jackranch

This was a pretty good movie. It was nowhere near as good as the amazing Pyaasa, which is one of the best movies ever in my opinion. This movie is the timeless story of a man trying to find acceptance and love. There are weak parts but they are overcome by the script and the excellent actors, especially Dutt regular Johny Walker. Shyama and Shakila both provided good performances and I would love to see them in a movie that was more focused on them. The DVD I had was very poor quality. It was one of the Forever Classics in the Yash Raj collection and the subtitling was way off. There appear to be at least 3 different versions on DVD, hopefully the others are better quality. All in all you cannot go wrong with Guru Dutt. If you haven't seen one of his movies before, you should definitely try Pyaasa first and then check this one out.

This movie began in such a terrible way that I almost turned it off after 10 minutes but I stuck with it and it got considerably better. There are some inspired bits of comedy to go along with some fairly pointy comments on the rights of women, Hindi-Muslim relations and corrupt human beings. It is a bit schizophrenic in the way that it seesaws from absurdist comedy to ultra serious drama in a matter of seconds. This is not a great movie but if you are looking for something where you won't have to think a lot, this will work for a couple of hours of entertainment. Overall I thought the cast did a good job with the material they were given to work with. 6/10