When Richard Attenborough first read Louis Fischer’s biography of Indian activist and attorney Mahatma Gandhi in the early 1960s, he was around 20 years into an acting career that included work with David Lean (“In Which We Serve”), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (“A Matter of Life and Death”), and John Sturges (“The Great Escape”). Attenborough hadn’t directed anything himself at that point, but discovering Gandhi’s story gave him the desire to mount a biopic on the epic scale of his mentors.
It would take Attenborough another couple of decades to find the necessary funding, but when he finally made “Gandhi” in 1982, it was worth the wait, both for him and for audiences worldwide. A literate three-hour drama for adults that was, amazingly, a box-office blockbuster as well as an awards behemoth (it won eight of the 11 Oscars for which it was nominated, including Best Picture and Best Director for Attenborough), “Gandhi” was one of those rare films that seemed to please just about everybody.
That must have amused and gratified Attenborough after years of being told that the film had no commercial prospects (he later said that he spent the 1970s acting in “some of the worst films ever known to man” to raise money). The time spent waiting to realize his dream project was not wasted, however; in the years between his discovery of Fischer’s book and the commencement of production, Attenborough honed his chops directing a trio of war epics (“Oh! What A Lovely War,” “Young Winston,” and “A Bridge Too Far”) as well as the nifty horror film “Magic” with Anthony Hopkins.
By the time he got to “Gandhi,” Attenborough was in total command of his craft, and the movie has a fully realized quality that results from a great director tackling a subject he’d been preparing for and dreaming about for his entire career. Clocking in at 191 minutes, the film is airtight without feeling rushed; Attenborough and screenwriter John Briley take the viewer through over 50 years of Indian and British history (from 1893 to 1948) via an impeccably balanced blend of character study and spectacle that feels even more remarkable today than it did in 1982.
Part of the movie’s impact comes from the sheer size of its pre-CGI imagery; while a few directors — Ridley Scott comes to mind — still occasionally work in Attenborough’s epic register, it’s hard to be as impressed by shots that we know are largely comprised of digitally expanded sets and crowds. “Gandhi” is one of the last truly huge movies in the sense that “Lawrence of Arabia” or “Doctor Zhivago” is huge — at one point early on, there’s a scene with over 300,000 extras, an achievement that landed “Gandhi” a spot in the Guiness Book of World Records.
That scene, a funeral that Attenborough stages in the film’s first few minutes, serves a few functions. By beginning the story with Gandhi’s assassination and funeral and then flashing back to his life, Attenborough lets the audience know that they’re attending a cinematic experience that’s as much a requiem for its real-life subject as it is a movie; he also, by shooting the funeral with such massive scale, immediately establishes the magnitude of the person whose life we’re about to celebrate.
On a subliminal level, utilizing hundreds of thousands of extras right at the start of the movie — and shooting the sequence with no fewer than 11 camera crews collecting tens of thousands of feet of film — permanently implants in the viewer the idea that they’re watching an epic. When, later on, “Gandhi” consists of many scenes that are simple interactions between men and women in rooms talking, there’s never a sense that the movie is static or claustrophobic in any way — even the most intimate scene feels touched by grandeur simply by existing in association with what has come before.
Not that the funeral is the only sweeping sequence in the movie. While it is the largest of the film’s set pieces, there are plenty of scenes later on, from massive political demonstrations to journeys set aboard period trains, that would by themselves serve as the most awe-inspiring moments in a lesser film. Yet for all of the movie’s scope, it never feels suffocating or overblown; the size is always in service of the drama and not a substitute for it, and Attenborough is unerring in his instinct for knowing when to pull back for a wide historical perspective and when to zero in on subtleties of gesture and dialogue that reveal character.
It helps that Attenborough cast Ben Kingsley — astonishingly, in his first ever screen appearance — as Gandhi. (Kingsley’s not the only example of Attenborough’s keen eye for young talent: Daniel Day-Lewis also appears in his first credited role as a racist thug.) Kingsley disappears into the role completely and infuses Gandhi with integrity and intelligence that are immediately felt by the viewer. His performance provides the depth that is occasionally lacking in the script, which, it must be admitted, bends the facts at times to make Gandhi more saintly than he — or probably any other human in history — actually was.
Minor oversimplifications aside, “Gandhi” was recognized in its moment as a major achievement, a few cranky dissenters like Pauline Kael and Dave Kehr aside (though even Kehr, a longstanding hater of tasteful British epics, admitted the film was “never really boring”). Yet over the years, its reputation has waned somewhat; in spite of its pleasures as a big screen experience, it’s rarely revived in repertory theaters and more or less forgotten by cinephiles.
When it is remembered, it’s often in unfavorable comparisons to two movies it beat out for Best Picture, “Tootsie” and “E.T.” Discussing losing at the Oscars to “The Hurt Locker” the year that he made “Inglourious Basterds,” Quentin Tarantino told interviewer Bret Easton Ellis that “it wasn’t like I lost to something dreadful. It’s not like ‘E.T.’ losing to ‘Gandhi.’”
Even Attenborough himself later said he didn’t think “Gandhi” should have won Best Picture. “‘E.T.’ was more entitled to an Oscar than Gandhi,” Attenborough claimed on a DVD extra interview. “‘E.T.’ was a better piece of cinema.”
Thus “Gandhi” has been relegated to a similar position in film history as “Ordinary People,” which spent years being denigrated simply because it had the temerity to defeat “Raging Bull” at the Oscars. One doesn’t have to argue that “Gandhi” is better than “E.T.” or that “Ordinary People” is better than “Raging Bull” to acknowledge either film’s greatness, and the fact is that comparing “Gandhi” and “E.T.” — or “Gandhi” and “Tootsie,” for that matter — is a bit absurd. They’re coming from different traditions, and attempting different emotional effects, and — thankfully — we don’t have to choose between any of them.
Now, “Gandhi” has been reissued by Sony in an indispensable 4K UHD limited edition Steelbook that features a pristine transfer and many, many hours of informative supplementary features. This is essentially the same package previously available as part of a “Columbia Classics” collection alongside several other films, and it’s a testament to Sony’s laudable devotion to its heritage. Under the stewardship of restorationist and archivist Grover Crisp, the company has continued to release superb physical media editions of its classics consistently, and “Gandhi” is one of the best to date. Without any prospective big screen reissue, it’s the best possible way to discover or rediscover one of the great big swings in 1980s cinema.
“Gandhi” in 4K UHD from Sony is now available.
