Guide

R.K. Narayan hated the film adaptation of his novel The Guide, and it's not hard to see why. Vijay Anand transformed Narayan's gentle satire of spiritual fraud into a sweeping melodrama with songs by S.D. Burman and a star turn from Dev Anand. But Narayan was wrong about one thing: the film is a masterpiece, just a different kind of masterpiece than his novel.

Dev Anand plays Raju, a small-town guide who reinvents himself as a spiritual guru when a simple villager (Waheeda Rehman, in her greatest performance) mistakes him for a holy man. The film moves between Raju's glamorous past — an affair with Rehman's unhappily married dancer — and his present: a hunger strike to end a drought, which he may or may not believe will work.

The English-language version, shot simultaneously for international audiences (and scripted by Pearl S. Buck), is completely different from the Hindi version, with an alternate ending in which Raju does not die. Both versions are worth watching, but the Hindi ending — Raju collapsing in the river, the rains finally arriving — is one of the most transcendent final scenes in Indian cinema.