An update of the King Midas legend, Ray's 1957 comedy concerns a middle-aged bank clerk who happens on a stone with alchemical properties, allowing him to turn steel into gold. Inserting this bit of magic into the everyday, Ray satirizes the dreams that pass for values in modern society; for what happens when the dream comes true involves a host of comically “normal” characters - the clerk, Parash Dutta; his secretary, Priyatosh Henry Biswas; and Priyatosh's fiancee, Hindola Mazumdar - in a series of preposterous events quite out of their league.
The Philosopher's Stone is one of the most rarely shown of Ray's films, perhaps because its whimsy is based on a subtle and cleverly nuanced satire of middle-class attitudes that is directed, more than his other films, at a specifically Bengali audience. However, the classic tale (at once reminiscent of Gogol and Sturges) is of universal irony. The English journal Sight & Sound called The Philosopher's Stone “one of the most sophisticated and effective satires produced by world cinema up to now,” and Marie Seton, Ray's biographer, comments: “It has been too little seen.... (I)t has grown upon people who have seen it more than once despite its intensely idiomatic Calcutta character....
“In the whole range of the remarkable performances in Ray's films, none surpasses in subtlety of emotional variation that of the late Tulsi Chakravarty as Parash Dutta. This previously little known actor created the memorable cameo of the pundit-grocer in Pather Panchali.... At that time he appealed to Ray as a potentially great actor if given the opportunity.... (T)he culmination of his career was an interpretation of Dutta reminiscent of the rich performances of Michel Simon in its combination of comic, serious and pathetic elements....” (JB)