The plight of Anglo-Indians during the last gasps of British rule in India forms the backdrop for this love story starring Ava Gardner and Stewart Granger. As an Anglo-Indian torn between her native land and her love for a British colonel, Gardner's sensuality and her contrasting absorption into Indian rituals clearly form the centerpiece of the film. But Bhowani Junction enjoys a higher regard now than it did on its release in 1956 primarily for George Cukor's extraordinary use of color, widescreen and effective location shooting in Pakistan. Gary Carey writes in Cukor & Co., “It intrigues the eye both with its superb sense of color and with some extremely artful composition. Cukor and his photographer, the gifted Frederick Young...have found ways to incorporate both perspective and intimacy into the flat, panoramic screen.” And Andrew Sarris, in a recent Village Voice, notes, “Cukor has scored strikingly with spectacle and performance.... (His) unusually experimental period with color and widescreen composition...is seen to best effect in a super-Lean demonstration of mass hysteria and political will at an open railway station....”