by feeling around you. You have to trust these feelings, because feelings are born and exist in the dark of one’s self, and they “see” with their own radiance when normal light is blind or absent. For example, Rekha knows that Shekar is innocent. Her “conscience” tells her so. And her father, the superintendant of police (K.N. Singh), scoffs at that sort of knowledge. He has no idea that feelings contain a truth and a proof which is far clearer than visible and factual evidence. And how does Shekar finally win? He wins because Master the thief tells him he has to escape from the trap Dharamdas has laid for him. Without this suggestion, Shekar was going to remain tied to the “innocent gentleman” who had bailed him out. But what has fastened the bond that exists between him and Shekar? Shekar’s trust. Indeed, when Master had been arrested because he had been seen in the room where the murder was accomplished, Shekar had told his subordinate to let him go, because he knew that he was just a petty thief. This bond of trust, spoken at that critical moment, when suspicion might well have overruled it, and the principle of precaution might well have prevailed, was crucial later on for Shekar.

Now, Kamini’s change from darkness to light should not be only categorised as a commercial arrangement. When C. Creekmur writes: “C.I.D. remains a commercial Hindi film: it can’t quite allow its femme fatale to be really bad, and redeems her in the end”, it's true, but we might add that she changes also thanks to the process of pity, which has been called the most elemental of all human feelings. Having had to look after Shekar’s injury, she is no longer his enemy; his suffering has been stronger than her antagonism. The human heart retains some seeds of goodness, one might say. But it faces daily the risks of violence and lying. The fact that the film was so often linked to Guru Dutt’s influence allows one to put it within his conception of the individual as oppressed by the crowds, of his denunciation of urban wrongs, all things which are connected to the song Aye dil hai mushkil jeena yahan sung by Master the thief in C.I.D. , where he suggests that Bombay’s perilous society makes it difficult to live there.

There are probably many other aspects which I have overlooked, but in order to ascertain this, you have to watch (or watch again) the mysterious and beautiful C.I.D.!