User Reviews

Free binge courtesy of IMDB & loved it..more moved than I thought I would be and Anoushka Shanka really adds to the the film like all great film music.

The movie begins with a young Indian princess on a caravan across the Persian desert. Raiders strike, and the girl is found and succored by a village potter. After she is grown into Seeta Devi, she is seized and sold to prince Charu Roy. Her adoptive brother Himanshu Rai follows and proclaims her a free woman, which does no good. Roy loves her but cannot make her his Empress because he can only marry a princess, which no one knows she is.

It's a story of how the Taj Mahal came to be built, and it's given a fairy-tale cast, with some striking visuals. It's directed by Franz Osten, a German who moved to India in 1924 to make movies there until 1939 Eventually he was seized by British authorities -- he had joined the Nazi party in 1936. He was released in 1940 and returned to Germany, where he died in 1956, just shy of his 80th birthday.

One of a trilogy of Indian/UK co-productions produced by and starring Himansu Rai, Shiraz invents a romantic backstory to the building of the Taj Mahal which, for the final reel at least, really tugs on the heartstrings. The location photography is stunning, but the acting is woeful and the story stretched pretty thin.

Not a great movie, with none of the flamboyant technique characteristic of the last great silents - THE WIND, ASPHALT, SUNRISE - but the mix of German expats., British scripting and Indian subject matter filmed on location, remains an intriguing novelty.

The plot, with the scheming highborn lady (`Father, to become Princess and later empress of India I would dare anything') introducing an old flame into the women's quarter to discredit the heir's true love, is simple stuff which seems to belong to a period of film making from years earlier. Playing is at least restrained.

The film's major appeal is in placing it's action against attractive genuine Indian buildings and the occasional vista. There's a bit of suspense from the likelihood that a real elephant will stomp the admirer. The hint of exotic sadism which runs through these European visions of The Mysterious East - `Kismet' or films like DAS INDISCHE GRABMAL and EMERALD OF THE EAST - is clear, as with demanding that the model maker's already blind eyes be put out.

The ending with the Empress' two devoted admirers sitting in front of the Taj Mahal is telling.

This one survives in a particularly sharp, well graduated copy - one of the best circulating, even if it isn't tinted. A pity the Sydney Film Festival, after bringing it half way round the planet, ran it too fast but the Tunji Beier - Linsley Pollak score they put with it was excellent.