Page 80 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

An Epic in Production 67

necklace into a bamboo grove – an image that Ray knew would
lack impact on screen. The idea of using the pond weeds in this
way struck Ray one day at the location when he and the team
were again ‘picnicking’ during a patch of wrong weather. He
was unmindfully throwing pebbles into the pond. ‘Suddenly I
noticed this phenomenon happening.’ Instead of pebbles, why
not the necklace? He almost jumped up in excitement. Along
with the snake that crawls into Harihar’s deserted house – which
is not in the novel at all – these two touches are Ray’s masterly
solution to the problem of how to maintain interest after the
audience knows that Apu’s family is soon to leave their home.
About six months after Monroe Wheeler’s visit to Calcutta, he
sent emissaries to check out Ray’s progress on the film. Wheeler’s
friend the director John Huston had actually come to India in
search of locations for The Man Who Would Be King. The first
Bengali he met as he stepped off the Pan Am flight at Calcutta’s
airport was Ray’s friend in advertising, R. P. Gupta, who had
learned of Huston’s visit through his employment at J. Walter
Thompson, which handled the Pan Am account. With Gupta as
intermediary, Ray went to see Huston at his hotel – the same one
as used by Renoir – and Huston asked if he could show him some
rough cut of his film. Having warned him of the poor technical
quality, Ray showed about half an hour of silent footage, avoid-
ing scenes with substantial dialogue and concentrating on the
visual highlights, especially the scene with the two children and
the train. According to Ray, Huston thought it ‘a fine, sincere
piece of film-making’ but warned him against showing too much
wandering. ‘The audience gets restive. They don’t like to be kept
waiting too long before something happens.’ Just before his death
in 1987, Huston recalled: ‘I recognised the footage as the work
of a great film-maker. I liked Ray enormously on first encounter.
Everything he did and said supported my feelings on viewing the
film.’ His reaction was supported by that of another American
visitor to Calcutta, Edgar Kaufmann, Jr, from the Museum of
Modern Art, who reported in November 1954 to Richard Griffith,

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