My all time fav movie. Reviewing a classic gives you a thrill and is an extremly challenging rather than reviewing some crap movie which are churned out today.
Navketan International have made some of the great movies like Jewel Thief,Jhonny Mera Naam, Hum Dono, Kala Bazar . But Guide is one of the biggest and most memorable movies under their banner. Based on R.K. Narayan's novel 'The Guide', the film is immortalized by director Vijay Anand's bold, unconventional strokes. Who would have dared to show a man and woman living together outside the sanctity of a marriage way
The movie revolves round Raju (Dev Anand), once a successful tourist guide who hesitates to return to his hometown of Udaipur after his release from jail and decides to search for his fortunes elsewhere. He ends up in a remote village temple wearing over his threadbare clothes a saffron scarf which had once belonged to some passing mendicant and finds himself suddenly elevated to the position of a holy man. Raju's mother and Rosie reach there and watch helplessly as Raju slowly drifts towards death due to the fasting.
The film is enhanced richly by the two central performances. Dev Anand gives perhaps his best shaded performance in the title role, playing him perfectly with just the right amount of grey and his perfectly nuanced performance won him his second Filmfare Award for Best Actor. Good as Dev Anand is, however, the life and soul of Guide is undoubtedly Waheeda Rehman. It was a daring role to play in those times, of a woman who leaves her stifling impotent husband and lives with her lover, a guide who helps her in her ambitions to become a famous dancer. Waheeda was in fact told she was committing professional suicide taking on this role.
The other big star of Guide was its musical score by S.D. Burman. The film represents perhaps Burman Dada's greatest work and he is aided tremendously by Shailendra's lyrics and the flawless rendering of the songs by Mohd. Rafi, Lata Mangeshkar, Kishore Kumar and himself.
Initially Guide had a tough time being sold because of its so called bold theme but thanks to Production Controller Yash Johar's perseverance, the film was finally sold and released to great critical acclaim and was a big commercial success. R.K. Narayan was most unhappy with the final film as he felt it deviated too much from his novel. One of the major changes that Vijay Anand did was to change the setting of the film from Malgudi to Udaipur and while this did give the film an exotic, grand visual look, admittedly perhaps this took away from the ambiance of the small town of Narayan's novel. The ending too of the film was significantly different from that of the novel. But then Vijay Anand has always maintained that he was never interested in merely copying any work of art from one medium to another unless there was scope for value addition and to be fair to him, he has made Guide into a rich and unforgettable cinematic experience.
Guide was made in two versions simultaneously- an English version in collaboration with Pearl S Buck and directed by Ted Danielewski to introduce Dev Anand to western audiences and of course the Hindi version directed by Dev Anand's younger brother, Vijay Anand. The English version said to be closer to the novel and in spite of a nude scene using a duplicate instead of Waheeda Rehman, flopped miserably but the Hindi version remains a classic to this day.
