Shatranj Ke Khilari (1977)

Mirza Sajjad Ali and Mir Roshan Ali are wealthy aristocrats of Lucknow whose whole life is chess. While their wives feel neglected and the city around them buzzes with rumours, they move from board to board and house to house to keep playing. In parallel, the East India Company's resident, General Outram, prepares to annex Awadh from its poet-king Wajid Ali Shah, a ruler more devoted to music and verse than to war. Based on a story by Munshi Premchand, this is Satyajit Ray's only full-length Hindi feature, a gently ironic, beautifully detailed study of a ruling class sleepwalking into history. Sanjeev Kumar and Saeed Jaffrey are delightful as the players, Amjad Khan plays against type as the king, Richard Attenborough plays Outram, and Amitabh Bachchan narrates. Ray composed the music himself.