Guru Dutt : Director par excellence

When Guru Dutt’s ‘Pyasa’ was released in 1957, we, as high school students, watched it with great enthusiasm. It is the story of a poet and his eternal thirst for love and fame. A spectator in North India watched the film 60 times continuously and went mad. He was a poet and that was the impact of the movie on the audience those days. I have been watching DVDs of ‘Pyasa’ and ‘Kagaz ke Pool’, two of the greatest films made by Guru Dutt, at regular intervals. Guru Dutt was born on July 9, 1925, at Bangalore and brought up at Culcatta (Kolkata). After working for a while as a journalist, he joined the Dance Academy of Uday Shankar at Almore; but he could not stay there for long as his restless mind kept urging him to go to tinsel world as his heart and mind were always in film-making.

He went to Poona (Pune) and joined Prabhat Studio. There was another aspiring to join the film world as a leading actor, Dev Anand. They came together and a great friendship developed between them. To quote Dev Anand: “The two young bachelors got into each other’s shirts because of a washer man’s folly, both on the threshold of film careers, were soon to become very close friends – intimate, inseparable, sharing each other’s secrets and dedicated to a pledge that if one became famous earlier than the other, the former would give the latter the ‘break’ he rightly deserved”.
As Dev Anand became famous earlier than Guru Dutt, he honoured the pledge and Guru Dutt was asked to direct ‘Baazi’, a film produced by Dev Anand under his Navketan banner in 1953. It was the first film directed by Guru Dutt and it was successful at the box office. Soon, he established his own banner, ‘Guru Dutt Films Pvt Ltd.,’ and started producing films of different kind.

Dev Anand said ‘Deep- seated within him was a tremendous ambition to fight against the stereotyped set of conventionalism of the early fifties, to be original and different’. As Abrar Ali, one of the closest associates of Guru Dutt, reveals, “Guru Dutt used to say that it is difficult to make successful films which cater to box office alone. The difficulty arises when purposeful films have to be shaped to succeed at the box office”. Guru Dutt produced the films under his banner, keeping these two things in mind (purposeful and successful).

He could produce only 8 films and most of them were not only different from the stereo- typed films but also successful at the box office. These were ‘Baazi’(1953), ‘Aar Par’(1954)’Mr. and “Mr. and Mrs. 55” (1955), ‘CID’(1956), ‘Pyasa’(1957), ‘Kagaz ke Phool’(1959), ‘Chaudvin ka Chand’(1960), ‘Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam’(1962). Three of them stand out: ‘Pyasa’, ‘Kagaz ke Phool’ and ‘Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam’.

‘Pyasa’ narrates the story of a poet, and film critic Maithili Rao says:”He is the spiritual descendant of Devdas, the self-destructive romantic”. He is an unsuccessful poet whose works are not accepted by conventional editors, publishers who want only poems of love. He has had no income since he left college and his two brothers hate him because he earns nothing. Except his mother, nobody shows any concern for him. The only person who understands, appreciates and loves his poetry is Gulab, a highly refined prostitute.

Slowly the drama is built around the poet Vijay(Guru Dutt), his lady love Gulab(Waheeda Rehman), his one-time lover Meena(Mala Sinha); and her husband, Mr Ghosh(Rehman), publishes the poems of Vijay under the impression that Vijay died in a train accident. When Vijay appears at the book-launching function of his poems, pandemonium breaks out where the poet starts singing ‘mere saamnese hatalo a duniya’(take this world away from my sight).

Vijay refuses to reveal his identity to the world which is so cruel and selfish, and wants to go away to a far-off place, far from the madding crowd, along with Gulab. The film depicts the cruelty of the materialistic world towards a sensitive poet. The songs written by Sahir and tuned by SD Burman are still reverberating in the ears of music lovers.

Another outstanding film ‘Kagaz ke Phool’ is auto- biographical. Guru Dutt put his own life on celluloid as a director. This is the story of the rise and fall of a film director, Guru Dutt himself. At the end of the film, once a famous director but now a destitute dies in a film studio sitting in the director’s chair. Ironically, Guru Dutt died in the same manner.
‘Kagaz ke Phool’ was the first film to be made in cinemascope. It failed at the box office. Guru Dutt’s self- confidence was shattered. As ‘Pyasa’ was a big hit, Guru Dutt had expected that ‘Kagaz ke Phool’, made in the same genre, would also become a hit.

Guru Dutt refused to direct any other film produced under his banner. After ‘Kagaz ke Phool’, two films ‘Chaudvin ka Chand’ and ‘Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam’ were made under Guru Dutt Films Banner but directed by M Sadiq and Abrar Ali, respectively. ‘Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam’ was another classic which did reasonably well at the box office. It was based on the Bengali novel by Bimal Mitra of the same title. Though this film was not directed by Guru Dutt, we see his impact on every frame.

This movie tells the story of a Zamindar (Rehman) and his estranged wife (Meena Kumari) and their servant (Guru Dutt). We see Meena Kumari at her histrionic best as an estranged wife of a cruel husband. When admirers of Guru Dutt were expecting many more great films from him, they heard of his demise on October 10, 1964, and that he had committed suicide. As Dev Anand says about his friend: “Guru Dutt, as the creator, is as big as any of his great colleagues in his field; so we can say and console ourselves with the fact that Guru Dutt is not really dead – he is very much alive in the hearts of men and women who came under the magic of his craft; and alive he shall remain as long as our memory survives”.

Bunny Reuben, a well-known film critic, tells us that “on 10th October 1964, not just Guru Dutt died, a part of the soul of every sensitive man died. A part of the future of Indian cinema died.”

Ampashayya Naveen

(This article is to mark the centenary of the Indian cinema)
www.ampashayyanaveen.com