Roll 'em

Years before India’s film industry became known as Bollywood—years before India even had a film industry—German director Franz Osten traveled to the subcontinent to make an epic silent movie. Telling a dramatic story of romance and nefarious royal intrigue, A Throw of Dice features an all-Indian cast decked out in glittering costumes, surrounded by 10,000 extras (a few of them riding elephants) in the wilds of Rajasthan. Osten’s 1929 film was a forerunner of the spectacles that made Bollywood famous, but it has never been seen in the United States—until now.

A Throw of Dice makes its U.S. premiere next week at the Pritzker Pavilion, with the Grant Park Orchestra playing a new score by genre-hopping Nitin Sawhney, a British composer of Indian heritage. “Although it has very sweeping and majestic scenes, it has a real innocence,” Sawhney says. “There’s also a real sense of melodrama, which is great for a composer to get his teeth into.”

A Throw of Dice (just released on DVD by Kino International) is inspired by an episode in the Mahabharata. After good-hearted King Ranjit (Charu Roy) falls in love with country girl Sunita (Seeta Devi), devious King Sohat (Himansu Rai) plots to steal her away.

Tim Pearce, who produced the restored version, says only a few silent Indian movies survive. Luckily for preservationists, the British Film Institute kept Dice in its vaults. “I watched it the first time and was simply amazed by the photography, performances and structure,” Pearce says. Sawhney, who has scored 40 films including The Namesake, was Pearce’s first choice to compose new music. “He has understood an incredible range of music from Indian to flamenco to classical,” Pearce says.

As Sawhney mixed Indian flutes and tabla with lush European orchestration, he felt no need to write authentic Indian classical music. Since the movie shows a mythical fantasy version of India, the music should reflect that exotic quality, he says. “It has a sense of fable about it,” says Sawhney, who will play piano and celesta at the Chicago performance while Stephen Hussey conducts.

Rai, who plays the villain with a sly look in his eyes, was also the film’s producer. In 1934, he founded Bombay Talkies Ltd., using Osten as a regular director. But when WWII broke out, Britain imprisoned Osten, who had joined the Nazi Party. As Indian film production ground to a halt, Rai suffered a nervous breakdown and died in 1940. Despite that sad turn of events, one of Rai’s landmark films, A Throw of Dice, has now achieved a happy ending, reaching a whole new audience.

A Throw of Dice shows at the Pritzker Pavilion Wed 30.

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