GANDHI (1982) C widescreen 188m dir: Richard Attenborough

w/Ben Kingsley, John Gielgud, Rohini Hattangady, Roshan Seth, Candice Bergen, Edward Fox, Trevor Howard, John Mills, Martin Sheen, Ian Charleson, Gunther Maria Halmer, Athol Fugard, Saeed Jaffrey, Geraldine James, Alyque Padamsee, Amrish Puri, Ian Bannen, Michael Bryant, John Clements, Richard Griffiths, Nigel Hawthorne, Bernard Hepton, Michael Hordern, Shreeram Lagoo, Om Puri, Virendra Razdan, Richard Vernon, Harsh Nayyar, Prabhakar Patankar, Vijay Kashyap, Nigam Prakash, Supriya Pathak, Neena Gupta, Shane Rimmer, Peter Harlowe, Anang Desai, Winston Ntshona, Peter Cartwright, Marius Weyers, Richard Mayes, Alok Nath, Dean Gasper, Ken Hutchison, Norman Chancer, Gulshan Kapoor, Charu Bala Chokshi, Raj Chaturvedi, Avpar Jhita, Anthony Sagger, David Gant, Daniel Day-Lewis, Ray Burdis, Daniel Peacock, Avis Bunnage, Caroline Hutchison, Mohan Agashe, Sudhanshu Mishra, Dina Nath, John Savident, John Patrick, Michael Godley, Stewart Harwood, Stanley McGeagh, Christopher Good, David Markham, Jyoti Sarup, John Naylor, Wilson George, Hansu Mehta, Sudarshan Sethi, Sunila Pradhan, Moti Makan, Jalal Agha, Rupert Frazer, Manohar Pitale, Homi Daruvala, K.K. Raina, Vivek Swaroop, Raja Biswas, Dominic Guard, Bernard Hill, Rama Kant Jha, Nana Palsikar, Alpna Gupta, Chandrakant Thakkar, John Quentin, Graham Seed, Keith Drinkel, Bob Babenia, Gerald Sim, Colin Farrell, Sanjeev Puri, Gareth Forwood, Vijay Crishna, Sankalp Dubey, James Cossins, Gurcharan Singh, John Vine, Geoffrey Chater, Ernest Clark, Habib Tanvir, Pankaj Mohan, Subhash Gupta, Aadil, Rajeshwar Nath, S.S. Thakur, Rahul Gupta, Barry John, Brian Oulton, James Snell, John Boxer, Gerard Norman, Bernard Horsfall, Richard Leech, Pankaj Kapur, Tarla Mehta, David Sibley, Dalip Tahil, Stanley Lebor, Terrence Hardiman, Monica Gupta, Jon Croft, William Hoyland, John Ratzenberger, Jack McKenzie, Tom Alter, Jane Myerson, Roop Kumar Razdan, Bani Joshi, Vagish Kumar Singh, Dilsher Singh, Sudhir Dalvi, Tilak Raj, Irpinder Puri, Pren Kapoor, Vinay Apte, Aswani Kumar, Avinash Dogra, Shreedhar Joshi, Suhas Palshiker, Karkirat Singh, Shekhar Chatterjee, Amarjeet, Pratap Desai, Bhatawadekar Prakash, Sunil Shende, Rovil Sinha

From the contemporary review of the film in Variety:

"The canvas upon which the turmoil of India, through its harshly won independence in 1947 from British rule, is, as depicted by Richard Attenborough, bold, sweeping, brutal; tender, loving and inspiring. He has juggled the varied emotional thrusts with generally expert balance.

"Attenborough and scenarist John Briley agreed to attempt to capture the 'spirit' of the man and his times, and in this they succeed admirably. Ben Kingsley, the British (half-Indian) actor, who portrays the Mahatma from young manhood as a lawyer in South Africa, is a physically striking Gandhi and has captured nuances in speech and movement which make it seem as though he has stepped through black and white newsreels into the present Technicolor reincarnation.

"From the time he first experiences apartheid in being unceremoniously booted off a train in South Africa after obtaining his law degree in London, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi becomes a man with a mission --- a peaceful mission to obtain dignity for every man, no matter his color, creed, nationality.

"While the focus of the drama is naturally on the person of Kingsley who gives a masterfully balanced and magnetic portrayal of Gandhi, the unusually large cast, some with only walk-through roles, responds nobly. Calling for individual mention are Edward Fox as General Dyer; Candice Bergen as Margaret Bourke-White; Geraldine James as devoted disciple Mirabehn; John Gielgud as Lord Irwin; Trevor Howard as Judge Broomfield; John Mills as The Viceroy; Rohini Hattangady as Mrs. Gandhi; Roshan Seth as Nehru, and Athol Fugard as General Smuts."

For comparison, a somewhat different view of the film from The Movie Guide:

"Despite an intelligent title performance by Ben Kingsley and impressive cinematography in the manner of David Lean, this huge, clunky biopic offers less than meets the eye. Director Attenborough seeks not to understand but to canonize his subject; as a result, both Gandhi's teachings and the complexities of Indian political history are distorted and trivialized. ... The film is at its best in its several melodramatic, large-scale 'epic' sequences (Salt March, post-Partition riots, assassination), but Gandhi remains a saintly cypher; other major figures are even more carelessly drawn; e.g., Nehru, who appears as a colorless Gandhi disciple (he was anything but), and Pakistan founder Jinnah, who comes off as a Muslim Darth Vader. African playwright Athol Fugard (Master Harold and the Boys) appears as General Smuts; Candice Bergen is fun in a cameo as American photographer Margaret Bourke-White."

And for the final word, Martin Scorsese: "Scorsese Screens: April 2021": from the Turner Classic Movies website (www.tcm.com):

"I recently took another look at Gandhi, Sir Richard Attenborough’s 1982 film about one of the most inspiring figures of the 20th century. At the time, it was treated as an event, an epic in the vein of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. It took many years to get a film about Gandhi made (at one point Lean was going to direct). When Attenborough came aboard, he cast a theatrically trained actor of half-Gujarati descent, Ben Kingsley, in the lead. The film was a box-office hit, a multiple-award winner and it justifiably made a star out of Sir Ben, with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working on two pictures.

"As it always happens when a film is so successful, there was a backlash: it was conventional and stodgy; it was partially subsidized by the Indian government; it presented a whitewashed portrait of Gandhi, etc. As time goes on, judgments about what’s conventional and what isn’t start to fade away, and you can see very clearly how timebound they are. Attenborough, who started as an actor in the ‘40s and very quickly became one of the most popular actors in British cinema, brought a rare level of emotional intelligence and articulation to the pictures he directed. And by the time he made Gandhi, he already had Young Winston and A Bridge Too Far to his credit, so he’d had experience with large-scale action and masses of people.

"The level of craft in Gandhi seems extraordinary today, and so does its spiritual force. Does it 'idealize' Gandhi? Probably --- look closely enough at anyone and you’ll find their flaws. And if the film had gone into more detail about the human contradictions in Gandhi’s character, what would it have served? Attenborough and Kingsley and John Briley, who wrote the screenplay, wanted to focus on the qualities that inspired people when Gandhi was alive and that went on to inspire Martin Luther King and many, many others. At a certain point, you have to make choices, and the life of the film has to part ways with the life depicted. The question becomes, how much conviction do the filmmakers bring to translating those choices into cinema?

"There are many examples of mediocre pictures that take officially sanctioned points of view and just serve them to the audience, and that’s it. Gandhi is very far from that type of cynicism. I could point to many extraordinary moments, but the scene that really struck me this last time and that’s haunted me ever since comes near the end of the picture. A Hindu man confesses to Gandhi that he has killed a Muslim child in anger and wonders how he can live with himself. 'I have a way out,' says Gandhi, who instructs the man to find an orphan boy, adopt him ... and raise him as a Muslim. Did it really happen that way? I don’t know. But I do know that the force of the scene cuts through hatred, particularly the kind of hatred expressed so freely right now, like a knife."

GANDHI was awarded eight Oscars: Best Picture, Director, Actor (Kingsley), Original Screenplay (Briley), Cinematography (Billy Williams, Ronnie Taylor), Art Direction (Stuart Craig, Bob Laing, Michael Seirton), Editing (John Bloom), and Costume Design (John Mollo, Bhanu Athaiya). It was also nominated for Best Original Score (Ravi Shankar, George Fenton), Sound (Gerry Humphries, Robin O'Donoghue, Jonathan Bates, Simon Kaye), and Makeup (Tom Smith).