This Satyajit Ray film film about an ill-tempered taxi driver might have influenced Martin Scorsese, though the Indian director takes a different route. Heavily bearded cabbie Narsingh (Soumitra Chatterjee) loses his licence for overtaking and has to work off the books in a remote area, getting mixed up with crooks.
The proud-but-dim hero is hard to put up with, but Ray delivers interesting vignettes about the folks encountered along the way. Less known abroad than his Apu trilogy, this was Ray’s biggest hit in India, perhaps because it’s as much an episodic melodrama as an exercise in neo-realism.