There is something magical about this silent movie, the third directed by Franz Osten. Simultaneously intimate and spectacular, telling the story of two royal rivals for the heart of a peasant girl and embedding this in the vistas and splendour of Rajasthan, the film moves between personal and emotional and expansive without sacrificing the sharpness of the plot. Two things stood out for me. Firstly the ambition of the story: the thousands of extras, and animals, the feeling of a Cecil B. DeMille epic being replanted into pre-war India. Secondly the coherence and accessibility of the plot. Sometimes silent movies can alienate a modern viewer, but sometimes they can have the opposite effect, the lack of spoken dialogue and the dependence on inter-titles can focus the viewer on the story. A Throw of Dice is told with elegant economy and, as such, never loses your attention.

Given the director’s status during the Second World War and his apparent political affiliations, this movie has elements that make it problematic, but on a visual and story level, it is engaging and well-crafted. Watch with Nitin Sawhney‘s beautiful soundtrack and in a double bill with Satyajit Ray‘s Pather Panchali (1955) for a more contemporary and more humanist take on rural India.