Celluloid scenes we remember

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Mughal-E-Azam

There are certain scenes from the old movies you cannot quite forget, for they once served as defining moments in your life. Remember Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady? As Professor Higgins, Harrison found it arduous yet challenging to remould Hepburn into a respectable lady on the social circuit. His exasperation at certain points in the story is what you remember. He asks plaintively, “Why, O why can't a woman be more like a man?” It is the natural in the acting that takes your fancy. And Hepburn? Recall her protestations as she is being prepared for a good bath by the maids at the Higgins' residence: “I am a good girl, I am!”
In the old days, love scenes in the movies were not blatant, brazen affairs. There was something of the sedate in the meeting of man and woman, with the passion of romance shining through the expressions the on-screen lovers brought to bear on their circumstances. In Mughal-e-Azam, a terrifically beautiful Madhubala goes through a noticeable tremor (you read it all over her face) when Dilip Kumar softly runs a peacock feather across her cheek. Thus does passion unite a man and a woman. Love is all, in its loud silences.

From Here to Eternity

Those of us who remember the BJ Thomas song, Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head, in the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid will instantly go back to that heart-warming image of Paul Newman and Katharine Ross on a bicycle as the latter serenades her with the song. That song, more than anything else, is a broad hint that even in a world of banalities, the strings of the heart can and do break into soothing melody in the strangest of moments. But the heart truly cracks when you think of Altaf, in the character of a crippled young man forced to earn a living for his family, selling newspapers on the street through breaking into song. Tumi ki dekhechho kobhu / jiboner porajoy is for many of us a story of ourselves. In Ato Tuku Asha, Abdul Jabbar does a fantastic job of having the song sink into our being. It has proved to be timeless.
Songs portray high romance. So does the sea. On the beach, acting out their roles in the movie From Here to Eternity, Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr bequeath to the world a kiss of memorable note, one that has remained unsurpassed through the decades. Not even the passion ignited in Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni for each other in Sunflower can equal what Lancaster and Kerr do by the sea, amid those rolling waves.

Sunflower

The writer is Executive Editor of The Daily Star