A Throw of Dice was our ninth and last feature from 1929, and our last planned feature from the 1920s. It is also our first Indian film, but that comes with the caveat that the director, Franz Osten, and some unknown fraction of the crew, were European. The cast, however, was Indian, as was the producer, Himanshu Rai -- who also played one of the leads, and later (in 1934) co-founded Bombay Talkies.
Osten himself was from Germany, where he began his career before shifting to Indian films in the late twenties and through the thirties. The film stars Rai and Charu Roy as rival kings. Rai is determined to steal Roy's kingdom by one means or another, and is additionally vying with him for the same woman (Seeta Devi), who has been raised in relative isolation by her father (played by Sarada Gupta), a former court official.
The film has been preserved or restored remarkably well, with a very clear print. It appears to have had a significant budget, with sophisticated camera-work and sets, a large number of extras, as well as tigers, elephants, camels, and cobras. One of the latter is used as a means of murder, and is shown crawling, hooded, over a sleeping man; presumably it had been defanged -- though given the 1920s' lackadaisical approach to workplace safety, who knows? The film has a mythic feel, and bears some resemblance to 1924's Siegfried -- though it has a lighter touch, and nothing explicitly supernatural occurs. (At 74 minutes it also has a much brisker running time.)
With this film we are finally done with the 1920s. It was by far the most comprehensive diet of films from this period that I (and obviously the kids) had ever embarked upon, and at some point soon I'll try to summarize the experience. For the next two weeks, however, we will watch various shorts made during the twenties -- and then move on to the features of the 1930s.
The ongoing list of films is at https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT.
