Bhowani Junction

I mentioned recently that MGM was good at literary adaptations, especially when the studio got the chance to be glossy. As the 1950s and Cinemascope came around, they also weren't bad at location shooting. A film that fits into the latter category is Bhowani Junction.

The opening titles inform us that MGM would like to thank the government of Pakistan for allowing the studio to use one of Pakistan's railway lines as well as a regiment of the Pakistani army. The movie was made a bit less than a decade after India gained its independence from the UK and was partitioned into India and Pakistan. Since the region in the 1950s wasn't that cinematically interesting, we go back to 1947, or just before independence. Stewart Granger plays Rodney Savage, a colonel in the British Army who has just been called back to the UK. He's trying to get a mixed-race woman, Victoria Jones (Ava Gardner), to go back to the UK with him, and as he steps onto the train, cue up the flashback as to why he wants to take her back to the UK....

Britain had always used locals to help run their colonies, and with the sheer number of political subdivisions in India, this made things fractious. Things became even tougher for the Brits once they were sucked into World War II, and the Indians, under Gandhi, took their opportunity to step up the pressure on the British. Col. Savage is stationed at Bhowani, site of an important railway junction. This is where he meets Victoria, who's father is a British railway engineer who married a local woman and had a mixed-race child.

Victoria meets one of the superintendents at the railway station, Patrick Taylor (Bill Travers), who like her is mixed-race. Both of them realize the problems this presents for them, as they get the sense that they won't fit in to the new India once it becomes independent, while at the same time they know that the upper-class British represented by people like Col. Savage will look down upon them should she go to England after Indian independence. And especially so in Patrick's case there's the dilemma of whether to be faithful to his employer in the railroad, or to throw his lot in with the independence activists who are trying to disrupt the railroad. Savage has a lot fewer qualms about who to treat those who would disrupt the railroad.

And then one of Savage's men, Capt. McDaniel, runs into Victoria one night. He too is taken with her beauty, and tries to force himself on her. Victoria tries to defend herself, but winds up killing McDaniel in the process and finding herself in need of protection by the other Indians. The independence campaign grows more violent, and now they have a pawn in Victoria....

Bhowani Junction is a movie that's beautifully filmed, although one wonders how much resemblance it bears to the real situation in India just before independence. There's also the question of casting Ava Gardner as a mixed-race Anglo-Indian. Some people hew to the idea that a mixed-race character can only really be played by someone of the non-white half of the race. I'm not really one of those people, but at the same time I recognize that some stars would be much less plausible than others trying to play mixed-race. (Imagine if MGM had tried to cast Debbie Reynolds as Victoria.)

The story in Bhowani Junction is absorbing enough for what it is, although again I have a feeling some people are going to have a decided problem with the way it tackles (or sidesteps; this is MGM, after all) difficult issues. At the same time, Hollywood of the mid-1950s was probably never going to come up with something truly authentic. In that light, Bhowani Junction definitely succeeds within its genre. Whether that genre is to your particular case is another issue.