Gandhi

All the details of the DVD are listed on the back of the white plastic case. The actual DVD case itself is in a wonderfully regal dark gold color, and the back picture is of the train sequence, with the words "Be the change you wish to see" beautifully etched across the skyline. Indeed, I have never come across a packaging for a disc that has so aptly captured the film's sentiment. On this front, I give the disc a full five stars.

However, the DVD itself smacks of hypocrisy. I find that everytime a reviewer gives this disc a low star rating due to the fact that the DVD blatantly insults the fact that Gandhi spoke Hindi and that all the main actors (save for Ben) were Indian, people are quick to claim that the review was 'not useful'. I am not sure why this is, but the truth is that this is very much an Indian film, with all the important roles played by Indian actors, and yet there is not ONE mention of ANY of their names on the DVD packaging. Candice Bergen, who appears for just eight minutes on screen, is given prime billing next to Ben Kingsley, while Rohini Hattangady, a beautiful Indian actress who plays the Mahatma's wife and was onscreen for most of the three hour film, is not mentioned even once on the DVD.

When you click on 'Cast and Crew', it is even more horrifying. Not even ONE of the actors mentioned are Indian. ALL of the actors listed are white. The great Alyque Padamsee who played Jinnah, the wonderful Roshan Seth who played Nehru, the incredibly talented Saeed Jaffrey who played Sardar Patel - all of them are not even mentioned ONCE. Considering that they appear throughout the film, this is a horrendous insult to the Indian film crew. However, consider it typical American studio idiocy, for Martin Sheen and Trevor Howard (both of whom pop up at the beginning and the next-to-end) get full page biographies and filmographies. This is intolerable.

This is especially disturbing, because this is exactly the sort of vapid Western-minded stupidity and xenophobia that Mahatma Gandhi fought against. Any self-respecting Indian would flush this occidental abomination down the drain. To add to the insult, the DVD does not even bother to mention that 'Gandhi' was shot simultaneously in English and Hindi. The Hindi version was the one released to millions of people in India, and the one that plays on Indian national television to this day. Considering that Gandhi spoke Hindi, and willfully strove to ignore English toward the most epic years of his life, the DVD literally slaps his message in the face by not including a Hindi language audio track. Yet, we get French and Spanish audio tracks, as if that were any consolation.

I was also dismayed and rather angered when I realized that there wasn't even a Hindi language subtitle option available. If the studio intended this as a DVD release for Caucasian audiences alone, I would understand. But yet they include obscure subtitles such as Thai and Korean, which makes the whole thing even more perplexing.

In the end, I think the 'Gandhi' DVD is a perfect example of how one should not judge a book by its' cover. This DVD is a glorious example of Western corporate ignorance and greed, and how the most beautiful cinematic achievements can die a gruesome death when handed over to the studios they were made under. I personally call for a boycott of this DVD until serious repairs are made. And if you're really interested in watching this film as it was intended, try to get your hands on the original Hindi version of the movie with English subtitles. That is the only version the poor Indian woman working in the fields, for whom Gandhi fought for, has watched.


My Vote For The Best Fim Biography Ever Made!   August 1, 2000
Barron Laycock (Temple, New Hampshire United States)
110 out of 123 found this review helpful

This movie was the realization of a lifetime dream for Sir Richard Attenborough, who finally succeeded in bringing this incredible spectacular to theatrical release in 1982. I was living outside London working for the American Forces in the greater London area at the time, so was thrilled to have the privilege to see this movie in its limited initial release in Britain, and was amazed by its scope, accuracy and integrity in bringing the quite controversial facts surrounding Gandhi's life and politically-motivated assassination to the screen. Ben Kingsley is simply magnificent as the diminutive, principled, and indefatiguable lawyer, humanitarian, and citizen of the world with an uncannily prescient feel for what was possible for a determined and energetic person as well as how to achieve his lofty otherworldly goals right here on earth.

Based on his appraoch here, Attenborough seems to have learned much from such masterful British film-makers as David Lean, for the use of scenery, topography, and natural surrounding of the characters as they wind through the more than 40 years of story line is breath-taking. His methods owe much to the kind of subtle insinuation of the local environment David Lean in particular used so memorably in movies like "Bridge Over The River Kwai" and "Lawrence of Arabia" (see my reviews) in making the scenery more than an incidental player in the storyline. Seeing Gandhi immersed in the incredible multidimensional diversities that were (and are) India helps the viewer as we begin to understand just how incredible his efforts were to unite the country with his strange yet irresistible moral authority, an authority that all of the various factions recognized and respected as the authentic thing.

There is, of course, an immensely talented cast, including Martin Sheen as an American newspaper correspondent who becomes intrigued by Gandhi's profound and surprisingly effective non-violent approach to social change. Gandhi's approach to using reason and morality to approach issues and perspectives, and these methods become the real star of the film as it builds slowly over the scope of this very literate and intelligent script. This is a wonderful motion picture experience for anyone willing to sit through the more than three hour extravaganza, one that guarantees Attenborough's prominent place in film history, and one that leaves this reviewer smacking his lips in anticipation of whatever other wonderful effort such as this may someday appear based on Attenborough's talents, visions, and moral sensibilities. Enjoy!


This epic classic is even better on DVD. Don't miss it!   October 19, 2002
Linda Linguvic (New York City)
28 out of 31 found this review helpful

This magnificent film has a cast of thousands as it was was produced before digitizing later became common practice. It was filmed on location in India and starred Ben Kingsley as Gandhi. Of course he had to lose weight, and he did have to maintain a suntan. But in spite of being English and not Indian, he sure did look like Gandhi. And during the course of the film, he just melted right into the character of this very special man he was portraying. The supporting cast was wonderful too and included Candice Bergen, John Gielgud, Trevor Howard, Martin Sheen and Om Puri.

The film covers more half a century, beginning in 1893 in South Africa when Gandhi, an attorney educated in England, is treated like a second-class citizen. Always, he yearned for freedom for his people from British rule. And always, he preached non-violence. It worked. Eventually India did become independent. And, later, when the tension mounted between Muslims and Hindus, and blood began to be shed, Mahatma Gandhi's hunger strike was able to stop the fighting.

Watching the film on DVD is a special treat because it included some original newsreel footage of Gandhi himself as well as a recent interview with Ben Kingsley, who is now in his late fifties. I love all those behind-the-scene stories, such as how he had to learn to spin fabric as part of his role and how difficult it was for him to spin and say his lines at the same time. Also, in the funeral scene, which included 400,000 people, he actually played the part of the corpse instead of using a wax dummy.

I definitely recommend this DVD. See it for the great performances. See it for a sense of history. And see it as a moral lesson in what is possible.


A Great Soul's Life.   February 17, 2003
Themis-Athena (from somewhere between California and Germany)
25 out of 26 found this review helpful

It all began simple enough - with the purchase of a first class train ticket by Mr. Mohandas Gandhi, Esq., recently arrived in South Africa, and unaware that as an Indian, he was required to travel third class and not entitled to such a ticket. Literally thrown off the train for his transgression, the young attorney, embodied to perfection by Ben Kingsley, spent a full night sitting on the platform, musing how best to respond to such discrimination. Shortly thereafter, and after consultations with established members of his community, he wrote his first treatises and organized his first demonstrations. And when participants of a protest assembly stood up and proclaimed their willingness to die in the fight against suppression, Gandhi once and for all formulated his doctrine of nonviolent protest: "They may torture my body, break my bones; even kill me. Then they will have my dead body - not my obedience."

Shot largely on four Indian locations, Richard Attenborough's nine-time Oscar-winning biography of Gandhi is a sweeping epic that takes the viewer back to Britain's colonial past, covering all major events of Gandhi's political career from its beginnings in South Africa to the March to the Sea and India's independence, and contrasting the luxurious lifestyle of the foreign rulers with the poverty of those they governed; that India which, as Gandhi soon realized, not only the British didn't understand, but whose population also could not have cared less about the activities of the Indian Congress Party, at the time little more than a group of well-to-do city dwellers mentally and socially almost as far removed from the rest of their country as the British. Twenty years in the making, the movie is clearly reverential of Gandhi's genius, and of the man whose symbolic growth was reverse parallel to his retreat into simplicity, and who for that very reason, and because of his unfaltering commitment to nonviolence on the one hand and India's independence on the other hand, accomplished what only few people would otherwise have thought possible: to convince the world's biggest colonial power to give up the crown jewel among its colonies; and to do so in a gesture of friendship and without civil war. The one aspect of Gandhi's life that falls a bit short here is the effect that his overbearing symbolic status had on his family life, which necessarily had to suffer as a result (unable to cope with his father's fame and chosen lifestyle, Gandhi's eldest son, for example, threw himself into a life of alcoholism and prostitution). But Gandhi is not depicted as a saint, and particularly during his early years, we learn about the struggle that went into the formation of the man who later earned the title "Great Soul" (Mahatma). Even anticipating that he might be killed by an assassin's bullet, Gandhi once said that he would only deserve that title if he could accept that bullet with Rama's (God's) name on his lips: fittingly, the movie begins with his assassination and comes full circle at the end, affirming that Gandhi truly was a Great Soul throughout.

Attenborough found his perfect Gandhi in Ben Kingsley, who not so much plays but truly *is* the Mahatma; from his appearance to the inflection of his voice, attitudes and gestures. Over the year-long struggles to finance the movie, Attenborough's first choices for the role had grown too old to convincingly play the young Gandhi in South Africa, but eventually Michael Attenborough pointed his father to Kingsley, then with the Royal Shakespeare Company, who reportedly won the role by meeting Attenborough in full Gandhi makeup at their first get-together, thus instantly convincing him that he had found his man. Yet, despite his gift for mimicry and his part-Indian heritage, Kingsley nevertheless turned to his Indian costars, particularly Rohini Hattangadi, who plays Gandhi's wife Kasturba, to fine-tune his portrayal; and he recalls in an interview for the movie's DVD release that the skill he found the most difficult to master was to spin and to talk at the same time. The use of the actual British newsreels covering Gandhi's visit to England adds to the movie's sense of authenticity - and emphasizes yet again Ben Kingsley's achievement in transforming himself into the Mahatma.

In fact, his awardwinning performance so overshadows every other actor in the movie that it would be easy to overlook the fine performances of his costars, all of whom contributed to the movie's unique quality - to name but a few, Sir John Gielgud, whom Kingsley praises as "a national treasure" (British viceroy Lord Irwin), Roshan Seth (Pandit Nehru), Martin Sheen (NY Times reporter Vincent Walker), Candice Bergen (People Magazine's Margaret Bourke-White), Ian Charleson (Gandhi's early friend and colaborator Reverend Andrews), Edward Fox (General Dyer, the man responsible for the massacre at Amritsar, who testified at his court-martial that his intention had been to "teach a lesson that would be heard throughout India"); and Trevor Howard as Judge Broomfield, who had to sentence Gandhi to prison for his outright admission that he was guilty of the charge of advocating sedition because of his belief "that non-cooperation with evil is a duty and British rule in India is evil," and who nevertheless rose at Gandhi's entrance into the courtroom instead of making the prisoner rise for him, and commented on the sentence he had to impose that "if ... his Majesty's government should, at some later date, see fit to reduce the term, no one will be better pleased than I."

The movie ends with Gandhi's affirmation that when he despaired, he remembered that "all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers; for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of this: Always." Such a belief may be difficult to hold on to, particularly for us who are so much more fallible than the Mahatma. Yet, this movie eloquently pleads that it is, at least, worth our very best effort.


The Mahatma would be pleased   August 20, 2005
Hoke (Thailand)
25 out of 26 found this review helpful

Despite the spotlight reviewer's claim, I believe Gandhi would indeed be pleased with this film. What this movie does is draw attention to the plight of India under colonial rule and the struggle to overcome it. Gandhi would not be so vain as to care about who got what credits and which image was used to sell a commercial product. Isn't it what is inside that counts and not the surface things? I feel bad for the reviewer for that person learned nothing from this movie and was just trying to find everything that might be flawed. I am certain that Gandhi would have tried to find everything that was right.

This movie was made in both English and Hindi. It is distributed within India in Hindi as well it should be. It is distributed in English and other languages outside of India to get to as wide as audience as possible. I very much doubt if people would have watched this had it been made only in Hindi and subtitled in English.

This movie does a great job of tracing Ghandi's life as he emerged from trying to lead a comfortable life as a lawyer to an uncomfortable life as the father of a nation. You will also witness the politics and hostilities that were a part of this struggle in India. One will truly appreciate the power of aggressive peaceful civil resistance which Gandhi employed so effectively. It also dispels the myth that he employed passive resistance which he is often miscredited for.