Movie Review: Devdas (1955)

This is a oft remade and oft told tale. The references in our lives can't be ignored. All in all this is a movie which will have to carry the burden of impressing viewers even after they know the story. Not many films can carry this burden. Devdas does.

I have known Bimal Roy as the director who lost out. It was just last year when I was reading an article in a newspaper where one of Roy's relations was trying to get people to notice his work. I agree his work has been noticed but that person's argument was that Bimal Roy had never been put on the same pedestal as Guru Dutt and Raj Kapoor. My expectations from this movie were pretty high. Bimal Roy's best is supposedly 'Do Bigha Zameen' but this movie is not concerned less either.

For a storyline that's very simple the length I noticed, before start, was 160 minutes. Quite long I told myself. I braced myself for a slow film. Surprisingly the first 100-120 minutes are quite fast. Obviously, that was great! The movie dipped a little after that for about half an hour after the which the end, which is very very famous, was just a formality. I felt certain portions of the film in that half hour were unnecessarily stretched. Purely my opinion.


If there has ever been a list of best acting performances of all time in Bollywood then Dilip Kumar as Devdas has to be pretty high on that list. This is a super performance. Scene that will stay with me forever: Dilip Kumar is angry but his way of showing anger is very very different. He does not shout yet we know he is angry and will lose control any second. The scar on Suchitra Sen is the result of his anger.

I also liked the idea that Paro is the brave one and Devdas the coward. She makes her way to his room at two in the morning and tells him she loves him. Simply brillaint! I can't remember a better scene in cinema at the moment. The scene just before this one, where she tells her friend of her plan to tell Devdas, set the tone for her character.

However, I didn't understand why Devdas chooses to drink himself to death in a train. I think I missed something there. Was I supposed to feel that train was taking him to his death? Or was there something else there?

RATING: 3.5/5