Joi Baba Felunath (1979)

Following on from Sonar Kella (1974), here the trio of detective Feluda (Soumitra Chatterjee), his sidekick Topse (Siddhartha Chatterjee) and thriller writer Jatayu (Dutta) become involved in a grimmer story set in the Bengali quarter of the holy city of Benares. Feluda, on holiday, is hired to track down a stolen gold statuette of Ganesh, the elephant god, harbinger of good fortune and worshipped by the mercantile middle class. Feluda finally gets the villains: the evil Maganlal Meghraj (Dutt), a Marwari businessman and smuggler, and his employer in crime, the yogic godman Machli Baba (Manu Mukherjee). With less action than Sonar Kella and more direct confrontation between the good and evil, the film’s main departure from Ray’s earlier children’s movies is the portrait of the villain who Ray described as ‘polished and ruthless, [c]ertainly the most ferocious character that I have created’.