Nine Hours to Rama. The best part of this 125-minute film about the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi is the 20 minutes that focus on the saintly man himself. The rest is pure Hollywood-on-the-Ganges.
J. S. Casshyap, the Indian actor who plays the Mahatma, not only has the emaciated physique and the down-to-perfection gestures, but also has re-created Gandhi's speech—the faltering, reedy tones and the gentle inflections that were so much the secret of the leader's non violent power. Closeups of Casshyap are startling, and a soaring overhead shot, as he walks feebly through the crowd of devotees who have jammed the garden to hear him at prayer, has an immediacy that is more newsreel than make-believe. In the garden the assassin's bullets strike him down, and here Nine Hours to Rama should have ended. Perhaps it never should have begun. To try to tell the story of Gandhi's assassination in terms of a suspense thriller is like making a movie about Lincoln and leading the audience to believe he may die of old age.