Page 170 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

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was ‘largely an illusion’. (Hence, probably, Crowther’s doubt in
his review about whether the film was ‘performed’ or ‘pictured’
by its cast.) But as rapidly became obvious, when the second
and third parts of the trilogy appeared in the United States,
the Flaherty tradition had little or nothing to do with Ray’s
work. Indeed Ray wrote practically nothing about Flaherty, and
hardly mentioned his documentaries during my many hours of
conversations with him.
Some of those US critics who had waxed ecstatic about the
first film, such as Croce, found its sequels to be more conven-
tional and less exciting. Reviewing The World of Apu, she wrote:
‘he is still a poet, and an exceptionally sensitive one, but his best
energies have gone into transcending the dramatic conceptions
of his script rather than in embodying them.’ This feeling of
disappointment with Ray’s gradual abandonment of lyricism
would lose him many of his early admirers after the early 1960s.
But the most perceptive American critical response came from
Paul Beckley writing in the New York Herald Tribune in 1960
about The World of Apu: ‘The connoisseur must feel a kind of
glow of surprised enthusiasm at the endless rightness of Ray’s
effects. If they seem in the beginning merely happy, the end-
less aptness soon makes clear that chance could have little place
in the making of a work so beautifully controlled. Yet it is not
entirely adequate to speak of control, rather a sort of constancy
of inspiration.’
The director Martin Scorsese, then a teenager, remarked
of that hopeful period in the cinema when directors such as
Ray, Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Godard,
Truffaut and Andrzej Wajda were at the height of their creative
powers:

One of the great cinematic experiences of my life was in the
very early sixties when I watched the complete Apu Trilogy in
a New York theatre ... I was as totally absorbed as one would
be reading a great epic novel. Satyajit Ray’s ability to turn the

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