Page 166 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

From Calcutta to Cannes 153

are as urgent as great ones, when some trivial incident, a letter,
a train passing, the wind singing in a telegraph pole, can seem
to last eternally.

But it was in the United States, the following autumn, that
Pather Panchali had its biggest success – on a scale that no other
film by Ray would ever again enjoy outside of Bengal. It had
already won an award for Best Film and Direction at the 1957
San Francisco Film Festival. Now, in September 1958, dis-
tributed by the loyal Harrison, the film opened at the Fifth
Avenue Cinema in New York. Ray, who had been invited to
the United States by Robert Flaherty’s widow for the Flaherty
film seminar in Vermont, was present in the theatre lobby for
the opening night. In 1982, he recalled the occasion in Sight
and Sound:

I watched the audience surge out of the theatre blear-eyed
and visibly shaken. An hour or so later, in the small hours,
came the morning edition of the New York Times. It car-
ried Bosley Crowther’s review of my film. Crowther was

the doyen of New York critics, with power to make or mar

a film’s prospects as a saleable commodity. Crowther was
unmoved by Pather Panchali. In fact, he said the fi lm was
so amateurish that ‘it would barely pass for a rough cut in
Hollywood.’ Later, he had second thoughts as letters poured
in to say how wrong he was. Th e film ran for eight months.

And yet I know Crowther was not wholly wrong. Judged on
the level of craftsmanship, there was much that was wrong
with my fi lm.

It is worth looking closely at Crowther’s review, which was by
no means all negative, because it is a quintessential example of
a clash between film cultures that remains more than pertinent
half a century later. Ray had decided back in 1950, when he
started Pather Panchali after seeing Bicycle Thieves and The Rules

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