Act fast! Witness departure of 8-Oscar-winning film on Netflix, portraying a historical 20th-century figure
Act fast! Witness departure of 8-Oscar-winning film on Netflix, portraying a historical 20th-century figure. The biopic that awarded the Oscar to Ben Kingsley will disappear from the channel in a few days, an ideal time to recover this classic from the 80s.
By Megan Sauer
In the coming days, Netflix’s film catalog will be left without the great winner of the 1982 Oscars, ‘Gandhi‘, the biopic about the figure of Mahatma Gandhi with which Richard Attenborough forever turned Ben Kingsley into a winner of an Academy Award.
The script, signed by John Briley, presents the protagonist as a young idealist who, after graduating in law in London, moves to South Africa with the intention of practicing his profession.
His stay there will help him realize the racism that exists in society, forcing him to take sides upon returning to India, where he begins his particular fight against British colonialism, basing his strategy on non-violence and freedom of expression worship.
In addition to the Oscar for Kingsley and the award for best film, the title also won the statuettes for best director (Attenborough), original screenplay (Briley), editing (John Bloom), photography (Billy Williams, Ronnie Taylor), design of production (Stuart Craig, Robert W. Laing, Michael Seirton), and costumes (John Mollo, Bhanu Athaiya).
That awards night, the same one in which José Luis Garci became the first Spaniard to collect the Oscar for the best non-English speaking film for ‘Starting Again’ (1982), there was no shortage of quality candidates, but no one could beat ‘Gandhi’, which by then had already swept the Golden Globes and the Baftas.
With ‘ET the Extraterrestrial’ (Steven Spielberg, 1982) becoming the real hit of the year, titles as fundamental as ‘Tootsie’ (Sydney Pollack, 1982), ‘Missing’ (Costa-Gavras, 1982), and ‘Verdict final’ (Sidney Lumet, 1982) were overshadowed by the film that made Kingsley the Indian leader until, a decade later, Steven Spielberg turned him into the unforgettable Itzhak Stern in ‘Schindler’s List’ (1993).
Attenborough, who at that time had already demonstrated his good work as a director with ‘A Bridge Far Away’ (1977), continued behind the cameras making titles such as ‘A Chorus Line’ (1985), ‘Grita Libertad’ (1987), ‘Chaplin’ (1992), and ‘Lands of twilight’ (1993).
Indelible gems came out of 1982, although many of them took some time to be appreciated as such.
The case of ‘Blade Runner’ (Ridley Scott, 1982) and ‘The Thing’ (John Carpenter, 1982) is especially paradigmatic, but it is not so surprising if we remember that that same year, if you looked at the billboard, you would come across films like ‘Star Trek II. The Wrath of Khan’ (Nicholas Meyer, 1982), ‘Rocky III’ (Sylvester Stallone, 1982), ‘Rambo’ (Ted Kotcheff, 1982), ‘Poltergeist’ (Tobe Hooper, 1982), ‘Conan, the Barbarian’ (John Milius, 1982), ‘Dark Crystal’ (Jim Henson, Frank Oz, 1982), ‘Fanny and Alexander’ (Ingmar Bergman, 1982), ‘Pink Floyd: The Wall’ (Alan Parker, 1982), and ‘Fitzcarraldo’ (Werner Herzog, 1982).
