The Golden Fortress (1974)
"Sonar Kella" (original title)

A young boy becomes a target for crooks, after he claims to remember his past life and mentions precious jewels in a golden fortress.

Director:

Satyajit Ray

Writers:

Hridayesh Pandey (hindi dialogue), Satyajit Ray (screenplay),

Stars:

Soumitra Chatterjee, Santanu Bagchi, Ajoy Banerjee

2 wins & 1 nomination.

Cast

Complete credited cast:
Soumitra Chatterjee	...	Prodosh Mitra (Feluda) (as Soumitra Chattopadhyay)
Rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Santanu Bagchi	...	Mukul 2
Ajoy Banerjee	...	Amiyanath Burman
Haradhan Bannerjee	...	Tapesh's father
Kushal Chakravarti	...	Mukul Dhar
Bimal Chatterjee	...	Advocate
Dibyendu Chatterjee
Rekha Chatterjee	...	Tapesh's mother
Santi Chatterjee
Siddhartha Chatterjee	...	Tapesh (Topshe)
Harindranath Chattopadhyay	...	Uncle Sidhu
Santosh Dutta	...	Lalmohan Ganguly (Jatayu)
Uday Singh Gailol
Sujit Ganguly	...	(as Dr. Sujit Ganguly)
Nimai Ghosh

Storyline

Mukul, a six year old boy, is obsessed with drawing pictures of a golden fortress, and claims to have lived there in a past life. Hoping to better understand the boy's condition, parapsychologist Dr. Hajra accompanies Mukul to search for the fortress. However, a newspaper story alerts a pair of crooks to the possibility of a hidden treasure. The boy's father fears Mukul is in danger, and hires private detective Prodosh "Feluda" Mitra and his cousin Topshe to join Hajra and Mukul in Rajasthan. But the danger may already be closer than they realize.

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Plot Keywords:

pretending to sleep | drawing | fake gun | newspaper clippings | peacock | 

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Genres:

Adventure | Family

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Details

Country:

India

Language:

Bengali

Release Date:

27 December 1974 (India)

Also Known As:

A Fortaleza de Ouro

Company Credits

Production Co:

Government of West Bengal

Technical Specs

Runtime:

120 min

Sound Mix:

Mono

Color:

Color (Eastmancolor)

Did You Know?

Trivia

The title means "The Golden Fortress", a reference to the fort at Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, India, which is built of a kind of sandstone that resembles gold.

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Connections

Followed by Tintorettor Jishu (2008)

User Reviews

A masterpiece

"Sonar Kella" (Golden Fortress ) , these words evoke a lot of sentiment in not only me , in any average Bengali . Lot of us grew up reading this story and knew the story by heart. So Satyajit Ray must have a tough time adapting this story for his film. But it had been done perfectly, the way only the genius like him could do. Soumitra Chatterjee , the brilliant actor he was , portrayed " Feluda" with implacable perfection . Santosh Datta made the role "Jatayu" (Lalmohan Ganguly) of his own. He was so good in his role that Satyajit Ray started to sketch "Jatayu" resembling him in his Feluda stories. Kamu Mukherjee as Mandar Bose also acted brilliantly in his evil character. But I don't know why nobody talked about Siddhartha Chatterjee in his role of Topshe. After Sonar Kella and Joi Baba Felunath, number of Feluda films , TV series were made , but no one could compete him as "Topshe". For me, he had born for that role. The film is set on the backdrop of Rajasthan . It is present in the film in its full glory. The local music is also used by the Satyajit Ray . Rajasthan's sand, music, camels , forts and people helped this film reach a level which Bengali audience rarely got to see in films. The primary target audience of this film was kids. But Satyajit Ray , knowingly or unknowingly, somehow managed to remove the invisible boundary between Adult and Kid worlds and created a magical form of art which is acceptable to all.