Page 169 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

156 The Apu Trilogy

first review. He also now mentioned that the film had received
the backing of John Huston in its rough-cut form, four years
before its US release. But he could not wholly accept the fact
that Pather Panchali owed little or nothing to Hollywood,
and so could not be judged by Hollywood’s criteria for suc-
cess. Crowther therefore concluded his second review some-
what lamely: ‘This is a picture of India of a sort we have not
yet had – not even in Jean Renoir’s The River nor in Robert
Flaherty’s Elephant Boy. This is a communication of human
experience out of the heart and fibre of Bengal. It is a univer-
sal experience, appropriate to the screens of the world.’ Even
so, Crowther selected Pather Panchali as one of his best for-
eign films of 1958, and repeated this recommendation in 1959
and 1960, for Aparajito and The World of Apu, when they were
released in New York. In the early 1960s, he became a com-
mitted admirer of Ray’s films.
Several other US critics felt rather similarly to Crowther, but
the majority American verdict was that Pather Panchali had, in
Ray’s much later words, ‘irresistible human appeal’, whatever its
cultural opacities for the West and its technical rough edges.
Time magazine called it ‘perhaps the finest piece of filmed folk-
lore since Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North’; the New Yorker
spoke of ‘a demonstration of what a man can do with a camera
and an idea if he really puts his mind to it’; whilst Arlene Croce
in Film Culture observed: ‘I don’t know anyone who hasn’t seen
Pather Panchali. ... Whatever else [Ray] may achieve, he has given
world cinema one of its monuments.’
The association of Ray with Flaherty by some critics – first
stated by Lotte Eisner in her Cannes Festival diary – both
helped the commercial success of Pather Panchali and hindered
its artistic appreciation in the United States. In the opinion
of the historian Chandak Sengoopta, ‘reviewer after reviewer
imagined it to be a Flahertyesque chronicle of real life in rural
India’ – with the parts presumably played by genuine villag-
ers, rather than actors from the city – despite the fact that this

9/16/2010 9:09:25 PM
Robinson_Ch08.indd 156 9/16/2010 9:09:25 PM
Robinson_Ch08.indd 156