AAG

aka Fire

1948 138’ b&w Hindi

d/p Raj Kapoor pc R.K. Films s Inder Raj Anand lyr Behzad Lucknowi, Saraswati Kumar Deepak, Majrooh Sultanpuri c V.N. Reddy m Ram Ganguly

lp Raj Kapoor, Nargis, Premnath, Kamini Kaushal, Nigar Sultana, Kamal Kapoor, B.M. Vyas, Vishwa Mekra, Shashi Kapoor, Indumati

Raj Kapoor said he would never forget this film, his directorial debut, ‘because it was the story of youth consumed by the desire for a brighter and more intense life. And all those who flitted like shadows through my own life, giving something, taking something, were in that film.’ The hero is Kewal (Kapoor), a country boy disfigured by a self-inflicted scar on his face who dreams of running a theatre. He is cast out by his father and eventually builds his own theatre where Nimmi (Nargis) becomes a star. Shashi Kapoor plays the part of Raj Kapoor as a young boy. Announcing the baroque imagery of Barsaat (1949) and Awara (1951), Kapoor fills his film with shadows evoking the influence of the Osten/ Wirsching brand of chiaroscuro.

Raj Kapoor and Premanath in Aag

AJIT

aka Rangeen Zamana 1948 133’ col Hindi

d/p Mohan Bhavnani pc Bhavnani Prod. st Snilloc’s novel Asir of Asirgarh lyr Phani m Govind Ram

lp Monica Desai, Premnath, Yashodhara Katju, Gope, Nayampalli, Badri Prasad, Ram Kamlani

Bhavnani’s last feature is described in a Times of India review (18.12.1949) as a ‘Rajput story fraught with great drama and tender romance’. It is India’s first colour film using Kodachrome 16mm blown up to 35mm in the USA.

ANJANGARH

1948 126’[B]/139’[H] b&w Bengali/Hindi

d/s Bimal Roy pc New Theatres st Subodh Ghosh’s Fossil dial[H] Mohanlal Bajpai lyr[H] Bhushan, Romesh Panday c Kamal Bose m Rai Chand Boral

lp Sunanda Bannerjee, Tulsi Chakraborty, Parul Kar, Manorama Jr., Chhabi Roy, Bipin Gupta, Asit Sen, Purriendu Mukherjee, Jahar Roy, Sunil Dasgupta, Prafulla Mukherjee, Ramakrishna Chatterjee, Devi Mukherjee[B], Amita Basu[B], Phalguni Roy[B], Shankar Sen[B], Raja Ganguly[B], Kalipada Sarkar[B], Bhanu Bannerjee[B], Manoranjan Bhattacharya[B], Rama Nehru[H], Hirabai[H], Hiralal[H], Ajay Kumar[H], Raimohan[H], Bhupendra Kapoor[H]

Roy’s New Theatres sequel to his remarkable debut Udayer Pathay/Hamrahi (1944), this is a political allegory about collusion in colonial times between the aristocracy and a rising indigenous bourgeoisie. The despotic ruler of the small Anjangarh kingdom comes into conflict with a mining syndicate which pays its workers a decent wage and allows the unionisation of the workforce. This bodes ill for the ruler. Eventually the syndicate joins with the despot in naming an innocent reformist collective set up for the welfare of the workers as the real culprit behind the popular unrest. Subodh Ghosh’s powerful story Fossil is a savagely ironic account of a fictional kingdom allegorically representing the socio-economic rise of the native colonial state. The big-budget film includes the key characters of the novel (e.g. the bourgeois liberal Mukherjee who dreams of a future land when the bones of the dead workers will, with the quartz and granite, yield mineral deposits a million years from now; the peasant leader Dulal Mahato), while placing in greater prominence the love story between the peasant leader Shubha and Mukherjee. It also has a ‘Vivek’, a singing minstrel used as a narrative chorus, a device borrowed from the traditional Jatra form.

ANOKHI ADA

1948 141’ b&w Hindi-Urdu

d/p Mehboob Khan pc Mehboob Prod, st Zia Sarhadi sc Aga Jani Kashmiri lyr Shakeel Badayuni, Anjum Pilibhiti c Faredoon Irani m Naushad

lp Naseem Banu, Surendra, Prem Adib, Zeb Kureshi, Cuckoo, Nawab, Pratima Devi, Murad, Bhudo Advani

An updating of the Anmol Ghadi (1946) love triangle, this time featuring mainly the heroine’s amnesia. The rivals for her love are an adventurer (Adib) who calls himself Laatsaheb (i.e. Lord Sahib) and a professor (Surendra). Each is associated with her life on either side of her memory divide, giving each a particular stake in whether she be allowed to recall her past or not. Remarkably shot in heavy chiaroscuro, esp. in the backdrops at the professor’s house where the heroine battles with her amnesia.

BHULI NAAI

1948 157’ b&w Bengali

d Hemen Gupta pc National Progressive Pics st Manoj Bose c Ajoy Kar m Hemanta Mukherjee

lp Radhamohan Bhattacharya, Pradeep Kumar, Nibedita Das, Tulsi Chakraborty, Sudipta Roy

Ex-terrorist Gupta’s first film in his best-known style (cf. ’42, 1949) celebrates the patriotic terrorist movements in pre-Independence Bengal. Markedly different from the film biographies of political personalities, Gupta’s angiy tone conveys opposition to the nationalist leadership coming into power at the time. Faithfully following Manoj Bose’s original story, it opens with the 1905 Swadeshi upsurge: the burning of imported garments, the anti-Partition rallies etc. Mahananda, Ajit and Anandakishore are in a procession which is attacked by the police. Their leader Masterda (borrowed from the chronologically later Surya Sen) absconds with Anupama when Mahananda betrays the group of insurgents. The young Anandakishore is killed and Ajit is arrested. He escapes from jail, kills the informer and is sentenced to death, reaffirming his faith in nationalism shortly before he is hanged. The episode, evoking the real-life incident of a terrorist vendetta against Naren Gosain, is followed by documentary shots of Gandhi and Subhash Chandra Bose (apparently added following censor strictures) that remain somewhat out of place in the main drama.

BIPLABI

aka The Revolutionary

1948 C.140’ b&w Assamese

d/c Asit Sen pc Shri Krishna Films co-lyr/m Shiba Bhattacharya co-lyr Malin Bora, Bhupen Bhattacharya

lp Anupama Bhattacharya, Chandra Phukan, Rani Nath, Jagat Bezbaruah

In his debut film, the noted Bengali and Hindi director Asit Sen tells of a young radical who sacrifices his life for the nation. Several Assamese films, often featuring former IPTA members, broached the theme of radical martyrdom and nationalism, but this is technically very accomplished and remained for some years a standard work in the genre.

CHANDRALEKHA

1948 207’b&w Tamil/Hindi

d/p S.S. Vasan pc Gemini s Gemini Story Dept. dial K.J. Mahadevan, Kothamangalam Subbu, Sangu, Kittu, Naina[T], Pandit Indra, Aga Jani Kashmiri[H] lyr Papanasam Sivan, Kothamangalam Subbu[T], Pandit Indra, Bharat Vyas[H] c Kamal Ghosh m Saluri Rajeshwara Rao, Balkrishna Kalla

lp T.R. Rajkumari, M.K. Radha, Ranjan, Sundaribai, L. Narayan Rao, P. Subbaiah Pillai, V.N. Janaki, Surabhi Kamalabai, N.S. Krishnan[T], T.A. Mathuram[T], T.E. Krishnamachariar[T], N. Seetaraman[T], Pottai Krishnamurthy[T], Yashodhara Katju[H], H.K. Chopra[H]

One of India’s most famous films, started in 1943 and costing a massive Rs 3m this was the first major effort of a Tamil studio to attempt an all-India distribution. The film’s nationwide success encouraged many others, e.g. AVM and Prasad, to follow suit. It is a period adventure film sometimes compared with The Prisoner of Zenda (1922, 1937). The basic plot is one of sibling rivalry between two princes, the good Veer Singh (Radha) and the bad Shashank (Ranjan). The object of desire and bone of contention between them is state power equated with the possession of the village maiden Chandralekha (Rajkumari). In the process, the hero and the heroine become circus artistes. The villain grabs the girl and enforces a wedding. She agrees provided there be an elaborate drum dance: the enormous drums, in the Indian cinema’s most anthologised sequence, contain the hero’s soldiers who burst out of the drums after the dance overwhelming the baddies followed by the longest sword duel in Indian cinema. Although the genre itself was not new to the Tamil cinema, its aggressive redefinition of entertainment mobilised Hollywood-style orientalism for an indigenist mass culture and became a landmark in the codification of an Indian mass entertainment ideology after Independence. Many of the spectacular dance sequences can be seen as continuations of the choreography in Uday Shankar’s Kalpana (1948), shot earlier that year at Gemini by many of the same technicians. The choreography was arranged by Jaya Shankar, Mrs Rainbird, Natanam Nataraj and Niranjala Devi. T.G. Raghavacharya started directing the film and probably shot most of it. Vasan took over direction later. According to Randor Guy, the initial plot stems from G.M.W. Reynolds’s novel Robert Macaire, or The French Bandit in England (1848). V.A.K. Ranga Rao notes that the film’s music shows influences from Carnatic, Hindustani, Bharatnatyam, Latin American and Portuguese folk music as well as a Strauss waltz. The chorus by the circus members apparently adapts the Donkey Serenade from R.Z. Leonard’s film The Firefly (1937).

DROHI

1948 179’ b&w Telugu

d L. V. Prasad pc Swatantra Pics s/lyr Tapi Dharma Rao c P. Sridhar m Pendyala Nageshwara Rao

lp G. Varalakshmi, Lakshmirajyam, K.S. Prakash Rao, L.V. Prasad, Rallabandi, Prabhakar Rao, K. Siva Rao, Venkumamba, Surabhi Balasaraswathi

Melodrama deploying the later New Theatres idiom of addressing the rise of a corrupt class of usurers in plots revolving around disease. The villain in the village is the wealthy and corrupt Gangadhara Rao (Rallabandi). His Westernised daughter Saroja (Varalakshmi) loves the crook Raja (Prabhakar). Driving her car, Saroja knocks down an old man who later dies of his injuries. The old man’s granddaughter Seeta (Lakshmirajyam) is adopted by Prakash (K.S. Prakash Rao), a local doctor, who marries Saroja. When Saroja finds out Seeta’s relationship with the accident victim, she has her thrown out on charges of theft. At this point an epidemic spreads through the village and the doctor has to work for long hours with the people. He also starts representing their interests to the political authorities. This threatens the villains Gangadhara Rao and Raja, who set fire to the village. The angry villagers are restrained by Seeta, but in the ensuing confrontation Seeta dies, accidentally killed by Gangadhara Rao. Saroja now turns over a new leaf and has her father and her ex-lover arrested, and she offers charity in the name of the dead Seeta. This is the first production of actor (and later director) K.S. Prakash Rao, and the debut of composer Pendyala. The other major director in the Prasad tradition, T. Prakash Rao, joined films here as assistant to Prasad, directing the scenes in which Prasad acted.

GHAR KI IZZAT

1948 136’ b&w Hindi

d Ram Daryani pc Murli Movietone st K.S. Daryani dial/lyr l.C. Kapoor c Kumar Jaywant m Pandit Govind Ram

lp Mumtaz Shanti, Dilip Kumar, Manorama, Jeevan, Dikshit, Suleman, Gulab, Gope

Daryani’s domestic drama features two couples, each cutting across the urban-rural divide. Radhika, daughter of Seth Chunilal, and her husband Chaman leave her father’s house to start an insurance business in the countryside. They meet Roopa (Shanti), poor but happy and living with her two brothers. Chanda (Kumar), Radhika’s brother, falls in love with Roopa; they get married and move to the city where Roopa lives an unhappy life, taunted by her parents-in-law about her former poverty. The weak Chanda, concerned about his wife’s unhappiness, leaves home and becomes a drunk and a gambler until, on a fullmoon night, all differences are resolved.

GOPINATH

1948 155’ b&w Hindi

d/s Mahesh Kaul pc Shanti Lokchitra lyr poems by the saint-poets Surdas and Meerabai, Ram Murthy c Chandu m Ninu Majumdar

lp Raj Kapoor, Tripti Mitra, Latika, Nand Kishore, Sachin Ghosh, Randhir, Anwaribai, Feroze, Mahesh Kaul, Baby Zubeida, Niranjan Tiwari

Tragic tale of Gopi (Mitra), a village woman virtually abandoned by her brother in the home of Mohan (Kapoor) and his ageing mother. The lower-caste Gopi secretly loves Mohan but he pines for the movie star Neela Devi. Eventually the frustrated Gopi goes mad just when Mohan, fed up with his star’s whims, returns to Gopi. The film belongs to the Bengali tradition of literary melodramas, an association enhanced by Tripti Mitra’s remarkable performance. In shifting the tragedy from a Devdas-type male anxiety to the woman’s condition, the film chronicles the behavioural and moral restrictions besetting a woman caught in a ‘traditional’ environment. Mitra’s performative idiom rises above the story’s vindication of tradition as superior to the liberated but hollow freedoms of the film star.

GUNSUNDARI

1948 153’ b&w Gujarati

d Ratibhai Punatar pc Ranjit Movietone lyr/m Avinash Vyas c H.S. Kwatra

lp Baburaje, Manhar Desai, Nirupa Roy, Dulari, Saraswati, Chhagan Romeo, Master Pransukh

Second remake of Ranjit studio’s infallible Gunsundari melodramas, following Chandulal Shah’s previous versions in 1927 and 1934, proving as successful as its predecessors. Although the familiar central story retains the same dramatic pivot, of a married woman discovering a world beyond the home and holding the family together from external threat, this Gujarati version features several variations in its ‘punchlines’. Gopaldas Seth’s joint family here consists of three grown up children: the elder son Chandrakant (Desai), married to the virtuous Guniyal (Roy), a seven year-old younger son Vinu (Pransukh) who believes Guniyal to be his mother, and a daughter Kusum, who lives a miserable life as the wife of an eccentric poet, Chaman. Chandrakant is introduced to the courtesan Neelmani (Saraswati) by his friend Sudhakar (Baburaje), who brings about his ruin and turns him into an alcoholic. The patriarch bequeaths his personal wealth to his virtuous daughter-in-law Guniyal, who tries to provide for Neelmani’s insatiable demand for money. The husband, caught in between a demanding lover and a sacrificing wife, is eventually reformed when he encounters his father’s funeral procession. Rejected by Neelmani, he returns to his wife. Along with Ranakdevi (1946), this film effectively founded a Gujarati cinema industry, establishing Vyas as the best known lyricist/composer in that language e.g. with the success of songs like Bhabhi tame thoda thoda thao varnagi, and was also a major personal success for its female lead Roy.

JOGIDAS KHUMAN

1948 121’b&w Gujarati

d Manhar Raskapur pc Rupchhaya Chitra st/dial Kavi ‘Jaman’ sc T.K. Dave lyr Avinash Vyas, Venibhai Purohit, Prahlad Parekh, Kailas Pandya c Manek Mehta m Ramesh Desai, Indukumar Parekh

lp Arvind Pandya, Master Dalpat, Champsibhai Nagda, Ratikumar Vyas, Narmada Shankar, Vimal Ghaisas

The first screen version of the anti-feudal Saurashtra legend of the bandit-saint Jogidas (Pandya). When the prince Vajesinh (Dalpat) seeks to annex lands gifted by the king to the Kathis of the Khuman clan of Bhavnagar, a rebellion is led by Hada Khuman, his two brothers Bhan (Nagda) and Ghela, and his son Jogidas. Jogidas eventually raises an army and kills the prince. He is forgiven by the king and becomes a saintly figure. The popular story was remade twice more by Raskapur himself (in 1962 and 1975: he was believed to be preparing yet another remake when he died) and featured a number of well known actors. In this version composer Laxmikant (cf. Laxmikant-Pyarelal) played Jogidas’ son Lakho, in what was probably his sole screen appearance.

KALPANA

aka Imagination

1948 164’ b&w Hindi

d/s/choreo Uday Shankar pc Stage & Screen Presentations dial Amritlal Nagar lyr Sumitranandan Pant c K. Ramnoth m Vishnudas Shirali

lp Uday Shankar, Amala Shankar, Lakshmi Kanta, G.V. Subba Rao, Birendra Bannerjee, Swaraj Mitter Gupta, Anil Kumar Chopra, Padmini, Lalitha

A dance spectacular, four years in the making, orchestrated by India’s most famous modern dancer (and brother of Ravi Shankar). The narrative of the surreal fantasy is embedded within a framing story of a writer telling a story to a film producer, who eventually declines to make the movie. The writer tells of Udayan (Shankar) and Kamini (Kanta) and the young man’s dream of establishing an art centre, Kalakendra (a fictional equivalent of Shankar’s India Cultural Centre at Almora) in the Himalayas. Shot in the Gemini Studios in Madras, this ode to creative imagination mobilises the vocabulary of traditional dancing, which doubles as a metaphor for the dreams invested in the newly independent India. The choreography was specifically designed for the camera, with semi-expressionist angles and chiaroscuro effects, and became a model for later dance spectaculars like Chandralekha (also made at Gemini and shot by Ramnoth, 1948) and the dream sequence in Raj Kapoor’s Awara (1951). For many years, the unusual film was seen as exemplifying a successful fusion of Indian modernism and the cinema. Shankar, who had danced with Pavlova, was lauded by James Joyce in a letter to his daughter: ‘He moves on the stage like a semi-divine being. Believe me, there are still some beautiful things left in this poor old world.’ A 122’ version was shown in the US although one reviewer noted that the Indian government seemed reluctant to let it be seen abroad.

KARIYAVAR

1948 138’ b&w Gujarati

d/sc/dial Chaturbhuj Doshi pc Sagar Movietone p Chimanlal Desai st based on Shaida’s novel Vanzari Vaav lyr Chaitanya, Nandkumar Pathak c Adi Irani, Jayant Dadawala m Ajit Merchant

lp Dina Sanghvi, Dhulia, Shobha, Mulchand Khichdi

Ruralist mythological and complicated love story featuring numerous symbolic references with evident sexual overtones. The village girl Raju (Sanghvi) accepts the challenge of putting her hand inside a pot containing a poisonous cobra which would win her the right to install an idol into a temple. The snake falls for the girl and promises to withdraw to a banyan tree from where it can protect her. Raju loves the gypsy Madhav to the envy of her neighbour, the evil Veera. The snake duly bites Madhav, but then sucks back its poison on the condition that a well would be dug in the village. The well however turns out to be dry, and the village, in the grip of drought, is urged by Veera to demand that Raju and Madhav sacrifice themselves in an exorcism that would solve the villagers’ problems. The story then introduces another woman, Champa, who volunteers to marry Veera and then further offers to commit suicide. As Champa and Veera are beheaded, the well waters rise. Remembered mainly as the screen debut of noted stage actress Dina Sanghvi, better known as Dina Pathak.

SHAHEED

1948 164’ b&w Hindi

d/st/co-dial Ramesh Saigal pc Filmistan co-dial/co-lyr Qamar Jalalabadi co-lyr Raja Mehdi Ali Khan c Marshall Braganza m Ghulam Haider

lp Kamini Kaushal, Dilip Kumar, Chandramohan, Leela Chitnis, V.H. Desai, Shashi Kapoor, S.L. Puri, N. Kabir, Ram Singh, Madan, Prabhu Dayal

Nationalist melodrama set in the context of the Quit India movement and the ensuing wave of terrorist actions in the mid-40s. Ram (D. Kumar), the nationalist son of the colonial police chief Raibahadur Dwarkadas (Chandramohan), leaves home to join a terrorist group. His childhood sweetheart Sheela (Kaushal), who repeatedly protects him from being caught, is forced to marry the evil policeman Vinod, who in return lets her brother Gopal free and then promises to save Ram’s life. In the end, accused of terrorist crimes, Ram is defended in court by his now-repentant father, but eventually hanged. Sheela, presented as the true martyr in this tragic drama, dies as well and is united with her lover in death.

SIRAJ

1948 ?’ b&w Assamese

d Bishnu Rabha, Phani Sarma st Lakhidhar Sarma lyr Shiba Bhattacharya, Bhupen Hazarika c Sudhish Ghatak m Bishnu Rabha

lp Phani Sarma, Bishnu Rabha, Chandradhar Goswami, Bhupen Hazarika, Anupama Bhattacharya, Nirupama, Ambika Patwari, Bhabha Hazarika

National integration movie made by former associates of the Assamese IPTA, calling for communal harmony through its central character Siraj (Sarma), a kind-hearted Muslim who raises an orphaned Hindu child. Composer and actor Bhupen Hazarika, making his debut here, remade the film in 1988, but four decades later the plot, lacking its initial conviction and performative authenticity, seemed maudlin.

SUHAAG RAAT

1948 143’ b&w Hindi

d/sc/lyr Kidar Sharma pc Oriental Pics st F.A. Mirza, V. Sharma c D.C. Mehta, D.K. Ambre, Machwe m Snehal

lp Begum Para, Bharat Bhushan, Geeta Bali, Pesi Patel, S. Nazir, Rajinder, Nazira, Shanta Kumar, D. Kumar

Geeta Bali’s debut is a classic love triangle. The child Bali is placed under the guardianship of the evil and greedy stepbrother Rahu: he pushes Bali over a cliff in order to get the entire family inheritance. Bali (Bhushan) survives, protected by an old murderer, Jaggu, whose beautiful daughter Kammo (Geeta Bali) falls in love with him although he prefers Paro (Begum Para), daughter of a zamindar with whom he has found employment. The villainous stepbrother re-enters the scene and lays claim to Paro; the lovely Kammo sacrifices her own life to get the lovers, Bali and Paro, together. All the well-known Sharma trademarks are present, including the use of nature as an emotional equivalent for the characters’ state of mind, e.g. the scene where Kammo rows the boat through the dark night to enable the lovers to elope. The film has several Geeta Dutt numbers, including Rum jhum matwale badal chha gaye and Balo more payai.

VADILONA VANKE

1948 132’ b&w Gujarati d Ramchandra Thakur pc Saras Pics s/lyr Prabhulal Dwivedi c Gordhanbhai Patel m Mohan Jr

lp Motibai, Vasant Nayak, Pratima Devi, Latabai, Ramesh Vyas, Anant Vin, Amrit, Anjana, Neelam, Chunilal Nayak, Master Pransukh, Baby Saroj, Vijaya, Keshav Purohit, Jayshankar, Chhagan Romeo

Melodrama about social modernisation featuring the retired diwan of Kathiawar and his two daughters who have both separated from their husbands. The elder sister, illiterate and a traditionalist, is married to the sophisticated political prisoner Pushkar. The younger sister is married to the aimlessly ‘modern’ Kirtikumar. The drama of conflicting rights and ambitions is played out by an unusually large number of characters including Pushkar’s widowed mother, her younger son, other members of the joint family, a criminal, and the accountants employed by Kirtikumar and the diwan. The film ends with Pushkar’s death, leading to the cessation of hostilities. The film is based on a successful play by the Desh Nataka Samaj.

ANDAZ

aka A Matter of Style aka Beau Monde 1949 148’(142’) b&w Hindi

d/p Mehboob Khan pc Mehboob Prod. st Shams Lucknowi sc/dial S. Ali Raza lyr Majrooh Sultanpuri c Faredoon Irani m Naushad

lp Dilip Kumar, Nargis, Raj Kapoor, Cuckoo, V.H. Desai, Sapru, Murad, Anwaribai, Amirbano, Jamshedji

Melodrama using the pivotal figure of a woman to dramatise the contradictory proposition that the new, independent India should value capitalist modernisation while retaining feudal family and moral values. Neeta (Nargis), a modern young woman who dresses in Western style, inherits the business empire of Sir Badriprasad (Sapru). She entrusts its management to her dashing young friend Dilip (Kumar), who had saved her life and now misreads her gratitude and assumes that she reciprocates his love. When the man she is engaged to, the spoilt playboy Rajan (Kapoor), returns, she marries him. Dilip’s managerial efficiency disintegrates under the pressure of his frustrated desire while the infantile Rajan begins to suspect his wife’s fidelity. Eventually the tensions erupt into a violent clash between the two men as Rajan threatens to beat Dilip to death with a tennis racket. When Dilip recovers and advances on Neeta, she shoots him and is jailed for murder. The ensuing trial underlines the moral of the story: all the mayhem is Neeta’s fault for not having listened to her father when he warned her to avoid ‘modern’ ways. A major musical hit with Naushad classics like Hum aaj kahin dil kho baithe, Tu kahe agar, Jhoom jhoom ke nacho aaj (all sung by Mukesh).

APOORVA SAHODARARGAL/APOORVA SAHODARULU/NISHAN

aka Strange Brothers 1949 151’ b&w Tamil/Telugu/Hindi

d T.G. Raghavacharya[Ta], C. Pullaiah[Te], S.S. Vasan[H] pc Gemini st Alexandre Dumas’s The Corsican Brothers dial Gemini Story Dept.[Ta], co-dial/lyr Pandit Indra[H] co-dial J.S. Casshyap lyr Kothamangalam Subbu[Ta] c Kamal Ghosh[H], P. Ellappa m Saluri Rajeshwara Rao, M.D. Parthasarathy, Balkrishna Kalla, R. Vaidyanath

lp P. Bhanumathi, M.K. Radha[Ta], R. Nagendra Rao, G. Pattu Iyer[Ta], L. Narayana Rao[Ta], B.S. Saroja, D. Balasubramanyam[Ta], V.P.S. Mani, Ranjan[H], J.S. Casshyap[H], Maya Bannerjee[H], Balkrishna Kalla[H], Suryaprabha[H], S.S. Kashyap[H], Stunt Sona.

Vasan’s sequel to the smash hit Chandralekba (1948) adapted the Douglas Fairbanks Jr version of the Dumas novel, directed by Edward Small (1942). Made as a trilingual, its nearly identical Tamil (Apoorva Sahodarargal) and Telugu (Apoorva Sahodarulu) versions were nevertheless credited to different directors, while M.K. Radha, who plays the double role of the separated twins in Tamil is replaced by his Chandralekba co-star Ranjan for the Hindi film. The villain Zoravar Singh (Nagendra Rao) defeats the rival kingdom of Bhawanigarh and the good doctor Shankar (Casshyap) manages to rescue the twins Vijay and Vikram (Radha/Ranjan), heirs to the throne. Vijay is raised in the city and Vikram in the forest. They grow up to take revenge on Zoravar. Both brothers love the same girl, Ranjana (Bhanumathi), causing a rivalry that generates further intrigues: Zoravar kidnaps the girl as bait to get the two heroes to reveal themselves. The Hindi version was less successful than the Tamil one, which broke several records.

BARSAAT

aka Rain 1949 171’(163’) b&w Hindi

d/p Raj Kapoor pc R.K. Films s Ramanand Sagar lyr Hasrat Jaipuri, Shailendra, Ramesh Shastri, Jalal Malihabadi c Jal Mistry m Shankar-Jaikishen

lp Raj Kapoor, Nargis, Premnath, K.N. Singh, Cuckoo, Nimmi, V.M. Vyas, Ratan Gaurang, Vishwa Mehra, Dolly Baldev, Pushpa Bimla, Prakash Arora, Sushila Devi, B.N. Khera, Master Sandow

Kapoor’s sombre musical classic contrasts different notions of love. The rich and ‘sensitive’ Pran (Kapoor) passionately loves the poor country girl Reshma (Nargis). Defying her father’s objections, who repudiates her, she runs to Pran but apparently drowns on the way. Pran and his philandering friend Gopal (Premnath), who callously jilted the village girl Neela (Nimmi), are driving through the country and happen upon Reshma’s wedding to the obsessive fisherman (Singh) who saved her and believes he owns her. Pran crashes his car, stops the wedding and gets Reshma while the repentant Gopal finds that Neela has killed herself. Kapoor’s 2nd independent production starring himself and Nargis was the R.K. Studio’s first major hit. Its unusually innovative chiaroscuro cinematography (e.g. for Lata Mangeshkar and Mukesh’s song Chhod gaye balam) created deep rather than laterally elaborated spaces and relied heavily on metaphor, as in the shot where the angled rope cut off by Reshma’s father aligns with the angle of the violin bow with which Pran nightly serenades Reshma (playing the Anniversary Song horn The Jolson Story, 1946). The dominant metaphor for the flow of desire, evoked by the title, is that of water, cf. the love sequence after the song Mujhe kisisepyar ho gaya (Lata Mangeshkar) with the waterfall, or the last shot when the smoke from Neela’s funeral pyre merges with the rain clouds. The film is remembered above all for Shankar-Jaikishen’s music, with numerous all-time hits, including the opening number Hawa mein udtajaye mera lal dupatta and Jiya bekarar hai, Barsaat mein humse mile, Meri aankhon mein bas gaya koi re, Ab mera kaun Sahara (all sung by Lata Mangeshkar). The specially charged Kapoor-Nargis love duets (cf. the Pyar hua ikraarhua song in Shri 420, 1955) were often singled out as exemplifying the acme of the Indian cinema’s romances.

Nargis in Barsaat

EK THI LADKI

1949 164’ b&w Hindi

d Roop K. Shorey pc Shorey Films s I.S. Johar lyr Aziz Kashmiri c Anwar Pabani m Vinod

lp Meena Shorey, Motilal, Kuldeep, I.S. Johar, Majnu, Shakuntala, Batra, Shamlal, Gogia Pasha, Agha Miraz

This suspense drama was Shorey’s first major Hindi success after his migration from Lahore. Poor and orphaned Meena (Shorey) accidentally witnesses the murder of a businessman in his office. Fleeing the scene, she is caught by the cops but rescued by the two killers who smart-talk their way out of the crisis. The trio check into a fancy hotel where Meena is required to play a princess. Spotting a policeman, she escapes once again and blunders into the office of hero Ranjit (Motilal), who employs her as his stenographer and then falls in love with her, to the annoyance of his boss’s daughter Vimala. Geeta Dutt (then Geeta Roy) sang one of her early numbers Chandani raat bai, but the major hit of the movie is Lata Mangeshkar’ s La-ra-lappa lai rakbada: throughout the rest of her career Meena Shorey was known as the La-ra-lappa-girl.

42

aka Byalis

1949 156’ b&w Bengali

d/s Hemen Gupta pc Film Trust of India lyr Tarit Kumar Ghosh c G.K. Mehta m Hemanta Mukherjee

lp Bikash Roy, Manju Dey, Sombhu Mitra, Suruchi Sengupta, Pradeep Kumar

Gupta’s best-known political film addresses the violent agitations against the colonial police in the Midnapore district of Bengal in late 1942. Set against the violent Quit India agitations of the 40s in Midnapore, much of the drama stems from the ambivalence of the local leadership towards Gandhian non-violence. An aged woman activist (a reference to Matangini Hazra of Midnapore) explains that Gandhi advocated non-violence but asked every woman to carry a knife as well, just in case. Ajoy, his wife Bina (Dey) and aged grandmother are fired with the ‘Karenge ya marenge’ (Do or die) zeal. Violence erupts when the village blacksmith’s daughter is killed. The blacksmith is tortured and killed by the evil army officer Major Trivedi (Bikash Roy, providing one of Bengali cinema’s most enduring images of untrammelled villainy). Bina, who becomes a courier for the terrorists, is gang-raped by the army and goes insane, whereupon the entire village rises in anger. The grandmother is shot while leading an unarmed procession. Ajoy is shot too. Finally, in a sequence evoking Eisenstein’s Bronenosets Potemkin (1925) the army refuses further orders to fire and eventually tramples over the major to join the marchers in raising the Indian tricolour. The tensely constructed and well-acted film, despite occasional hiccups in the dialogue (e.g. the major’s line in English, ‘You will be killed, killed to death’), encountered censorship problems for its potential to ‘excite passion and encourage disorder’. Banned in Bengal, MP, Assam, Bihar and Madras (although cleared in Bombay), it was eventually released, with changes, in 1951.

GIRLS’ SCHOOL

1949 154’ b&w Hindi

d/s Amiya Chakravarty pc Lokmanya Prod. dial J.S. Casshyap lyr Pradeep c V. Babasaheb m C. Ramchandra, Anil Biswas

lp Geeta Bali, Sohan, Shashikala, Sajjan, Mangala, Ramsingh, Vimala Vasisth, Krishna, Harun, Jagannath, Arjun, Gangu, Kesarbai

Rural drama about Meena (Bali) who leaves home rather than submit to an arranged marriage and starts a girls’ school in a village, although opposed by the local zamindar. The zamindar’s brother-in-law Bipin (Sajjan), who lusts after Meena, is the villain. The hero (Sohan) appears in answer to an advertisement for a schoolteacher and is appointed only because Meena mistakes his name - Shanti Kumar Majumdar - for that of a woman. The zamindar’s widowed sister Sumitradevi, a supporter of the school, objects because he is not married. Meena and Shanti Kumar fall in love but he realises the damage he may cause to her school and leaves. Bipin then spreads rumours about Shanti Kumar’s morals, which cause a further difficulty that has to be resolved before both the future of the school and of the loving couple may be assured. Guru Dutt assisted Chakravarty on this film shot at Bombay Talkies.

GUNSUNDARI KATHA

1949 172’ b&w Telugu

d/co-sc K.V. Reddy Vauhini co-sc K. Kameshwara Rao st Shakespeare’s King Lear dial/lyr Pingali Nagendra Rao c Marcus Bartley m Ogirala Ramchandra Rao

lp Govindrajulu Subba Rao, Shantakumari, K. Siva Rao, Malathi, Relangi Venkatramaiah, Sriranjanijr., T.G. Kamala, Hemalatha, Lakshmirajyam Jr., Seeta, Balijepalli Lakshmikanta Kavi

Freewheeling adaptation of Lear by fantasist K.V. Reddy. The royal patriarch (Subba Rao) is offended by his youngest daughter Gunsundari (Sriranjani) when she pledges unconditional loyalty to her future husband. He has her married to a deaf and dumb cripple (Siva Rao) who is in fact a perfectly healthy youth living under a curse. The king is stricken with a mysterious illness and his three sons-in-law set out to discover the Mahendramani jewel which will cure him. When the youngest son-in-law finds it, the other two steal it and magically change the third into a bear. Gunsundari eventually succeeds in lifting the curse upon her husband. The music of the big-budget Vauhini film is particularly successful, with V.A.K. Ranga Rao claiming Ogirala’s composition Eevanilo to be the most unusual song in the history of Telugu cinema. The scenarist K. Kameshwara Rao later remade it in Tamil (Gunsundari, 1955) starring Gemini Ganesh and Savitri.

Gunsundari Katha

KANEEZ

1949 140’ b&w Hindi-Urdu

d Krishna Kumar pc Caravan Pics s/co-lyr Hasrat Lucknowi co-dial/co-lyr Shahir Ghaznavi co-lyr Sarshar Saloni, Harishchandra Akhtar c S. Srivastava m Ghulam Haider, Hansraj Behl, O.P. Nayyar

lp Munawar Sultana, Shyam, Urmila, Kuldeep Kaur, Khwaja Sabir, Tiwari, Nazir Kashmiri, Jilloo, Cuckoo, Sinha

This Muslim social became one of 40s star Munawar Sultana’s best-known films. She plays Sabira, the daughter of the millionaire Seth Akbar (Sinha) who is swindled and put into an asylum by his villainous manager Hamid (Sabir). Sabira marries Hamid’s son Akhtar (Shyam), but it is an unhappy marriage ruined by a sexy urban socialite, Darling (Kaur). Sabira is forced to become a servant in her own home but eventually recovers her rightful place as the household’s mistress. Numerous songs by Shamshad Begum and Zeenat Begum also includes early songs by Geeta Dutt.

KAVI

1949 151’ b&w Bengali

d/sc Debaki Bose pc Chitramaya st/dial/lyr Tamshankar Bannerjee from his novel (1942) c Dhiren Dey m Anil Bagchi

lp Nilima Das, Anubha Gupta, Robin Majumdar, Tulsi Chakraborty, Nitish Mukherjee, Reba Devi, Satya Bandyopadhyay

Noted novelist Tarashankar Bannerjee’s book addressed the desire for immortality through art. In his own screen adaptation, the railway porter Nitai (Robin Majumdar) develops a reputation as a poet through participating in the kabigan (musical debate between poets who improvise in a question-answer contest). The married Thakurjhee (Anubha Gupta) falls in love with him. To avert a scandal he leaves his village and travels with a nomadic Jhumur troupe of dancers and musicians. The prostitute Basan (Nilima Das), whose advances the hero initially rejects, eventually comes to embody the unity of art and desire. Her death forces him to return home, where he finds Thakurjhee also dead. The performances of the two women, the mute suffering of the mundane Thakurjhee, counterposed by Basan’s delicate frame crippled by venereal disease, and seen as the two sensuous opposites evoked by the hero’s poetry, allow for some graceful moments in the film. The film was known for its music, esp. Tarashankar’s lyrics Kalo jodi manda tobe, Ei khed mor mone mone, jiban eito chhoto kane, sung by male lead Majumdar, one of the last actors in the Saigal mould. Bose’s ecstatic soft close-ups, his signature, are available in profusion. He remade the film in Hindi (1954) with Geeta Bali, Nalini Jaywant and Bharat Bhushan.

KEELUGURRAM/MAYA KUDHIRAI

aka The Magic Horse 1949 220’ b&w Telugu/Tamil

d/p Rajah of Mirzapur pc Vijayalakshmi Movies sc Ch. Narayanamurthy s/dial/lyr Tapi Dharma Rao c D. L Narayana m Ghantasala Venkateshwara Rao

lp Anjali Devi, A. Nageshwara Rao, T. Kanakam, Suryashree, Lakshmirajyam Jr., Surabhi Kamalabai, Gangarathnam, M. Subbulu, A.V. Subba Rao, Relangi Venkatramaiah, P. Koteshwara Rao, D. Satyanarayana

Folk-tale in which the king, out on a hunt, falls in love with a beautiful woman (Anjali Devi) who turns out to be a rakshasi (demoness). The king insists on marrying her, inviting retribution from his son (Nageshwara Rao) by his first queen. The demoness, who is able to devour elephants and horses, sends the hero, her stepson, on a dangerous journey to fetch a rare herb, hoping he will die in the process. He survives with the aid of a magic flying horse and eventually defeats his stepmother in a savage battle. This is one of noted singer Ghantasala’s first films as composer. The Rajah of Mirzapur, proprietor of the Shobhanachala Studio, took directorial credit.

LAILA MAJNU

1949 171’ b&w Telugu/Tamil

d/sc P.S. Ramakrishna Rao pc Bharani Pics dial/lyr Samudrala Raghavacharya c B.S. Ranga m CR. Subburaman

lp P. Bhanumathi, A. Nageshwara Rao, C.S.R. Anjaneyulu, K. Siva Rao, Mukkamala Krishnamurthy, Arani Satyanarayana, Lalitha, Padmini, Sriranjani Jr.

The first Telugu version of the classic Sufi legend filmed extensively in Hindi. The rich Laila (Bhanumathi) loves the poor Qais (A. Nageshwara Rao) who is accused of insanity by her family. She is sent to Iraq but, in a reversal of the usually tragic ending, meets and unites with her lover in the desert. Remembered mainly for the two stars’ performances and for Bhanumathi’s songs Ninu basipovudana and Preme neramauna, both of which she later claimed to have composed herself. The film is also Malayalam star Padmini’s Telugu debut with her sister Lalitha.

MAHAL

1949 162’ b&w Hindi-Urdu

d/s Kamal Amrohi pc Bombay Talkies lyr Nakshab c Josef Wirsching m Khemchand Prakash

lp Ashok Kumar, Madhubala, Kumar, Vijayalakshmi, Kanu Roy

Amrohi’s debut is now considered a Hindi classic. It is a complicated ghost story psychodrama choreographed by Lachhu Maharaj and featuring hero Shankar (A. Kumar), who moves into an abandoned mansion that has a tragic history. He notices his resemblance to a portrait of the mansion’s former owner and sees the ghost of the man’s mistress Kamini (Madhubala) who tells him he must either die if they are to be united or that he must marry her reincarnation, the gardener’s daughter, Asha. His friend Shrinath (Roy) tries to break the obsession by arranging Shankar’s marriage to Ranjana (Vijayalakshmi). However, Shankar’s obsession continues to the distress of his new bride who is expected, among other things, to live in a snake- and bat-infested hut. Ranjana commits suicide, accusing Shankar of the deed, but the truth comes out in the courtroom drama when the gardener’s daughter admits to having masqueraded as the ghost. Shankar is nevertheless condemned to death for Ranjana’s murder but in a strange reversal of fortunes, transfers his obsession to Asha: instead of being fascinated by a dead woman, he is now the near-ghost fascinated by the living Asha. The deep-focus photography is perhaps German cameraman Wirsching’s best work in his career at Bombay Talkies. It is complemented by a remarkably advanced soundtrack. The film includes the song hit, Ayega aanewala (sung by Lata Mangeshkar and regarded as a turning-point in her career), used as a leitmotif for the ghost.

MANA DESAM

1949 172’ b&w Telugu

d L.Y. Prasad pc M.R.A. Prod. sc/dial/lyr Samudrala Raghavacharya c M.A. Rehman m Ghantasala Venkateshwara Rao

lp Chittor V. Nagaiah, Narayana Rao, N.T. Rama Rao, Relangi Venkatramaiah, Vangara, Ramanatha Sastry, C. Krishnaveni, Kanchana, Surabhi Balasaraswathi, Hemalatha, Lakshmikantam, S.V. Ranga Rao

Produced by the actress Krishnaveni, this is a political melodrama about India’s freedom struggle. Shobha (Krishnaveni), a critic of the Congress Party, argues with Madhu (Narayana Rao), a supporter, and they fall in love. Both get caught up in repressive police violence and are arrested. When independence is achieved, Madhu develops ‘amnesia as a result of torture by the police, but his memory returns and eventually he marries Shobha. The film included several symbolic scenes including a prostitute and a bottle of liquor in front of a Gandhi portrait while a Nagaiah song bemoans the speed at which India forgot Gandhi’s teachings. Remembered mainly as Telugu megastar N.T. Rama Rao’s debut as a police inspector, and as singer Ghantasala’s first composing assignment. The film relies heavily on Burrakatha and Oggukatha folk forms, introduced here via songwriter Raghavacharya and widely used in the propagandist theatre of the Praja Natya Mandali (see BPTA).

MANGALFERA

1949 139’ b&w Gujarati

d Ratibhai Punatar pc Ajit Pics st Vaju Kotak sc Ramchandra Thakur c H.S. Kwatra lyr/m Avinash Vyas

lp Nirupa Roy, Dulari, Sarita Devi, Shanti Madhok, Manhar Desai, Babu Raje, Chhagan Romeo, Bhagwandas, Ibrahim, Maruti, Kamlakant, Barkat Virani, Haridas, Popat

Ajit’s remake of the Ranjit Studio’s Shadi (1941). The physically handicapped Mangal (Desai) is seduced away from his loving wife Shobha (Roy) by Mena (Madhok). Shobha tries to commit suicide. When the well-meaning Chandrika (Dulari) tries to seduce the hero again, Mangal begins to believe that he was trapped into marrying a disabled woman and he returns to Shobha. The film was considered a reform social rather than a melodrama and was seen as a worthy successor of Punatar’s previous Gujarati hit, Gunsundari (1948), confirming him as the leading Gujarati director.

MEETH BHAKAR

1949 125’ b&w Marathi

d/s/lyr Bhalji Pendharkar pc Prabhakar Pics c Ganpat Shinde m Kashalkar

lp P. Ratnamala, Jayaram Shiledar, Baburao Pendharkar, Chintamanrao Kolhatkar, Jayaram Desai, R.V. Rane, Chittaranjan Kolhatkar, Omkar Devaskar, Usha Kiron

Pendharkar’s ruralist melodrama and murder mystery. Amrit, the son of proud patriarch Tatyaba, who lives with three sons and a daughter-in-law, is accused of a murder in a gambling den. In return for hushing up the matter, the evil owner of the den enslaves the entire family, forcing them to do menial labour. The happiness of the past is contrasted with the family’s downfall, for which fate is blamed, until salvation arrives when the murder victim turns out to be still alive. Pendharkar’s lyrics intensified the film’s sentimentality, e.g. Bhar divasa amhi ek swapna pahila.

NAGAKANNIKA

1949 172’ b&w Kannada

d G. Vishwanathan p D, Shankar Singh, B. Vittalacharya pc Mahatma Pics dial/lyr Hunsur Krishnamurthy c G. Dorai m Palavangudi Shyama Iyer

lp M. Jayashree, Bellari Ratnamala, B. Raghavendra Rao, U. Mahabala Rao, S.M. Veerabhadrappa, G.R. Sandow, Pratima Devi, Eswarappa

D. Shankar Singh’s Mahatma Pics’ best-known film is a ‘folklore’ movie modelled on the Telugu fantasy genre (cf. Patala Bhairavi, 1951). An evil magician indulging in human sacrifices changes his protesting daughter into a parrot. He then changes a yogi’s daughter into a snake and wants to sacrifice the king of Mahendrapuri but the hero manages to save the king. Co-producer B. Vittalacharya continued the genre in his Kannada and Telugu films.

NALLATHAMBI

1949 199’ b&w Tamil

d Krishnan-Panju pc Eneskay Pics, Jayanti Ents C.N. Annadurai lyr Udumalai Narayana Kavi, K.P. Kamakshi c V. Kumaradevan mus C.R. Subburaman

lp N.S. Krishnan, T.A. Mathuram, S.V. Sahasranamam, P. Bhanumathi, Alwar Kuppuswamy, T.K. Kanta, S.R. Janaki, D.V. Narayanswamy, M.N. Rajam

Together with Velaikkari (1949), this key DMK film initiates Annadurai’s film career. The zamindar of Swapnapuri bequeaths his property to his daughter Pushpa (Bhanumathi) and his sister’s son, the idealist rebel Nallathambi (Krishnan). The villain Bhoopati (Sahasranamam), who planned to marry Pushpa to acquire her land, sows discord between Pushpa and Nallathambi while the latter propagates Annadurai’s political programme (e.g. advocating prohibition) and defends the people who are oppressed by the zamindari system. In many ways the most Gandhian of the DMK Films (e.g. on issues like prohibition), the attacks on the zamindari system also indicate the DMK’s moves away from the Justice Party. While promoting Krishnan as a star, the film’s highlight is a fantasy insert in which Bhanumathi becomes Cleopatra.

NAVAJEEVANAM

1949 172’ b&w Tamil

d Kadaru Nagabhushanam pc Shri Rajarajeshwari Prod, s/co-lyr Nagamani co-lyr Kambadasan dial[H] Udayakumar c P. Ellappa m S.V. Venkatraman

lp Chittor V. Nagaiah, Mahadevan, P. Kannamba, Annapurna, Sriram, S. Varalakshmi, Kamala, T.A. Jayalakshmi, Vanaja

Nationalist film contemporaneous with the DMK political film idiom and deploying many Gandhian symbols. It contrasts the benevolent Gandhian playwright Mahadevan (Nagaiah) with his arrogant younger brother Prabhakar (Sriram). When Prabhakar marries the rich Kamala (Kamala) and is entrusted with the estate of his industrialist father-in-law, he becomes an oppressive employer and rejects his brother when Mahadevan argues on the workers’ behalf. Kamala surrounds herself with upper-class social engagements, throwing her husband together with his old flame Vanaja. Eventually Kamala and Prabhakar have a change of heart and restore the joint family’s feudal collective identity.

PARIBARTAN

1949 C.130’ b&w Bengali

d/sc Satyen Bose pc National Progressive Pics st/dial Manoranjan Ghosh lyr Bimal Ghosh c Ajoy Kar m Salil Choudhury

lp Ajit Bose, Shyamal Bose, Dilip Chatterjee, Sova Sen, Satyabrata, Sandhyarani, Satyen Bose

Satyen Bose and (probably) composer Salil Choudhury’s debut is a didactic reformist children’s film elaborating two enduring themes of Bengali boyhood novels: life at a boarding school and the semi-tragic experience of growing up. Prankster Ajoy is sent away from his widowed mother to school where he learns to respect people from a different class and becomes bosom pals with the handicapped Shakti. The boys’ triumphant encounter with the corrupt school superintendent involves the good teacher Sisirbabu (played by director Bose), a nationalist who is popular with all the students except Ajoy. Their feud is eventually called off when Shakti dies in an accident, leaving Ajoy bereft twice over when Sisirbabu also has to leave the school. The producers were known for their nationalist dramas, including Hemen Gupta’s Bhuli Naai (1948).

PONMUDI

aka Ethirparatha Mutham

1949 ? b&w Tamil

d Ellis R. Duncan p Modern Theatres sc/lyr Bharatidasan from his narrative poem Ethirparatha Mutham [Unexpected Kiss] c J.G. Vijayan m G. Ramanathan

lp Narasimhabharati, R. Balasubramanyam, Azhumalai, A. Karunanidhi, Kali N. Rathnam, M.G. Chakrapani, Madhuri Devi, Rajamani, Padmini, Saraswathi, Azhvar Kuppusami, Dhanalakshmi

The story focusses on two Siva Mudaliar families in the business milieu of Kaveripoompattinam. They are landowners and pearl merchants whose families have intermarried. Mananayagan (Kuppusami) and Annam (Saraswathi) have one son, Ponmudi (Bharati), while Chokkalingam (Balasubramanyam) and Vanji (Dhanalakshmi) have a daughter, Poonkothai (Madhuri). The two children have always been promised to each other in marriage, but the arrangement falls through when the two families fall out over a land deal, forcing the young lovers to meet in secret. When they are discovered, Ponmudi is sent to North India on business and Poonkothai runs away from home. The distraught parents make up and send messages to tell their kids that all is well. However, Ponmudi has been captured by tribals and is being prepared as a human sacrifice. The messengers and Poonkothai arrive in time to rescue him. The film’s dialogues are in the distictly Tamil idiom, representing a specific subcultural world.

RAKSHAREKHA

1949 168’ b&w Telugu

d/p/sc R. Padmanabhan pc R. Padmanabhan Prod, s/lyr Balijepalli Lakshmikanta Kavi c T. Marconi m Ogirala Ramchandra Rao

lp P. Bhanumathi, Anjali Devi, Lakshmirajyam Jr., T. Kankam, Vijayalakshmi, R. Subbamma, Lakshmidevi, Gangarathnam, A. Nageshwara Rao, Balijepalli Lakshmikanta Kavi, K. Siva Rao, Ramnatha Sastry, D. Satyanarayana, Vangara

Costumed fantasy, and a rare joint appearance of Telugu cinema’s two best-known female stars, Bhanumathi and Anjali Devi. Kalavathi (Bhanumathi), talented and versatile daughter of the king of Simhala, refuses to marry, as does Sudhakar (A. Nageshwara Rao), prince of the neighbouring kingdom of Avanti. While he is asleep, fairies come and transport him in his bed to Kalavathi’s chamber and they fall in love. The celestial damsel Chitra (Anjali Devi), envious of Kalavathi, whisks Sudhakar up to heaven, allowing him to return to earth once a week but threatening that his head will explode into a 1000 pieces if he reveals her existence. When Kalavathi gets pregnant, her husband’s disappearances lead to rumours accusing her of infidelity and she is forced to leave the palace. Kidnapped by tribals, she escapes dressed as a man. Another princess, Chandrika, believing Kalavathi to be a man, falls in love with her and marries her. In the end, Chitra throws Sudhakar out of heaven and he lands on earth, petrified into a stone statue. A holy man makes him human again and changes Chitra into a witch. Patterned on an earlier hit, Pullaiah’s Gollabhama (1947), the film became a pioneering example of a genre Telugu film critics call ‘folklore films’.

RIMJHIM

1949 144’ b&w Hindi

d Ramesh Gupta, Sushil Sahu pc Hindustan Chitra s Kishore Sahu lyr Bharat Vyas, Moti, K. Tripathi c P. Isaac m Khemchand Prakash

lp Kishore Sahu, Ramola, Mubarak, Mohna, Jankidass, Jugnu, Mumtaz Ali

Musical comedy romance about Rammo (Ramola) who, scheduled to marry a fat man she hates, runs away on her wedding day dressed as a man. She meets Kamal who falls in love with her. Later they get married, but the niece of their common employer then declares her love for Kamal, creating a triangle. The film includes several classic Shamshad Begum songs.

SHABNAM

1949 154’ b&w Hindi

d/sc Bibhuti Mitra pc Filmistan st Helen Devi dial/lyr Qamar Jalalabadi c Marshall Braganza m S.D. Burman

lp Dilip Kumar, Kamini Kaushal, Jeevan, Paro, Mubarak, Rajendar Singh, Harun, Shyama, Cuckoo

Filmistan’s musical hit also established the reputation of composer S.D. Burman. Heroine Shanti (Kaushal), her aged father and a young man, Manoj (Kumar), are refugees from the 1942 bombing of Rangoon on their way to Bengal. Shanti initially dresses as a man to avoid being molested. When Manoj discovers that she is a woman they fall in love, although he is ensnared by the charms of a gypsy girl (Paro). Shanti accepts shelter from a rich zamindar (Jeevan) who falls in love with her. She next encounters Manoj when the zamindar hosts a gypsy dance: he is part of the troupe but misunderstands her presence in the palace as a betrayal. The film includes the classic Shamshad Begum Yeh duniya roop ki cbor, bachale mere babu.

VELAIKKARL

1949 186’(128’) b&w Tamil

d/sc A.S.A. Sami p S.K. Moiyuddin, K. Somasundaram pc Jupiter Pics st/dial C.N. Annadurai from his play lyr Udumalai Narayana Kavi c M. Masthan m C.R. Subburaman, S.M. Subbaiah Naidu

lp K.R. Ramaswamy, M.N. Nambiar, T.S. Balaiah, V.N. Janaki, M.V. Rajamma, Ponnuswamy Pillai, Natarajan, Sivanandan, Mustafa, Krishnan, K. Saraswati, Bhagyam, Angamuthu, Radhabai, Lalitha, Padmini, D. Balasubramanyam

Taking off from the play by the future chief minister of Tamil Nadu, the film’s release coincided with the founding of the party he led, the DMK, and set out its programme in dramatic form. Inspired partially by the actual Bhowal Sanyasi case, the plot tells of Anandan (Ramaswamy) who returns from a tea plantation in Sri Lanka to find his father hanging from a tree, hounded to suicide by a rapacious landlord (Balasubramanyam). He takes revenge with a DMK character called Mani (Baliah). A subplot has the landlord’s son (Nambiar) fall in love with the maid Amrita (Rajamma), providing the title as well as opportunities to castigate elitism. The film expounds the DMK’s anti-caste and anti-clerical populist ideology with long monologues, flowery language and by showing e.g. a criminal, Harihara Das (Nambiar again) masquerading as a pious leader of an ashram. Sivathamby (1981) commented: ‘The rhetoric of Anandan at the temple (of Mariamman) and in the court of law exposed the manner in which the landowners manipulated the entire system to keep themselves in power and authority. The arguments were so radical and heretical that they posed a threat to the very foundations of Tamil rural society.’ However, the producers, religious people who only made the film because the play had been a hit, attenuated the atheist thrust and ended the film with a title card affirming ‘only one god and only one community’. For his first feature, playwright/scenarist Sami relies heavily on theatrical conventions such as speech to camera, mid-shots and studio settings. The Travancore sisters, Lalitha and Padmini, perform the famous dance number Oridam thanile. Janaki, MGR’s wife, who plays the landlord’s daughter Sarasa, briefly became chief minister of Tamil Nadu in 1987 and led one of the two AIADMK factions after her husband died.

AFSAR

1950 121’b&w Hindi

d/s Chetan Anand pc Navketan st N. Gogol’s The Inspector General lyr Vishwamitter Adil, Narendra Sharma c V. Ratra m S.D. Burman

lp Dev Anand, Suraiya, Ruma Devi, Kanhaiyalal, Rashid, Mohan Segal, Krishna Dhawan, Anand Pal, Zohra Segal, Manmohan Krishna

Chetan Anand’s 2nd film (after Neecha Nagar, 1946), launching Navketan, continues his engagement with classic Soviet literature, although a Filmindia review suggested the film was based on the Henry Koster-Danny Kaye version (1949) of Gogol’s play. The journalist Kapur (Dev Anand) comes to a village run by corrupt politicians led by the village tehsildar (Kanhaiyalal). They mistake him for a government inspector and treat him like a VIP. The expose of rural politics is intercut with a love story between Kapur and the tehsildar’s sister Bimala (Suraiya). The film substantially determined the style, and the key unit, characteristic of Navketan’s 50s productions.

Apoorva Sahodarulu see Apoorva Sahodarargal

BABUL

1950 142’ b&w Hindi

d/p S.U. Sunny pc Sunny Art Prod. s Azm Bazidpuri lyr Shakeel Badayuni c Fali Mistry m/p Naushad

lp Nargis, Dilip Kumar, Munawar Sultana, Amar, A. Shah, Jankidass, H. Pahadi, Vinod Ismail, Jugnu, Chandrabala, Seema, Meher, Rajbala, Khursheed

Major commercial hit recounting a love triangle in a feudal household between the handsome new postman Ashok (Kumar), Bela (Nargis), the old postman’s vivacious daughter and Usha (Sultana), the haughty daughter of the zamindar. Ashok teaches Usha music until Bela warns her to keep away from her man. Usha withdraws and promises to marry a man of her father’s choice. One of the most formally elaborate romance dramas of 50s Hindi film, Babuls tragic end forms part of the unusual plot departure of the hero falling in love with a woman who is not the heroine and who, indeed, remains out of sympathy with the audience for the better part of the film. When it turns out that both women have been betrayed by the hero and by their fathers, the film shifts into a completely subjective style, locating the man and two women in three distinct spaces, even separated in one shot by a gigantic wall. In the end, Usha’s wedding procession escalates into a whole sequence of tragedies: Bela, in a deranged fit, falls from a tree and is fatally injured, though she insists that Ashok marry her, which he does, minutes before she dies. Her death is shown by a medieval horseman descending from the skies to receive her, as the smoke from her cremation merges with the clouds.

Munawar Sultana in Babul

BANWRE NAIN

1950 138’ b&w Hindi

d/sc/co-lyr Kidar Sharma pc Ambitious Pics st Akhtar Mirza c Pandurang K. Shinde m Roshan co-lyr Sharada [Himmat Roy], Vrajendranath Gaud

lp Raj Kapoor, Geeta Bali, Vijayalakshmi, Pesi Patel, Nazira, Cuckoo, Sharada, Banke, Siraj, Prakash, Darpan, Kanta

Extraordinary melodrama distinguished by Geeta Bali’s innovative acting. Disinherited Chand (Kapoor) falls in love with village girl Tara (Bali). He leaves for the city promising to return and marry her. Her sister Gangu dies as does her blind mother. She goes to the city to join Chand but Rajani, the woman who was supposed to marry Chand, manages to discredit her and she is mercilessly ejected. Chand marries Rajani while Tara is relegated to join the brass band at the wedding. Rajani dies a horrible death shortly afterwards, confessing to her deceitful action. Chand then goes in search of Tara but he is too late: she is dead. The elaborate plot is perfunctorily wrapped up in the last 15’ but the film remains notable for its remarkable camerawork, e.g. in the song Sun bairi balam, Sharma and Shinde extend the use of filters pioneered in Barua’s Devdas (1935) to create black skies over a white earth. There is an unrestrained use of the pathetic fallacy with repeated rain and fire motifs, esp. in the song Ten duniya mein dil lagta nahin, allowing Sharma to merge a romanticised socialist realism with a mawkish presentation of patriarchy at times slipping into cosmic fantasy (e.g. the dead Tara comes alive to help Chand to enter her world). All the registers are ably sustained in Bali’s skilful performance. Sharma later claimed to have written all the lyrics himself.

CHINNAMUL

aka The Uprooted 1950 117’ b&w Bengali d/c Nemai Ghosh pc Desha Pics s/lyr Swarnakamal Bhattacharya m Kalabaran Das

lp Prematosh Roy, Gangapada Basu, Sova Sen, Shanta Devi, Shanti Mitra, Sushil Sen, Jalad Chatterjee, Bijon Bhattacharya, Ritwik Ghatak

This seminal film in the evolution of Bengali cinematic realism tells of a large group of farmers from East Bengal who, on Partition, have to migrate to Calcutta. Made with IPTA support, the film used several people from refugee camps to represent their fictional equivalents. Its two legendary highlights are the scene of the old woman clinging to the doorpost of her ancestral house, refusing to leave, and the arrival of the peasants at Sealdah station amid thousands of real refugees living on the pavement. Other remarkable scenes include the long train journey, cut to the rocking movement of the passengers as they try to sleep or stand in the crowd. Despite its strong documentary overtones with people enacting their actual experiences (including the old woman), it is the folk-derived IPTA acting style that sets the tone, punctuated by tight close-ups, usually of the hero (Roy), the only politically aware member of the group, who looks for his community on Calcutta’s streets. The film came to exemplify realism as consisting, in Ghosh’s words, six different principles: no professional actors, no make-up (except whiskers), no out-takes, no songs, concealed camera on all occasions, and dialogue with a strongly regional dialect. Early commentators (including Mrinal Sen, writing in Parichay) criticised the film for its narrative and stylistic incoherence, although it is much closer to the spirit of IPTA’s famed stage production of Nabanna than IPTA’s own film version of that play, Dharti Ke Lai (1946). Gangapada Basu, who plays the leader of the group, had acted in the original play, and went on to do notable roles in Jalsaghar (1958) and Ranch an Ranga (1964). The film was made under trying conditions, including police harassment (e.g. the script was seized following a court order). Post-production censorship imposed some compromises and the film was released only following the intervention of New Theatres’ B.N. Sircar. It was a commercial failure but recovered its costs when the USSR bought it on Pudovkin’s recommendation (cf. his long essay in Pravda, 6.12.1951), where it was dubbed and retitled Obejdolni. This was Ghatak’s first extended encounter with cinema, functioning as actor and assistant director. According to Ghosh, Satyajit Ray, then an art director with an advertising agency, informally contributed to the initial screenplay.

DAHEJ

1950 149’ b&w Hindi

d V. Shantaram pc Raj kamal Kalamandir s/lyr Shams Lucknowi c V. Avadhoot m Vasant Desai

lp Jayashree, Prithviraj Kapoor, Karan Dewan, Lalita Pawar, Ulhas, Keshavrao Date

Melodrama about the oppressive consequences of the dowry custom. Chanda (Jayashree), the daughter of the thakur (Kapoor), is to marry Suraj (Dewan) but his greedy mother (Pawar) demands more money than the thakur can afford. Chanda is tormented and eventually expelled from the house while Suraj is forced into a second and more lucrative alliance. In a comic and expressionist end, Chanda and Suraj die in each other’s arms, even as the dowry which the thakur has raised after selling all his property - arrives at the doorstep.

DASTAAN

1950 122’ b&w Hindi

d A.R. Kardar pc Musical Pics st S.N. Bannerjee dial Prem Bannerjee, Jagdish Kanwal lyr Shakeel Badayuni c Dwarka Divecha m Naushad

lp Raj Kapoor, Suraiya, Suresh, Al Nasir, S.N. Bannerjee, Pratima Devi, Murad, Lakshman, Surinder, Shakila, Baby Anwari, Veena, Sapru

Melodrama told in flasback about the sexually repressed Rani (Veena) whose life is caught between two historical moments and ends up causing grief to all who knew her. The orphaned Indira (Suraiya) is adopted by the wealthy colonial (Sapru) and becomes a companion to his sons Raj (Kapoor) and Kundan (Nasir) but she is hated by Rani, the household’s eldest daughter. Both Raj and Kundan fall in love with Indira, but Rani gets her married to the foreign-returned Ramesh (Suresh) and later causes a rift between the two brothers, resulting in Raj suffering a major accident and indirectly leading to Indira’s death. The film starts with Rani’s own death, after 25 years of isolation. Her character is placed historically between colonial domination (represented by the father) and independent capitalism’s rule with its continuation of traditional patriarchy. She is represented as surrounded by infantile men and logically negative about marriage. Suraiya sang all the nine songs in the film, including the very popular duet Tara ri yara ri (with Mohammed Rafi).

DIVADANDI

aka The Lighthouse 1950 123’ b&w Gujarati

d Balwant Bhatt pc Neelam Films st/co-lyr Chandravadan Mehta sc Ramnik Vaid dial/co-lyr ‘Befaam’ co-lyr Venibhai Purohit, Balmukund Dave c Haren Batt m Ajit Merchant, Dilip Kumar

lp Nandini, Arvind Pandya, Baburaje, Charubala, Kamalakant, Lohana

The film’s lead Kano (Pandya) is raised by his foster-father, the sailor Lakhu Malam (Kamalakant), who also teaches him sailing, to the envy of Lakhu’s biological son Kavli (Baburaje). When Kano falls for the girl Motan (Nandini), Kavli forces Kano into becoming an opium addict. Kavli kidnaps Motan, but he is challenged and eventually killed by his father. The father, in the film’s contemplative end, is condemned, as part of his penal service, to looking after an old lighthouse. The film was noted mainly for its music, and for introducing the well known lyricist Purohit, who wrote the song hit Taro aankhno Aafini. It was shot entirely at the Bet Dwarka harbour in Saurashtra, an important pilgrimage place for Vaishnavas, and uses the locally assembled traditional wooden sailing ships in its action sequences.

EZHAI PADUM PADU/BEEDALA PATLU

aka The Plight of the Poor aka Les Miserables

1950 197’[Ta]/194’[Te] b&w Tamil/Telugu d K. Ramnoth pc Pakshiraja Studios sc Sadananda Bharathi, Jawar Seetaraman st Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables dial[a] Elangovan lyr W.K. Gopalakrishnan[Ta], Arudra[Te] c N. Prakash m S.M. Subbaiah Naidu

lp Chittor V. Nagaiah, Serukalathur Sama, Jawar Seetaraman, T.S. Balaiah, T.S. Dorairaj, Lalitha, Padmini, M.N. Rajam, V. Gopi

Extraordinary melodrama held together by Nagaiah’s best-known film performance. This version of Sadanand Bharathi’s Tamil translation of Hugo’s novel (remade, unacknowledged, as Gnana Oli, 1972), opens with the petty thief Kandan (Nagaiah) in jail. He escapes and is rearrested by Inspector Javert (Seetaraman). Kandan’s niece (N. Rajam) is abandoned by her husband (Balaiah) while pregnant, and joins a travelling circus after leaving her child with her wicked foster parents. When released, Kandan is reformed by the kind action of a Christian priest, Sadhu Uthaman, becomes a successful glass manufacturer and, after changing his name, is elected the town’s mayor. Kandan’s past catches up with him when Inspector Javert is posted to the town and intends exposing him. During an Independence struggle incident, Kandan rescues Javert and the inspector commits suicide, caught in the dilemma of having to work for an imperialist police force but being indebted to a former criminal. The film is dominated by Nagaiah, inviting comparisons with Paul Muni, and by the stage actor and co-scenarist Seetaraman, who became known as Javert (aka Jawar) Seetaraman for the rest of his career. Much of it is shot with heavy expressionist lighting, esp. the jail sequences as the inspector’s presence is announced by the sound of stomping boots. The visual effect was extended by Elangovan’s dialogue.

GADANO BEL

1950 123’ b&w Gujarati

d Ratibhai Punatar pc Ajit Pics st Prabhulal Dwivedi’s play sc Ramchandra Thakur c M.G. Jadhav lyr/m Avinash Vyas

lp Nirupa Roy, Dulari, Charubala, Lila Kurle, Hirabai, Maya Devi, Manhar Desai, Baburaje, Chhagan Romeo, Ramlal, Banke Bihari, Champak Lala, Bhogilal, Ramesh, Girish, Nityananda Ghosh

Realist Gujarati reform social adapting a noted play first staged by the nationalist Desh Natak Samaj. When the head of a family, who is also the main breadwinner, dies of overwork, the joint family disintegrates as the in-laws leave with whatever they can appropriate. Eventually, after the house has been auctioned, the three family members left behind are supposed to put their faith in god.

HAR HAR MAHADEV

1950 137’ b&w Hindi

d/p Jayant Desai st Bachubhai Shukla dial Pandit Anuj lyr Ramesh Sastry, Saraswati Kumar Deepak c Saju Naik m Avinash Vyas

lp Nirupa Roy, Trilok Kapoor, Shanta Kumar, Jeevan, Kanta Kumari, Mishra, Meenakshi, Niranjan Sharma

Major mythological hit and Nirupa Roy’s best-known film in the genre. King of demons Tarakasur invades the land of the gods to avenge the insult meted out to his mother by Indra. His victory leads to a declaration that he is now king of the cosmos, an imbalance that may only be righted by Shiva (Kapoor). Kama, god of love, is sent to awaken Shiva from his eternal meditation, but gets burnt to ashes. Shiva can only be propitiated by Uma (Roy), daughter of the Himalayas, through an act of penance that leads to Shiva accepting her as his consort.

JOGAN

1950 116’ b&w Hindi

d Kidar Sharma pc Ranjit co-lyr Mirabai, Pandit Indra, Butaram Sharma, Himmatrai Sharma c D.C. Mehta m Bulo C. Rani

lp Nargis, Dilip Kumar, Pratima Devi, Pesi Patel, Purnima, Baby Tabassum, Anwari, Ramesh Thakur, Durpan, Rajendra Kumar

The title refers to religious female mendicants, whose best-known example continues to be the 16th-C. saint poet Meerabai. One of Sharma’s most emotionally charged melodramas, it features Surabhi (Nargis), a mendicant whose song by Meerabai Ghunghat kepat khole re (sung by Geeta Dutt) attracts the atheist Vijay (D. Kumar). Despite her protestations, he keeps following her and she eventually tells him how she escaped her debt-ridden father and alcoholic brother who wanted her to marry an old man; she ran away to die and renounced her earlier life. When she leaves, she tells Vijay not to follow her beyond a particular tree. Later, another jogan arrives, meets Vijay by the tree and gives him a book, saying that Surabhi had entrusted her, before she died, with the task of giving it to a man who would be waiting by a tree. The film has several other Meera bhajans sung by Geeta Dutt which became some of her early hit songs. Bulo C. Rani’s most famous film score, assisting an innovative soundtrack incl. voiceovers and monologues, with the songs often set to twilight effects, chiaroscuro and flickering lights.

Nargis and Dilip Kumar in Jogan

MANTHIRI KUMARI

aka The Minister’s Daughter 1950 173’(167’) b&w Tamil

d Ellis R. Duncan, T.R. Sundaram pc Modern Theatres s M. Karunanidhi based on Kundalakesi lyr A. Marudakasi, K.M. Sharif c J.G. Vijayan m G. Ramanathan

lp M.G. Ramachandran, S.A. Natarajan, M.N. Nambiar, A. Karunanidhi, Madhuri Devi, G. Shakuntala, TP. Muthulakshmi, Lalitha, Padmini, Ragini, C.V. Nayakan, K.V. Srinivasan

One of the most popular Tamil films of the decade, continuing the post-Velaikkari (1949) engagement of top DMK personnel with cinema, scenarist Karunanidhi and star MGR. Shot near Salem in the hill resort of Yercaud, the film is based on an 8th-C. Tamil literary epic, a Buddhist text that, according to Mu. Varadarajan (1988), was a Buddhist propaganda work reflecting the rivalry between Buddhists and Jains in the 1st millenium AD. The original story, of which only 28 verses still exist, tells of a woman from the vaisya caste, a Jain by birth, who kills her husband when he tries to murder her, and is eventually converted to Buddhism. While using its historical and literary references mainly as an authenticating force, the film replaces the Jain context with the Brahmin caste in line with DMK policy. Parthiban (Natarajan), the son of an imbecilic king’s royal priest (Nambiar), is committed to the art of banditry while wearing a Batman-type mask to discredit Veeramohan (MGR), a loyal general and lover of Princess Jeeva (Shakuntala). The minister’s daughter is Amudavalli (Madhuri) who tries to reform the treacherous son, marries but ends up killing him in self-defence. The nasty priest then kills her at the durbar. The songs proved enduring, esp. Vaarai … vaarai sung by Trichy Loganathan for Parthiban as he leads Amudavalli to a hilltop to kill her. It is also a landmark in playback singer T.M. Soundararajan’s long career. Master Subbaiah, the teenage prodigy who died young, sings a song and appears briefly as a cowherd. The film also launched the enduring image of the famous screen villain Nambiar. Madhuri Devi provides the best performance as a sword-wielding, independently minded heroine who kills her own husband.

MASHAAL/SAMAR

1950 136’ b&w Hindi/Bengali

d Nitin Bose pc Bombay Talkies st Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay sc Sajanikanta Das dial[H] Sudarshan lyr[H] Pradeep c Radhu Karmakar m S.D. Burman, Manna Dey

lp Ashok Kumar, Sumitra Devi, Ruma Ganguly, Kanu Roy, Moni Chatterjee, Krishnakant

Based on Bankimchandra’s novel Rajani (1877), this romance addresses property rights. Samar (Kumar) and Tarangini (Sumitra Devi) are childhood lovers. Samar feels betrayed when she obeys her father’s decision and marries a wealthy zamindar. When Samar becomes a successful lawyer, he tries to take revenge on Tarangini and marries a blind flower-girl who, he discovers, owns the property on which the zamindar has built his fortune. The plot is complicated by the fact that the blind girl loves Jatin, the zamindar’s son.

MICHAEL MADHUSUDHAN

1950 c.145’ b&w Bengali

d/s Modhu Bose pc I.N.A. Pics lyr Pranab Roy c G.K. Mehta m Chitta Roy

lp Utpal Dutt, Molina Devi, Ahindra Choudhury, Debjani, Miss Grace

Biopic of Michael Madhusudhan Dutt (1824–73), a major and colourful Bengali poet. Regarded as the founder of the modern Bengali theatre with his plays Sarmistha (1858), staged by the Belgatchia Theatre, followed by Krishna Kumari, the farce Ekey Ki Bole Sabhyata etc. A student at the Hindu College, he wrote his first poems in English (e.g. the narrative poem Captive Ladie, 1849). He later wrote the epic Meghnadbad Kavya (1861), the Homeric epic in blank verse Tilottama Sambhab Kavya (1860), the Radha and Krishna love story, Brajangana (1861) and Birangana (1862). Two stage biographicals precede the film: one by Netal Bhattacharya (1943) with the great Sisir Bhaduri playing the poet, the other by Mahendra Gupta (1942) featuring Ahindra Choudhury in the lead. Following Banaphool’s popular play, the film depicts the poet as a romantic rebel and chronicles the high points of his adventure-laden career: his baptism, his romance and marriage to the Frenchwoman Emilia Henrietta, and his tragic death. Most notable for Utpal Dutt’s remarkable screen debut as the poet, including several recitations of poetry. Dutt, often credited with having renovated acting in Bengali theatre and film, went on to identify himself with Michael Madhusudhan (cf. his play Danrao Pathikbar, 1980, harking back to the film’s iconography). The popular genre of screen biographicals was continued by Bose in Bireshwar Vivekananda (1964), Bijoy Basu’s Raja Rammohun (1965) and Piyush Bose’s Subhash Chandra (1966).

NALLATHANKA

aka The Good Sister 1950 c.165’ b&w Malayalam d P.V. Krishna Iyer p K.V. Koshy, Kunchako pc K&K Prod. s Muthukulam Raghavan Pillai c A. Shanmugham, P.K. Madhavan Nair m V. Dakshinamurthy, Rama Rao

lp Augustine Joseph, Vaikkom Moni, Miss Kumari, Omana, Muthukulam Raghavan Pillai, S.P. Pillai, Matheppan, Joseph Mulawana, Jagadamma, Thankamma, Joy Poonnuran, Balakrishna Pillai, Paliam Joseph, Baby Girija

Melodrama adapting the legend of Nallathanka (aka Nallathangal in Tamil), a pivotal reference in Parasakthi (1952). The king’s sister marries the king of another land and bears him seven children. When drought strikes, she has to appeal to her brother and face the humiliation of an envious sister-in-law. The high point in this melodrama comes when the sister tries to kill herself and all her children by throwing them into a well. The film was a major K&K hit, encouraging Malayalam distributors to give more time to films from their own state.

PARAMANANDAYYA SHISHYULA KATHA

1950 c.200’ b&w Telugu

d/s K. Siva Rao pc Allied Prod. lyr Tapi Dharma Rao c B. Subba Rao m Ogirala Ramchandra Rao, S. Dakshinamurthy

lp C.S.R. Anjaneyulu, A. Nageshwara Rao, lakshmirajyam, K. Siva Rao, Relangi Venkatramaiah, Nalla Ramamurthy, Kanakam, D. Hemalatha, Girija

Comedy portraying two bumbling disciples of the eccentric philosopher Paramanandayya (Anjaneyulu). Into this standard folk narrative, scenarist Tapi Dharma Rao weaves a Shakespearean court intrigue while conveying his political concerns in lines like ‘It is better to starve than to rob others’ and in satirical attacks on political opportunism. Nageshwara Rao and Lakshmirajyam played the romantic leads.

PATTHE BAPURAO

1950 143’ b&w Marathi

d Raja Nene pc Raja Nene Prod. p R.C. Jobanputra s/lyr D.K. Kane c Dolly Daruwala m Vasant Pawar

lp Ranjana, Raja Nene, Shashikala, Jawdekar, Manjrekar, Chandu Gokhale, Govindaswamy Aphale, Vatsalabai, Indirabai

Former Prabhat Studio director/actor Nene’s best-known film is a biopic of Patthe Bapurao (Nene), Maharashtra’s famous composer and author of the folk-classical lavani musical form. He is shown as an upper-caste schoolteacher, absorbed in a musical genre practised by lower-caste people. He partners the dancer Pavala (Ranjana) and together, after many hardships, they popularise the dance-music form throughout the region. Beginning with the typical Tamasha invocation to Ganesh (Shubhamangali charana gana nachala), the musical has several hit numbers from the lavani tradition as well as Kane’s originals.

PUDHCHA PAOOL

1950 135’ b&w Marathi d Raja Paranjpe pc Manik Studio st Venkatesh Madgulkar s/lyr G.D. Madgulkar c I. Mohammed m Sudhir Phadke

lp Hansa Wadkar, P.L. Deshpande, G.D. Madgulkar, Kusum Deshpande, Vivek, Mohammed Hussain, D.S. Ambapkar, Bal Chitale, Raja Paranjpe, Shakuntala Jadhav, Suman, Ravindra, Baby Neela

Raja Paranjpe’s directorial breakthrough features the famous Marathi humourist, playwright and stage star P.L. Deshpande. Krishna (Deshpande) goes to the city looking for work and promptly falls for the folk Tamasha dancer Mogri (Wadkar). She is presented as a gold-digger, as the hero eventually realises after he is beaten up. Paranjpe, writer Madgulkar and composer Phadke became an established team.

RAM RAM PAHUNA

1950 122’ b&w Marathi

d/s Dinkar D. Patil pc Uday Kala Chitra lyr P. Sawalram, Shanta Shelke c Shankar Savekar m Lata Mangeshkar

lp Damuanna Malvankar, Chandrakant, Baburao Athane, Ratnamala, Kusum Deshpande, Madhu Bhosle, Shakuntala Bhome, Susheela Devi, Kusum Sukhtankar

The first solo film by Maharashtra’s best-known exponent of the ‘gramin chitrapat’ genre set in a Maharashtrian village frontier area evoking the Western genre. This melodrama, more intimate than some of Patil’s later work, features good elder brother Shripati who sends younger brother Jaisingh to his uncle to study English. The wily uncle encourages Jaisingh’s affair with his daughter, and she becomes pregnant. Shripati arranges for the two to marry, but the uncle causes a rift between the brothers, causing Shripati and his wife to be evicted from their own home. Jaisingh falls prey to several vices while his uncle takes over the family property, but eventually he makes up with his brother. Lata Mangeshkar, making her debut as composer, scored some melodious tunes, esp. Bara gava majhya sathi jhurati.

SAMADHI

1950 165’ b&w Hindi

d/s Ramesh Saigal pc Filmistan lyr Rajinder Krishen c K.H. Kapadia m C. Ramchandra

lp Ashok Kumar, Nalinijaywant, Shyam, Kuldip Kaur, Mubarak, Shashi Kapoor

Patriotic drama addressing Subhash Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army. Following Bose’s call on Indian youth to join in the anti-imperialist front, Shekhar (Kumar) abandons his wealth to join the INA. In Singapore his elder brother Suresh (Shyam), who is a captain in the British army, has to collaborate with a British spy ring headed by Boss (Mubarak) and the dancer Dolly (Kaur). Shekhar falls in love with Lily (Jaywant), Dolly’s sister. Boss uses this to infiltrate the INA’s intelligence. In the war, the two brothers face each other and Shekhar is left for dead. He nevertheless makes it back alive and rounds up the British spies. Shekhar eventually dies in an operation to blow up a bridge on the India-Burma border. The film, which Filmindia (May, 1950) described as politically obsolete since India had already achieved independence, included the C. Ramchandra hit Gore gore o banke chhore (sung by Lata Mangeshkar and Amirbai Karnataki) praising Bose, Subhash Chandra ke naam se Hindustan ka naam, as well as the socialist-realist marching song Kadam kadam badhaye ja (both sung by the composer).

SAMSARAM

1950 219’ b&w Telugu

d L.Y. Prasad pc Sadhana Pics st/dial/co-lyr Sadasiva Brahmam co-lyr K.G. Sharma c M.A. Rehman, B. Subba Rao m S. Dakshinamurthy

lp N.T. Rama Rao, A. Nageshwara Rao, Relangi Venkatramaiah, Nalla Ramamurthy, Doraiswamy, Lakhsmirajyam, Surabhi Balasaraswathi, Suryakantam, Bezwada Kantamma, Pushpalatha, Savitri

A major melodrama hit about the fragmentation of a joint family made in the same year as Prasad’s seminal Shavukaru. After their joint appearance in Palletoori Pilla, also 1950, Telugu cinema’s two best-known stars, N.T. Rama Rao and A. Nageshwara Rao, again teamed up for this story about a middle-class government clerk Raghu (NTR), living happily with his wife Manjula (Lakshmirajyam), until his scheming mother Venkamma, his sister Kamakshi (Balasaraswathi) and her cowardly husband (Venkatramaiah) move into his house. Venkamma appropriates all of Raghu’s earnings and Kamakshi plots to have Manjula blamed for all that goes wrong in the household. Raghu, unable to pay his pregnant wife’s medical fees, loses his job and abandons his family. His brother Venu (Nageshwara Rao), a flirt who lives off his girlfriend Kamala (Pushpalata) and her rich father, eventually traces Raghu and finds him a job as a porter in a mill. Venu also manages to reunite the family. The film borrows the popular Tamil cinema convention of introducing a comic duo (here Venkatramaiah and Suryakantam) into the melodrama.

SANGRAM

1950 139’ b&w Hindi

d/s Gyan Mukherjee pc Bombay Talkies, Sargam Pics Unit dial/co-lyr Vrajendra Gaud co-lyr P.L. Santoshi, Raza Mehdi c Josef Wirsching m C. Ramchandra

lp Ashok Kumar, Nalinijaywant, Nawab, Tiwari, Sajjan, Ramsingh, Kumud, Bina Paul, Indumati, Baby Tabassum, Shashi Raj

A cop father against criminal son crime drama made in the Indian variant of the film noir style launched by Mukherjee’s megahit Kismet (1943). Kunwar (Ashok Kumar) takes to gambling and gets involved in bad company in spite of his father (Nawab) being a policeman. Although Kunwar is reformed by his gentle betrothed (Jaywant), his past catches up with him in the form of his former crooked sidekick. In the end, Kunwar escapes from jail to avenge the betrayal of a man who was supposedly on the right side of the law, and his father faces him with a gun, torn between his responsibilities as a parent and as a cop. An unusually violent crime film for its time with the hero playing the villain.

SHAVUKARU

1950 177’ b&w Telugu

d/sc L.V. Prasad pc Vijaya co-p B. Nagi Reddy co-p/st/dial Chakrapani lyr Samudrala Raghavacharya c Marcus Bartley m Ghantasala Venkateshwara Rao

lp Sowcar Janaki, N.T. Rama Rao, Govindrajulu Subba Rao, S.V. Ranga Rao, Srivastava, Shantakumari, T. Kanakam, Seeta, Baby Bhanu, V. Sivaram, Vangara, Joga Rao, Relangi Venkatramaiah

Successful ruralist melodrama and a drawn out version of the Bombay Talkies dramas of Ashok Kumar and Leela Chitnis. Satyam (NTR), the son of the moneylender Chengaiah (Subba Rao), is supposed to marry the daughter, Subbulu (Janaki), of his neighbour, the farmer and village elder Ramaiah (Srivastsava). Problems arise and villainies are perpetrated until both men’s sons find themselves together in jail. Chengaiah then has a change of heart, the main villain, his helper Rangadu (Ranga Rao), is caught and the village is united again. The film, later remade as Enga Veetu Penn (1965), begins with a folk Harikatha performance, making a lyrical comment on the theme of miserliness as a social evil. NTR’s debut as leading man is often seen as launching a second generation of Telugu melodrama in which e.g. Ghantasala’s ‘rooted’ music (the song Palukaradate chiluka) and Chakrapani’s script marked a ‘realist’ departure from the pre-WW2 reform sagas. More importantly, this is the debut production of Vijaya Studios, demarcating itself from the earlier Vauhini style. Chakrapani’s script was later serialised in the journal Vijayachitra owned by the studio. Actress ‘Sowcar’ Janaki makes her film debut here. She appended the film’s title to her name from then on.

SHEESH MAHAL

1950 144’ b&w Hindi

d Sohrab Modi pc Minerva Movietone st Hakim Ahmed Shuja co-sc Munshi Abdul Baqui co-sc/co-lyr Shams Lucknowi colyr Hakim Panipatti c M. Malhotra m Vasant Desai

lp Sohrab Modi, Naseem Banu, Pushpa Hans, Nigar Sultana, Mubarak, Pran

Modi’s big-budget commentary on decaying feudal aristocracy. Old patriarch Jaspal Singh (Modi) lives in the Sheesh Mahal (Palace of Mirrors) and believes only in aristocatic lineage, scorning capitalist enterprise. His contempt for money makes him an easy victim for a moneylender and he eventually has to sell his palace to a labourer turned millionaire, Durgaprasad (Mubarak) while himself turning into a worker to survive. The film contrasts Jaspal Singh’s feudal ambitions for his daughters, against what he sees as treacherous bourgeois values, but which are also the only values that come to his aid in the form of Durgaprasad.

SWAPNA SUNDARI

1950 173’ b&w Telugu/Tamil d/s Ghantasala Balaramaiah pc Pratibha Pics dial/lyr[7e] Samudrala Raghavacharya dia[Ta] Sakshi lyr[Ta] Ramaiah Doss c P. Sridhar m C.R. Subburaman

lp G. Varalakshmi, Anjali Devi, A. Nageshwara Rao, K. Siva Rao, K. Mukkamala, Surabhi Balasaraswathi

‘Folklore’ fantasy in which a heavenly damsel (Anjali Devi) falls in love with an earthly prince (Nageshwara Rao) and keeps entering his dreams. He stays awake one night in order to capture her, but she is entrapped by a magician (Mukkamala). The hero goes in search of her and rescues her after another woman (from earth, Varalakshmi) sacrifices her life. Both Anjali Devi and Varalakshmi, in the prime of their careers, give highly entertaining performances, which, with the dance compositions of Vedantam Raghavaiah and R. Balasaraswathi’s songs (as playback for Anjali Devi), comprise this hit’s major attractions. Varalakshmi’s Nee sani neevene number was, in the words of V.A.K. Ranga Rao, a ‘sexy delight’.

TATHAPI

1950 122’ b&w Bengali

d Manoj Bhattacharya pc Chhabi-o-Bani st Swarnakamal Bhattacharya sc Bimal Roy lyr Rabindranath Tagore, Atul Sen, Shyamal Gupta cjayantilal Jani m Rabin Roy

lp Pronoti Ghosh, Sunil Dasgupta, Sova Sen, Bijon Bhattacharya, Manoranjan Bhattacharya, Prabhadevi, Sudipta Roy, Ritwik Ghatak

A film remembered mainly for introducing several key Bengal IPTA figures to the cinema, including Ghatak. Although scripted by Bimal Roy from a story by noted leftist writer Swarnakamal Bhattacharya, the film stands at a tangent from the radical realist initiative launched by Roy’s Udayer Pathey (1944) and which culminated in Nemai Ghosh’s Chinnamul (1950). The plot has a mute heroine (a novelty at the time) named Kalyani (Ghosh, in her debut). Hero Pranabesh (Dasgupta) is tricked into marrying her and insists on continuing to meet his lover Sujata. A rather ugly encounter leads to Kalyani being injured and returning to her village. The hero, having a change of heart, saves Kalyani from committing suicide and brings her back home. Contemporary reviews in Chitrabani and Rupamancba commend the film’s sensitive portrayal of psychological changes and its refreshingly untheatrical observation of life. Bimal Roy apparently supervised the direction of this film.

Pronoti Ghosh (right) in Tathapi

AFSANA 1951 168’ b&w Hindi

d B.R. Chopra pc Shri Gopal Pics s I.S. Johar lyr Asad Bhopali, Chander c Rajendra Malone m Husnlal-Bhagatram

lp Ashok Kumar, Veena Kumari, Kuldeep Kaur, Pran, Jeevan, Cuckoo, Baby Tabassum, Ratan Kumar, Madan Jamoora, Chaman Puri, Narmada Shankar, Wajid Khan, Uma Dutt, Prem Kohli

Chopra’s debut is a story about identical twin brothers, Ratan and Chaman (A. Kumar), separated in childhood. Ratan, raised in an orphanage, grows up to become a noted magistrate. Chaman inherits the family wealth and becomes an arrogant playboy. The two meet as adults when Chaman is on the run, falsely accused of murder. Chaman gets away by impersonating Ratan and when he dies in a car crash everybody believes it is Ratan who is dead. Ratan, whose wife (Kaur) has an affair with his friend Mohan (Pran), wakes up from a drugged sleep to find himself regarded as Chaman. Eventually his memory returns through the help of childhood sweetheart Meera (Veena) and happiness follows upon his fickle wife’s suicide and her lover’s financial ruin. Continuing Ashok Kumar’s association with the crime movie genre, newcomer Chopra’s direction was extensively commended.

AGNI PAREEKSHA

1951 181’b&w Telugu

d P. Manikyam pc Sarathi Films s Tapi Dharma Rao lyr K.G. Sharma c B. Subba Rao m Galipenchala Narasimha Rao

lp Kalyanam Raghuramaiah, C.S.R. Anjaneyulu, K. Siva Rao, Lakshmirajyam, Malathi, Lakshmikantam, Relangi Venkatramaiah, Kanakam, Gangarathnam, Suryakantam

Melodrama suggesting a slight modernisation of the devoted wife stereotype in order to refurbish feudal patriarchal values. Heroine Sushila (Lakshmirajyam) loses her husband Kumaravarma (Anjaneyulu) to the charms of the prostitute Kalavati (Lakshmikantam) and fails in her attempt to commit suicide. Sushila then sets out to seduce her husband back. In doing so, it is she rather than he who faces accusations of sexual infidelity and has to undergo a trial by fire to prove her chastity. Agradoot made a version of the story in 1954.

ALBELA

1951 158’ b&w Hindi

d/p/s Master Bhagwan pc Bhagwan Art Prod. dial Ehsan Rizvi lyr Rajinder Krishen c Shankar A. Palav m C. Ramchandra

lp Geeta Bali, Master Bhagwan, Badri Prasad, Pratima Devi, Bimala, Nihal, Dulari, Sunder, Usha Shukla

A musical hit and Bhagwan’s most successful film as producer and director. A dispatch clerk (Bhagwan) dreams of becoming a stage star. His success as singer and dancer is aided by the reigning star Asha (Bali) with whom he falls in love. The love story is intercut with tragedy in his home, the death of his mother (Pratima Devi), estrangement from his father (Badri Prasad) and the villainy of his brother-in-law (Nihal). The film’s highlights are the dances and C. Ramchandra’s hit songs Sholajo bhadke (set to flickering light and Hawaiian dance choreography), Bholi surat and Shyam dhale, all sung by the composer with Lata Mangeshkar. Bhagwan apparently sold the film’s rights cheaply after its initial run and its successful 90s re-release did nothing to benefit its impecunious maker.

AMAR BHOOPALI

aka Kavi Honaji Bala 1951 136’ b&w Marathi

d/py. Shantaram pc Rajkamal Kalamandir st/dial C.Y. Marathe sc Vishram Bedekar lyr Honaji Bala, Shahir Amar Sheikh c G. Balkrishna m Vasant Desai

lp Panditrao Nagarkar, Sandhya, Lalita Pawar, Bhalchandra Pendharkar, Vishwas, Gulab, Jayarampant, Nimbalkar, Amina, Bandopant Sohoni

Shantaram’s hit musical biopic of Honaji Bala (played by Marathi stage star Nagarkar), a legendary Marathi poet from the Gawali caste in the last years of the Pune Peshwai. Known mainly for having popularised the musical dance form of the lavani in Maharashtra and esp. for his classic composition Ghanashyam sundara shirdhara, addressing a new dawn in the morning raga Bhoop. The piece later acquired revolutionary associations alluded to in the film’s anti-British discourse. Set in the Pune-based Maratha empire just before it succumbed to the British, the story shows the poet’s involvement with lavani music, which the film associates with prostitutes, winning recognition when the peshwa’s wife at the Pune court gives him an award for his Bhoop composition. His love life with Tamasha dancer (Sandhya in her debut) is intercut with the Maratha wars against the British, his music spurring on the soldiers. Shantaram contrasts Honaji’s erotic and militant poetry with the prevailing ‘decadent’ brahminical effusions. Replete with Shantaram-type calendar art compositions (when pigeons descend around Sandhya’s body in the forest) the film ends like a mythological, showing the infant Krishna and Yashoda, when his Ghanashyam composition is immortalised. Additional songs were written by the radical poet and performer Amar Sheikh, associated with the militant powada form and with the IPTA’s left wing in Maharashtra.

ANDOLAN

aka Our Struggle 1951 146’ b&w Hindi

d Phani Majumdar pc Motwane cost/sc Krishan Chander cost Sudhir Sen lyr Indivar, Niaz Haidar c Roque M. Layton m Pannalal Ghosh

lp Shivraj, Kishore Kumar, Manju, Pushpa, Sushama, Parashuram, Tiwari Jr., Shekhar, Bhojwani, Sharad, Malhotra, Krishnakant

A stridently nationalistic story of India’s freedom struggle, presented through the experiences of a Bengali family from 1885, when the Indian National Congress was established, to 1947. Important events incorporated into the plot were Gandhi’s satyagraha (1920), the Simon Commission (1928), Vallabhbhai Patel’s Bardoli satyagraha (1928) and the 1942 Quit India agitations. Krishan Chander’s script, Sachin Shankar’s choreography and the acting styles owed much to the IPTA theatre of the 40s. The film, made at Bombay Talkies, was produced by the distributors of the Chicago Radio PA systems label. Kishore Kumar plays the militant hero of this quasi-documentary. Motwane included old documentary footage purchased from Kohinoor and Krishna Film, as well as a shot of Rabindranath Tagore singing his Jana Gana Mana composition, one of India’s national anthems (Arunkumar Roy’s Of Tagore and Cinema, 1994, traces this footage to Ufa, shot when Tagore visited Munich).

AWARA

aka The Tramp aka The Vagabond 1951 193’(170’)(82’) b&w Hindi

d/p Raj Kapoor pc R.K. Films cost/sc/dial K.A. Abbas co-st VP. Sathe lyr Hasrat Jaipuri, Shailendra c Radhu Karmakar m Shankar Jaikishen

lp Raj Kapoor, Nargis, Prithviraj Kapoor, Leela Chitnis, K.N. Singh, Shashi Kapoor, Cuckoo, Leela Mishra, Baby Zubeida, Honey O’Brien

Having built his own studio at Chembur in Bombay with the profits of Barsaat (1949), Kapoor launched his most famous film, collaborating with the unit most closely associated with his work: scenarists Abbas and Sathe, song-writers Shailendra and Hasrat, art director Achrekar, cameraman Karmakar and composers Shankar-Jaikishen. Set in Bombay, the plot concerns Raju (Kapoor), the estranged son of Judge Raghunath (P. Kapoor), who finds a surrogate father in the criminal Jagga (Singh), the dacoit who caused Raju’s mother (Chitnis) to be thrown out of her home. Raju eventually kills Jagga and tries to kill Raghunath, before he redeems himself in the eyes of the judge and wins the love of his childhood sweetheart, Rita (Nargis), who is now the lawyer defending him in court. The very intensity of the oedipal melodrama, enacted by the Kapoor family itself, spills over into a kind of hallucinatory pictorialism (the dream sequence, the prison sequence at the end, the design of the judge’s mansion) and underpinned some of the most remembered songs of the 50s (Awaara boon, Ghar aya merapardesi and Dum bharke udhar mooh phere, o chanda). The spectacular 9’ dream sequence which took three months to shoot was apparently added on at the end, to hike up its market value. This was also Kapoor’s first fairy-tale treatment of class division in India, whose nexus of authority (power, patriarchy and law) explicitly excludes the hero. Its main tenet, presented through Raghunath, is the feudal notion of status: ‘the son of a thief will always be a thief, a view that villain Jagga sets out to disprove by making Raju a thief. Raju’s patricide (he kills Jagga and is arrested for attempting to murder Raghunath) tries to break out of the contradiction set against an alternative, post-colonial, reinvention of an infantile Utopia in which everyone can fully ‘belong’, a condition symbolised by Nargis who is both the hero’s conscience and reward. Kapoor’s later treatments of the same contradictions increasingly took on the ‘frog prince’ fairy-tale structure (Shri 420, 1955; Mera Naam Joker, 1970), mapped on to the middle/working-class divide. The film launched Kapoor and Nargis as major stars in parts of the USSR, the Arab world and Africa, while the US briefly released an 82’ version. Nargis’ appearance in a bathing costume is widely but wrongly believed to be the first erotic swimsuit scene. That cliche had earlier been deployed by Master Vinayak in Brabmacbari (1938). Gayatri Chatterjee (1992) published a book-length commentary on the film.

Prithviraj Kapoor and Nargis in Awara

BAAZI

aka A Game of Chance 1951 143’ b&w Hindi

d/co-st Guru Dutt pc Navketan co-st/sc/dial Bsaraj Sahni lyr Sahir Ludhianvi c V. Ratra m S.D. Burman

lp Dev Anand, Geeta Bali, Kalpana Kartik, Roopa Varma, K.N. Singh, K. Dhawan, Srinath, Rashid Ahmed, Abu Baker, Nirmal Kumar, Habib

Guru Dutt’s directorial debut was a follow-up of Afsar (1950), the film with which the brothers Anand launched Navketan and which signalled a transition in Dev Anand’s screen persona. Madan (Anand) is a small-time gambler forced into joining the owner of the Star Hotel, a mysterious and shadowy criminal (Singh), to pay for his sister’s medical expenses. Other characters are Rajani (Kartik), a doctor, her fiance, the cop Ramesh (Dhawan), and later Leena (Bali), a cabaret dancer who is killed and for whose murder Madan is framed. The elusive villain eventually turns out to be Rajani’s father. Madan, condemned to death, is saved by Ramesh who lays a trap to catch the villain. Dutt demonstrates a confident assimilation of the Warner Bros, film noir style, esp. in the lighting, the camera placements and the editing. Even though it was his directorial debut, the film already shows a remarkable talent for song picturisation, something Dutt became famous for. One of the film-makers who apparently fascinated him at this time was John Huston, an inspiration he also used in his second film, Jaal (1952). Includes Geeta Dutt’s famous song Tadbirse bigdi huyi.

BABLA

1951 ?’ b&w Bengali/Hindi

d/l Agradoot pc MP Prod. st Sourin Mukherjee lyr[H] Sahir Ludhianvi lyr[B] Sailen Roy c Bibhuti Laha, Sushanta Moitra m Robin Chatterjee

lp Niren Bhattacharya, Sova Sen, Jahar Ganguly, Paresh Bannerjee, Pahadi Sanyal, Dhiraj Das, Prova Devi

Typical instance of the commercially successful realist Bengali melodrama of this period, as a pop variation of what the later New Theatres directors were doing after the war. A compositor in a printing press (Bannerjee) brings his wife (Sen) and son Babla (Bhattacharya) to Calcutta. He has an accident and his overworked wife succumbs to tuberculosis. Babla leaves school to work as a newspaper hawker. When he finds a purse full of money, he dutifully returns it to its owner and refuses to be helped. Returning home, he finds his mother dead. Widely advertised in the Hindi market, the film was accurately described in Filmfare (16.10.1953) as failing ‘from sheer excess’. The film’s Malayalam remake, Newspaper Boy (1955), was much more of a critical success.

BADAL

‘1951 146’ b&w Hindi

d/st Amiya Chakravarty pc Varma Films sc Rajendra Shankar dial Hari Pratap, C.L. Kavish lyr Shailendra, Hasrat Jaipuri c V. Babasaheb m Shankar-Jaikishen

lp Premnath, Madhubala, Purnima, Hiralal, Randhir, S. Nazir, Agha

Commercially successful adventure movie adapting the Robin Hood legend in the character of Badal (Premnath). The hero loses his faith in God and king when Jaisingh, right-hand man of the jagirdar, takes away his property. He forms a band of outlaws, falls in love with the daughter of the jagirdar, Ratna (Madhubala), who is unaware of his identity but who later joins his side. Eventually the conflict between Badal and Jaisingh is resolved when the king ventures out in disguise and sees for himself the tyranny of his ministers.

BAHAR

1951 170’ b&w Hindi

d M.V. Raman pc AVM s/lyr Rajinder Krishen c T. Muthuswamy m S.D. Burman

lp Vyjayanthimala, Pandharibai, Karan Dewan, Pran, Om Prakash, Sundar, Shyamlal, Leela Mishra, Indira Acharya, Baby Tabassum

Heroine Lata (Vyjayanthimala) is a modern girl, pursued by villain Shekhar (Pran) but in love with novelist Ashok (Dewan) who turns out to be her neighbour called Kumar. Shekhar fathers a child to the country girl Malati (Padmini) who, unable to trace the perfidious Shekhar, abandons the child in Kumar’s house. Seeing Kumar playing parent to a mysterious child, Lata misunderstands the situation until the truth is revealed in the end. Pran, playing his usual villain role, undergoes an uncharacteristic change of heart to allow a happy ending for all. Intended mainly to showcase Vyjayanthimala in her Hindi debut, the film features her numerous dances as well as Kishore Kumar’s hit song Kusoor aap ka. This major hit, adapting Raman’s earlier hit Vazhkai/Jeevitham (1949), was the Madras-based AVM Studio’s first foray into Hindi cinema.

BARJATRI

1951 ?’ b&w Bengali

d Satyen Bose pc National Progressive Pics st Bibhutibhushan Mukhopadhyay co-lyr Bimal Chandra Ghosh co-lyr/m Salil Choudhury c Bimal Mukherjee

lp Kali Bannerjee, Anup Kumar, Arun Choudhury, Satya Bannerjee, Haradhan Bannerjee, Bhabhen Pal, Sandhya Devi, Jharana Chakraborty

Successful ensemble-play comedy featuring the stammerer Ganesha (K. Bannerjee) and three efforts to find him a bride. In the first, Ganesha goes with his friends to a village to attend a wedding, but they are mistaken for thieves when trying to peek into the bridal chamber. They create another scandal when they arrive at the bride’s house ‘for negotiations’, impersonating their guardians. Ganesha later becomes tutor to the cousin of the girl he loves, but this fails as well, and he gets punished by his despotic uncle. This perennial hit, admired by Ray for its authenticity, launched a genre of the ensemble ‘slice of life’ comedy, esp. Pasher Bari (1952) and Sharey Chuattar (1953).

DEEDAR

1951 130’ b&w Hindi

d Nitin Bose pc Filmkar s Azim Bazidpuri lyr Shakeel Badayimi c Dilip Gupta m Naushad.

lp Dilip Kumar, Nargis, Ashok Kumar, Nimmi, Baby Tabassum, Murad, Jai Merchant, Parikshit, Baby Anwari, Niharika Devi, Umasashi, Surender, Agha Miraz, Yakub, Sapru

Adapting much of the Saigal type of melodrama (Street Singer, 1938), the tale opens with adolescents Shamu (D. Kumar) and childhood sweetheart Mala (Nargis). Mala’s rich father (Sapru) disapproves and when the children have an accident while horse-riding (a portent of the tragedy to come), he has Shamu and his mother evicted. The trauma kills the mother and turns Shamu blind. He is rescued and brought up by Champa (Nimmi) and her canny guardian, Choudhury (Yakub). Champa loves Shamu but he cannot forget Mala. Dr Kishore (A. Kumar), an eye surgeon moved by the music Shamu sings on the streets, restores the hero’s eyesight. Shamu then sees that Mala, to whom he has dedicated his life, is engaged to his benefactor, Dr Kishore, and he puts his eyes out again. Dilip Kumar’s best-known tragic performance clearly evokes the Oedipus legend with blindness signifying an escape from the unbearable present and mourning for a lost innocence. The film, however, splits its lead protagonists, e.g. through turn wipes repeatedly juxtaposing Dilip against Ashok Kumar and Nargis against Nimmi, a technique that evokes the Bengali literary melodrama (as does the cliche of the eye operation). In spite of the many unimaginative and maudlin sequences, some attempts at realism resemble aspects of Satyajit Ray’s approach, e.g. the long track along the kitchen floor in Champa’s hovel or the changing light patterns on the ceiling behind Shamu when he sings Naseeb darpe tere azmaane aya boon. Bimal Roy edited the film.

HUMLOG

1951 144’ b&w Hindi

d/s Zia Sarhadi pc Ranjit lyr Vishwamitter Adil, Uddhav Kumar c H.S. Kwatra m Roshan

lp Nutan, Shyama, Balraj Sahni, Durga Khote, Anwar Hussain, Sajjan, Kanhaiyalal, Manmohan Krishna, Durrani, Rashid Khan, Master Rattan, Cuckoo

Sarhadi’s realist film forms a trilogy with Footpath (1953) and Awaaz (1956). It tells of the bank clerk Lala Haricharan Das, who supports a wife and three children on a meagre salary. His son Raj (Sahni) grows up disaffected; daughter Paro gets tuberculosis leading to big medical bills, and youngest son Chhotu drops out of school with no money to pay for his education. Raj steals money belonging to his father’s employer and causes the father’s imprisonment. Raj now has to look after the family, suffers from overwork and heart disease and ignores his girlfriend Shefali. Paro, kept apart from her boyfriend Anand by her disease, writes the play Humlog (We, The People). Later, Raj’s friend Kundan (Hussain) is killed and Raj is arrested for the murder and dies of a heart attack in court. Paro and Anand, at the end, stage Paro’s play as a self-reflexive comment on the film itself.

JEEVITHA NAUKA/JEEVAN NAUKA

aka Picbaikari, aka Life is a Boat 1951 170’ b&w Malayalam/Tamil/Hindi

d K. Vembu p K.V. Koshy, Kunchako pc K&K Prod. s Muthukulam Raghavan Pilla lyr Abhayadev c Balasubramanyam, P.B. Mani m V. Dakshinamurthy

lp Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair, Sebastian Kunju Kunju Bhagavathar, P. Adimoolam, Muthukulam Raghavan Pillai, B.S. Saroja, Pankajavalli, S.P. Pillai, Mathappan, Nanukuttan, Jagadamma, Janamma

Soman (Nair) is married to Laxmi (Saroja), a poor village performer. His brother, employed by the local capitalist, and wicked sister-in-law resent this and break up the joint family. Soman goes to the city while Laxmi, with her infant son, faces local harassment. She follows her husband to the city, but when she sees him in the company of rich women, she misunderstands and keeps away. Soman then searches for his wife and son and the nuclear family is reconstituted, although the sister-in-law is punished when she is forced to become a beggar. The second big production of the famed duo Koshy and Kunchako (after Nallathanka, 1950) and the first Malayalam megahit, the film combined the talents of Sebastian Bhagavathar who, with Augustine Joseph, was one of the last great actor-singers from the stage, alongside future stars Nair, Pankajavalli and composer Dakshinamurthy. Both the title and the character of Saroja evoke Osten’s Jeevan Naiya (1936), but the major dramatic influence was probably Vauhini Studio’s 1940s cinema, which Koshy in his autobiography maintained as his ideal. Tamil and Hindi versions were also made, probably dubbed.

MALLEESHWARI

1951 194’ b&w Telugu

d B.N. Reddi Vauhini st From Rayalvari Karunakritiyamu, a play by Buchi Babu s/lyr Devulapalli Krishna Sastry c Adi M. Irani, B.N. Konda Reddy m Saluri Rajeshwara Rao, Addepalli Rama Rao

lp P. Bhanumathi, N.T. Rama Rao, Kumari, T.G. Kamaladevi, Srivastava, Rushyendramani, Baby Mallika, Doraiswamy, Master Venkatramana

Reddi’s big-budget fantasy set in the reign of Krishnadeva Raya, king of the Vijayanagara Empire with its capital at Hampi. The beautiful Malleeshwari (Bhanumathi) loves the sculptor Nagaraja (NTR) but class differences keep them apart. The king (Srivatsava) secretly observes her dancing in the rain for her lover. When Nagaraja leaves to seek his fortune so that he may claim Malleeshwari’s hand, the king summons her to become a court entertainer. The lovers meet again when the hero is hired to build a dancing hall for the queen (Kamaladevi) but they infringe the queen’s rule forbidding companions to fall in love and they are sentenced to death. At the last minute, the king forgives them. Apparently one of Reddi’s favourite films, it benefits from A.K. Sekhar’s sets. The songs by Bhanumathi and Ghantasala (singing the playback for NTR) were hits.

MANGALA

1951 182’ b&w Telugu

d Chandai p S.S. Vasan pc Gemini st Gemini Story Dept. dial/lyr Tapi Dharma Rao m M.D. Parthasarathy

lp P. Bhanumathi, Ranjan, Suryaprabha, T.R. Ramchandran, Narayana Rao, Doraiswamy, Kolatthu Mani, Surabhi Kamalabai, Vijayarao

A remake of Gemini’s hit Mangamma Sapatham (1943), to follow their successful trilingual Apoorva Sahodarargal/Nishan (1949) starring Bhanumathi and Ranjan. Vasan again claimed directorial credit for the Hindi version. Mangala (Bhanumathi), the daughter of a rich farmer, chases her pet pigeon into a strange land whose prince (Ranjan) instantly falls in love with her. When she resists his advances, he threatens to marry and imprison her for the rest of her life. She responds by threatening that, should they marry, their son would grow up to whip his father. Dressed as a Carmen Miranda gypsy dancer she seduces him, gets pregnant and bears a son who eventually fulfils her prophecy.

MARMAYOGI/EK THA RAJA

aka The Mysterious Sage 1951 175’ b&w Tamil/Hindi

d K. Ramnoth pc Jupiter Pics, Ratna Films p M. Somasundaram sc/dial A.S.A. Sami st Robin Hood legend, Marie Corelli’s Vendetta (1886) lyr Kannadasan, K.D. Santhanam c M. Masthan m CR. Subburaman, S.M. Subbaiah Naidu

lp M.G. Ramachandran, Serukalathur Sama, Jawar Seetaraman, S.A. Natarajan, M.N. Nambiar, Madhuri Devi, Anjali Devi, S.V. Sahasranamam, Pandharibai, M.S.S. Bhagyam

A royal fairy tale set in an unspecified place and time (although there is medieval jousting tournament) granting set and costume designers full freedom. The evil courtesan Urvashi (Anjali Devi) tries to kill the King Marmayogi (Sama) and assumes power, but he survives and returns disguised as a ghostly sage while his son Karikalan (MGR) becomes a Robin Hood figure in the forest. After many adventures the king exposes the courtesan, who dies of shock, and the prince becomes a benign ruler after marrying the general’s daughter (Madhuri). Sami tailored the script, Flynn/Fairbanks references and all, for his friend MGR, giving him a character named after a legendary Chola king, fitting in with the current wave of Tamil revivalism. The credit sequence freely uses Ivan the Terrible imagery. The narration is whimsically misogynist but seems to delight in the unfettered cinematic play with popular imagery and stories.

NAVALOKAM

aka New World 1951 169’ b&w Malayalam d V. Krishnan pc Kottayam Popular Prod. s Poonkunnam Varkey lyr P. Bhaskaran c P.K. Madhavan Nair m V. Dakshinamurthy

lp Kumari, Sethulakshmi, Lalitha, Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair, Sebastian Kunju Kunju Bhagavathar, Venniyoor Madhavan Nair, Muthukulam Raghavan Pillai

A ruthless estate owner, Kuruppu (Nair), sparks off a revolt among his labourers over his callous-seduction and discarding of Devaki (Kumari). The woman, who has an independent reputation for her social work, allows her husband to be arrested on charges of assault, but eventually comes to his rescue, and also reconciles differences between the employer and his workers. The film combined the stage and film talents introduced by Koshy-Kunchako productions into Malayalam (cf. Jeevitha Nauka the same year) with major figures from the radical literary movements in Kerala, writer Varkey and lyricist Bhaskaran. Despite its stagey effects, including crammed studio interiors, emphasis on dialogue and on entries and exits, the film is seen as the first in Malayalam to shift away from mythologicals and into politically informed realism. Its extension of traditional melodramatic forms, adapted from Tamil and Telugu cinema, to address e.g. industrialisation and class conflict, was to prove an important generic precedent for Kariat’s films.

NIRDOSHI/NIRAPARADHI

1951 186’[Te]/182’[Ta] b&w Telugu/Tamil

d HM. Reddy pc Rohini Pics co-st/co-lyr/dial[H] K.G. Sharma co-st/co-lyr[Te] Sri Sri, Acharya Athreya, Sadasiva Brahmam dial/co-lyr[H] M.S. Subramanyam c P.L. Rai m Ghantasala Venkateshwara Rao, H.R. Padmanabha Sastry

lp Anjali Devi, K. Mukkamala, G. Varalakshmi, Lakshmikantam, Doraiswamy, Chandrasekhar, Madhu, Pandit Rao, K. Prabhakar Rao

Inaugurating a fresher idiom for 50s Telugu melodrama, this is a love quartet: the rich lawyer Vijay (Mukkamala) marries village girl Nirmala (Anjali Devi), but Tara (Varalakshmi), who wanted to marry Vijay, tries to disrupt the marriage, and Chandrayya, who loved Nirmala, also features in the intrigue. Telugu megastar Anjali Devi’s first major lead role and pioneering Telugu director Reddy’s last film. Sivaji Ganesan dubbed Mukkamala in the Tamil version.

PATALA BHAIRAVI/PATAAL BHAIRAVI

1951 195’[Tel/192’[Ta] b&w Telugu/Tamil/Hindi

d/co-sc K. V. Reddy pc Vijaya co-sc K. Kameshwara Rao st/dial/lyr[H] Pingali Nagendra Rao lyr[H] Thanjai Ramaiyadas lyr[H] Pandit Indra c Marcus Bartley m Ghantasala Venkateshwara Rao

lp N.T. Rama Rao, Malathi, S.V. Ranga Rao, C.S.R. Anjaneyulu, Balakrishnan, Padmanabham, Lakshmikantam, Hemalathamma, Relangi Venkatramaiah, T.G. Kamaladevi, Surabhi Kamalabai, Girija, Chitti, Savitri

Breaking all box-office records in AP, Vijaya quickly made a Tamil version and Gemini Studios followed with a Hindi version, all starring Rama Rao who soon after started his own production house. The poor gardener’s son Thota Ramudu (NTR) has to become rich to gain the hand of the Princess Indumati (Malati). The villain is a sorcerer (Ranga Rao) who wants to make the hero, as a fine example of manhood, into a human sacrifice to the underworld Goddess Patala Bhairavi. He entraps the hero with a magic bowl able to generate gold and Thota has to overcome numerous trials (e.g. fighting a crocodile which turns out to be a godly being living under a curse) before he tricks the sorcerer and is able to decapitate him. He thus satisfies Patala Bhairavi’s lust for a human sacrifice and receives all the riches he craves from her as a reward. To lengthen the film, the sorcerer is revived and again pursues the hero and is again defeated. The kitschy imagery and studio sets provide an appropriate style for this emphatically Orientalist fairy tale. Ghantasala’s music is a key contribution to the film’s success. The Hindi version, dubbed by Gemini from Telugu, included a specially shot colour sequence with a dance by Lakshmikantam. The Telugu film consolidated a local version of the ‘folklore’ film, a swashbuckling Orientalist fantasy evoking both Alexandre Dumas and Hollywood’s Douglas Fairbanks films. Created by the Tamil cinema (cf. Apoorva Sabodarargal, 1949; later associated mainly with MGR), the genre was successfully transferred into Telugu where established directors like B.N. Reddi (formerly associated with reform themes) had to acknowledge its commercial infallibility (Raja Makutam, 1959). The real success of the genre is due to its colourful invention of local pseudo-legends often adapting idioms from the folk theatre, e.g. Burrakatha. Earlier Telugu films in this idiom included Balanagamma (1942), Ratnamala (1947) and Raksharekha (1949) Savitri performed a dance in the film.

NTR (centre) in Patala Bhairavi

RATNADEEP/RATNADEEPAM

1951 ?’ b&w Hindi/Bengali/Tamil

d Debaki Bose pc Chitramaya st Prabhat Kumar Mukherjee’s novel dial Narottam Vyas, Shekhar Roy[H] lyr Mahendra Pran, Buddhichandra Agarwal ‘Madhur’[H] c Deojibhai m Robin Chatterjee

lp A. Gupta, Manju Dey, Molina Devi, Chhaya Devi, Pahadi Sanyal, Tulsi Chakraborty, Kamal Mitra, Rajkumar Soni, Sudhir Chakravarty, Gokul Mukherjee, Gaurishankar, Abhi Bhattacharya

Bengali-Hindi costume movie (the Tamil version was probably dubbed). The kingdom of Basuligram is in mourning on the 14th anniversary of the disappearance of Prince Bhuvan (after 14 years, a missing person may be pronounced dead). That night, at a nearby railway station, a dismissed station-master Gopal finds the corpse of a Sanyasi (ascetic) bearing a remarkable resemblance to himself. When he realises that this is the missing prince, he impersonates him. Amid joy and celebration in the palace, he meets the young queen whose innocence makes him realise the folly of his deception. The businessman Ghulam, who wanted to marry the queen himself, intends exposing the impostor. The Hindi version had several Geeta Dutt, Jutika Roy and Talat Mahmood numbers. Based apparently on the famous Bhowal-Sanyasi case in Bengal.

AAN

aka Savage Princess 1952 161’ col Hindi

d/p Mehboob Khan pc Mehboob Prod. st R.S. Choudhury dial S. Ali Raza lyr Shakeel Badayuni c Faredoon Irani m Naushad

lp Dilip Kumar, Nimmi, Premnath, Nadira, Sheela Nayak, Mukri, Murad, Nilambi, Cuckoo, Maya, Abdul, Aga Miraz, Amirbano

Mehboob’s shift from b&w to colour led to a sweeping narrative style, with a brown and green countryside, neo-classical decor, expansive gestures and valiant horsemen thundering under fiery golden-orange skies, announcing his Mother India (1957) socialist realism. Hero Jai Tilak (Kumar) belongs to a Rajput clan loyal to the benevolent maharaja (Murad). The villain is the Cadillac-driving Prince Shamsher Singh (Premnath) who tries to usurp power by killing his father, the ruler. Much to the distress of Mangala (Nimmi), who loves him, Jai resolves to tame the proud rajkumari (Nadira) as he tamed her wild stallion in a contest. Shamsher kidnaps Mangala and tries to rape her, causing her to fall to her death. Jai retaliates by capturing the rajkumari, forcing her to take Mangala’s place. Eventually it turns out that the maharaja is still alive and Mangala appears in the rajkumari’s dream, making the princess realise she loves Jai. Jai and the loyalist forces defeat Shamsher and reassume power. One of Mehboob’s first films to receive wide distribution in the West, where it was compared, incongruously, to both LeRoy’s Quo Vadis (1951) and Powell’s The Red Shoes (1948), while Dilip Kumar was seen as close to Tarzan. The desert, a set created by art director Achrekar, in which the rajkumari is gunning for Jai quotes the climactic scenes of King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946). Full of elaborately stylised action (esp. Nimmi’s performance), the most spectacular action takes place in a Ben Hur-type arena, including the sword-fight between Jai and Shamsher in front of the funeral pyre intended to burn the rajkumari at the stake. Shot in 16mm Gevacolour and blown up in Technicolor, the film’s epic style merges remarkably well with Technicolor’s tendency to create colour patches, a problem that e.g. Nitin Bose failed to solve in his Ganga Jumna (1961), making Aan one of India’s first successful experiments with colour cinematography. Released in a 105’ dubbed French version as Mangala Fille des Indes in 1954 and the first Hindi film to be dubbed in Tamil.

AANDHIYAN

1952 136’ b&w Hindi

d/cost/sc/dial Chetan Anand pc Navketan Films cost Hamid Butt lyr Narendra Sharma c Jai Mistry m Ali Akbar Khan

lp Dev Anand, Nimmi, Kalpana Kartik, Durga Khote, K.N. Singh, Leela Mishra, Pratima Devi, M.A. Latif, Johnny Walker

Chetan Anand’s 2nd film at Navketan, made between the more famous Affsar (1950) and Taxi Driver (1954), argues for a humane form of capitalism. The honest lawyer Ram Mohan (Anand) wants to marry Janaki (Kartik), daughter of the businessman Din Dayal. The villain is a rival businessman, Kuber Das (Singh), who blackmails Din Dayal into letting him marry Janaki. The entire community comes to the aid of the honest capitalist but to no avail and it remains up to the star, Anand, to ensure the happy ending.

ANANDMATH

1952 176’ b&w Hindi

d/sc Hemen Gupta pc Filmistan st Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s novel (1884) dial Krishna Prabhakara lyr Shailendra, Hasrat Jaipuri c Dronacharya m Hemanta Mukherjee

lp Prithviraj Kapoor, Geeta Bali, Ranjana, Pradeep, Ajit, Bharat Bhushan

Militant Bengali film-maker Gupta made his Hindi debut at Filmistan with this stridently nationalist biographical of the 18th C. sage Satyanand who led the sanyasi uprising against the British and the subject of Bankimchandra’s best-known novel. Alongside Satyanand’s heroism, the film, choreographed by Sachin Shankar, develops a murkier tale around the sexual troubles of Satyanand’s two lieutenants, Jeevanand and Bhavanand. Jeevanand renounces his wife Shanti when he joins the Math (clan), but finds himself so frustrated that he has to recover her, while Bhavanand covets Kalyani, the refugee queen of Padachinha. Both men die in the uprising, their deaths being presented as a kind of retribution for their sexual weakness.

ANDAMAN KAITHI

aka The Prisoner of the Andamans 1952 190’ b&w Tamil

d V. Krishnan pc Radhakrishna Films s Ku. Sa. Krishnamurthy from his play

lp K. Sarangapani, T.S. Balaiah, M.G. Ramachandran, Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair, P.K. Saraswathi, Santhanalakshmi, M.S. Draupadi, T.V. Sivadhanu

A story about Independence and Partition (shown via newsreel footage) adapted from Krishnamurthy’s reformist play as staged by the popular 40s company, TKS Brothers. The young trade union activist Nataraj (an early MGR role) tells, in flashback, his cellmate how his villainous uncle, Ponnambalam (Sarangapani), a collaborator with the British, swindled Nataraj’s mother, killed his father and married his sister, Leela (Saraswathi). The family having escaped by train from Karachi to Madras, the villain has Nataraj imprisoned but the hero manages to kill him, earning a further prison term. Set at the time when the labour movement was gaining ground (scenes of food shortage, unemployment, strike calls), the play’s reformism was skewed towards a nationalist politics and sexual conservativism, in the name of naturalism: the hero marries a rape victim (Draupadi) but the child conveniently dies; his sister Leela is a widow but also a virgin, a difficult condition achieved by feigning madness during marriage. The song Anju ruba notai (A Five Rupee Note) was a hit and the poet Subramanya Bharati’s Kani nilam vendum (I Want a Piece of Land) featured as part of a love duet. A long dance sequence interrupts the narrative momentum. Some accounts suggest K. Subramanyam supervised the making of the film.

BAIJU BAWRA

1952 168’ b&w Hindi

d Vijay Bhatt pc Prakash Pics st Ramchandra Thakur sc R.S. Choudhury dial Zia Sarhadi lyr Shakeel Badayuni c V.N. Reddy m Naushad

lp Bharat Bhushan, Meena Kumari, Surendra, Kuldeep Kaur, Bipin Gupta, Manmohan Krishna, B.M. Vyas, Mishra, Radhakrishan, Kesari, Ratan Kumar, Bhagwanji, Baby Tabassum, Rai Mohan, Nadir

Bhatt took considerable liberties with the history of India’s classical music for this megahit focusing on an encounter between Tansen (Surendra), court musician in Akbar’s (Gupta) Mughal court, and the itinerant Baiju (Bhushan). When Tansen’s guards kill Baiju’s father (Bhagwanji), he avenges himself by defeating Tansen in a musical contest. Naushad used leading classical singers D.V. Paluskar and Amir Khan as playback voices for the highlight of the movie, the contest itself. This was Meena Kumari’s first important role, playing Baiju’s self-sacrificing sweetheart, Gauri. Remembered mostly for its music.

BASU PARIVAR

1952 ?’ b&w Bengali

d Nirmal Dey pc MP Prod.

lp Uttam Kumar, Pahadi Sanyal, Nepal Nag, Bani Ganguly, Bhanu Bannerjee, Sabitri Chatterjee, Supriya Choudhury, Jahar Roy

Dey’s first film with Bengali superstar Uttam Kumar adapts the Bengali cinema’s 1940s realist tendency (e.g. Chinnamul, 1950) to the commercial entertainer’s requirements. It tells of a family’s economic difficulties during WW2. The father (Sanyal) is an excitable figure mourning the passing of pre-war plenitude; there is a kindly mother (Ganguly) and two sons, Sukhen (Kumar) exercising a restraining influence on his impulsive younger brother Satyen (Nag). The crisis comes when Satyen is arrested for theft. Believing Sukhen did it, Satyen takes the blame. The family suffers severe disruption until the real thief is caught in an implausible ending. Incredibly, given their later screen relationship, Supriya Choudhury plays Uttam Kumar’s sister. The film was remade in Hindi as Hum Hindustani (1960).

CHHATRAPATI SHIVAJI

1952 156’[M]/170’[H] b&w Marathi/Hindi

d/s/co-lyr Bhalji Pendharkar pc Prabhakar Chitra co-lyr V. Sawalram, Shailendra c G. Shinde m C. Ramchandra

lp Chandrakant, P.Y. Altekar[M], Prithviraj Kapoor[H], Gajanan Jagirdar, Leela Chandragiri, Lalita Pawar, Ranjana, Ratnamala, Vanamala, Baburao Pendharkar, Master Vithal, Krishnarao Chonkar, Jaishankar Danve, Sureshnath, Vasantrao Pahelwan, Lata Mangeshkar

Pendharkar’s biopic of his idol, 17th-C. Maratha emperor Shivaji (Chandrakant), presented as the founder of India’s first Hindu kingdom. The film chronicles Shivaji’s birth at Shivneri, the evolution of his Dev-Desh-Dharam (God, Country and Religion) ethic, his unification of the Maratha people and his celebrated encounters with the Adil Shahi king of Bijapur and with Shahista Khan, the uncle of Mughal King Aurangzeb (Jagirdar). Shivaji’s capture by the Mughals and his escape from Agra are also shown. The film establishes the definitive version of the popular iconography clustering around Shivaji’s heroic persona (cf. the Marathi historical novels of Ranjit Desai or Vasant Kanetkar’s stage historicals). Marathi stage actor and film-maker Altekar played Raja Jaisingh, with Kapoor taking the role in Hindi.

CHIMNI PAKHARE/NANNHE MUNNE

1952 134’ b&w Marathi/Hindi

d Datta Dharmadhikari pc Alhaad Chitra s/co-lyr G.D. Madgulkar co-lyr Phani c Bal Bapat m Vasant Pawar, Ramchandra Wadhavkar

lp Baby Shakuntala, Raja Nene, Sulochana, Indira Chitnis, Indu Kulkarni, Rambhau Gramopadhye, Dada Mirasi, Raja Gosavi

Typical Dharmadhikari melodrama about a 12 year-old girl (Shakuntala) who raises her three younger brothers when their father runs away after committing a crime and their mother dies of shock. Several songs intensify the sentimental approach, e.g. Aai meli baapgela aata sambhali vithala (Mother is dead, father is gone, now we’re in God’s hands). The film’s stark realism, adapted from e.g. Bimal Roy, demonstrates its compatibility with tragic melodrama, as the film sets up a basic conflict between goodness and evil (the latter represented by a neighbour who wants the children evicted from their house), and eventually evokes the saint film in a contemporary setting (cf. the formal similarities with Sant Dnyaneshwar, 1940).

DAAG

1952 149’ b&w Hindi

d/co-s Amiya Chakravarty pc Mars & Movies co-s Rajendra Shankar dial Rajinder Singh Bedi lyr Shailendra, Hasrat Jaipuri c V. Babasaheb m Shankar-Jaikishen

lp Dilip Kumar, Nimmi, Usha Kiron, Lalita Pawar, Kanhaiyalal, Jawahar Kaul, Leela Mishra, Chandrasekhar, Krishnakant

In Chakravarty’s melodrama about class division and the evils of alcohol, Shankar (Kumar), a nice village youth who makes clay statues, is parted from his sweetheart Parvati (Nimmi) when her family inherits a fortune. In addition, he is an alcoholic who devotes all his wealth, property and even the money for his ailing mother’s medicines on drink. The maudlin plot comes alive only through Nimmi’s uncanny knack for larger-than-life gestures. The film’s remembered song is Talat Mahmood’s Ai mere dil kahin aur chal.

DAASI

1952 181’ b&w Telugu/Tamil d C.V. Ranganatha Das pc Rajyam Pics c M. Rehman m S. Dakshinamurthy, C.R. Subburaman

lp N.T. Rama Rao, Lakshmirajyam, S.V. Ranga Rao, Relangi Venkatramaiah, K. Siva Rao, Srivatsava, Doraiswamy, Shantakumari, Kanakam, Vasanthi

Telugu melodrama unusually derived from the Bengali literary idiom. A childless zamindar (Ranga Rao) wants to marry again but his wife (Shantakumari) then feigns pregnancy and adopts her maid’s (Lakshmirajyam) child. The film deals with the problems of the maid, and then those of the child (Vasanthi) who discovers her real mother.

JAAL

aka The Net 1952 165’ b&w Hindi

d/s Guru Dutt pc Filmarts dial M.A. Latif lyr Sahir Ludhianvi c V.K. Murthy m S.D. Burman

lp Dev Anand, Geeta Bali, Ram Singh, Purnima, K.N. Singh, Krishna Kumari, Johnny Walker, Rashid Khan, Raj Khosla, Raj Matwala

Dutt’s classic follow-up to Baazi (1951) with the same stars. Set in a small Indian enclave still under foreign control (presumably Portuguese Goa), Tony (Anand) is an unscrupulous gold smuggler who seduces the local belle Maria (Bali) and makes her his accomplice. Lisa (Purnima), who was Tony’s companion until the police got on her track, tries to warn him. In the end, when Tony is hunted down by the police, Maria stops the shootout and persuades him to go to jail, promising to wait for him. Maria’s blind brother Carlo (K.N. Singh) and her fiance Simon (R. Singh) are the other important characters in the story. The film’s most remarkable scenes, apart from its wonderfully suspenseful opening on the waterfront, include a very stylish seduction scene as Tony lures Maria to the beach with his song Yeh raatyeh chandniphir kahan (sung by Hemanta Mukherjee), and she ends up caught, literally, in his net. The rural Goan fishing community is transformed into a kind of frontier town to provide the setting for the morality tale of sex and religion, summarised in a strangely comic scene with masked dancers at a village fete. Dutt uses the sound of waves as a leitmotif and his renowned crane shots (cf. Pyaasa, 1957’; Kaagaz Ke Phool, 1959) are already in evidence.

LAKHACHI GOSHTA

1952 133’ b&w Marathi

d Raja Paranjpe pc Gajaraj Chitra co-s/lyr G.D. Madgulkar co-s G.R. Kamat c Bal Bapat m Sudhir Phadke

lp Chitra, Rekha, Raja Gosavi, Indira Chitnis, Ravindra, Sharad Talwalkar, G.D. Madgulkar, Raja Paranjpe, Madan Mohan

A poet (Gosavi) loves a kindly radio singer while his painter friend loves the daughter of a millionaire. The millionaire agrees to his daughter’s marriage provided the painter can demonstrate his ability to live in luxury by spending Rs 1 lakh (Rs 100,000) within a month. However, the money he spends keeps making profits. The comedy depends mainly on Madgulkar’s incisive dialogue and a cast including several well-known Marathi comedians such as Gosavi and Talwalkar. Gosavi, a former bank clerk, made his debut here and went on to become a major Marathi stage and screen comedian, associated with deadpan dialogue.

MAHAPRASTHANER PATHEY/YATRIK

1952 137’ b&w Bengali/Hindi

d Kartick Chattopadhyay pc New Theatres st Probodh Kumar Sanyal’s novel dial Mohanlal Bajpai[H] c Amulya Mukherjee m Pankaj Mullick

lp Basanta Choudhury, Arundhati Devi, Maya Mukherjee, Tulsi Chakraborty[B], Abhi Bhattacharya[H], Kamal Mitra

Film based on Probodh Kumar Sanyal’s travelogue about his visit, presented as a search for Truth, to the Himalayas and the religious shrines at Kedarnath and Badrinath. Choudhury plays the author in both versions. Arundhati Devi in her film debut plays Rani, the widow on a pilgrimage, while Bhattacharya plays the Brahmachari in the Hindi version. A strongly mystical aura pervades the film, notably in the nature shots. It initiated a trend of pilgrim travel movies (Marutirtha Hinglaj, 1959) revived in the 70s (Bighalita Karuna fanhabifamuna, 1972; Amrita Kumbher Sandhaney, 1982).

MR SAMPAT

1952 165’ b&w Hindi

d S.S. Vasan pc Gemini st R.K. Narayan’s novel (1949) lyr Pandit Indra, Kashyap m E. Shankar Sastry, Balkrishna Kalla

lp Motilal, Padmini, Kanhaiyalal, Swaraj, Vanaja, Agha

The famous R.K. Narayan literary character of the gentleman crook became a classic Motilal role. The suave and fast-talking Mr Sampat hits Bombay as the manager of Seth Makhanlal Jhaverimull Gheewala’s (Kanhaiyalal) municipal election campaign. He opens a bank with assistance from a former prince and the Kalamandir Theatre company to impress the woman he wants to win, Malini Devi (Padmini).

NAGARIK

aka The Citizen 1952 127’ b&w Bengali

d/s Ritwik Ghatak pc Film Guild c Ramananda Sengupta m Hariprasanna Das

lp Satindra Bhattacharya, Prabhadevi, Sova Sen, Ketaki Devi, Geeta Shome, Ajit Bannerjee, Kali Bannerjee, Keshto Mukherjee, Gangapada Basu, Shriman Pintoo, Parijat Bose, Mumtaz Ahmed Khan, Anil Chatterjee

Ghatak’s directorial debut was part of a co-operative effort. The film is an ensemble piece featuring a family from North Calcutta (the original residents of the city) faced by the War and Partition. Ramu (S. Bhattacharya) the eldest son, hopes to get a job to support the family but spends his time gazing wistfully at a flowering tree and dreaming of settling with his girlfriend Uma (K. Devi) in a house resembling one he saw in a calendar painting. His aged father (K. Bannerjee) is an idealist who clings to fantasies of the past while his mother (Prabhadevi) passionately regrets the loss of their old mansion; his sister Seeta (Sen) internalises the family’s suffering and tries to escape the situation via the lodger, Sagar (A. Bannerjee), they have taken in and who becomes the figure through whom the family articulates its future. Eventually they move into a proletarian slum and abandon their individual aspirations as they become progressively politicised. The film came in the wake of the IPTA-derived political cinema in Bengal (e.g. Chinnamul, 1950) and remains Ghatak’s most direct call to political action, including his only explicit propaganda scene: the insertion of the Internationale on the sound-track as the family leaves the house while another group ‘just like them’ comes in presumably to live through similar experiences. Acknowledging for the first time in Indian cinema the melodramatic origins of an apparently realist plot, Ghatak uses wide-angle lenses to make the histories and the social relations crystallised in the urban environment resonate with the fate of the characters, starting with the presentation of the city itself, Calcutta, through a series of pan-dissolves at the film’s opening. The development of the relationship between the central characters of the melodramatic plot and the city is gradually inflected by the encounter with peripheral characters: Jatin Babu (K. Mukherjee) who lives under the staircase and whose wife dies; Shefali (G. Shome), Uma’s sister, who becomes a prostitute; Sagar, who changes from a rent-payer to an escape route for Seeta. These inflections begin to clarify the relations between broader social processes and the lives of individual characters, opening up the melodrama towards a directly political consciousness of the need for radical change. The film was never released and believed lost, but a restored print, unfortunately showing the extensive decay of the recovered positive, was eventually released in 1977.

PALLETOORU

1952 171’ b&w Telugu

d/co-sc T. Prakash Rao pc Peoples’ Art Prod. p P. Sivaramaiah co-sc M.S. Choudhury co-s/co-lyr Vasireddy co-s/co-lyr Sunkara co-lyr Sri Sri, V. Shrikrishna c Ajoy Kar m Ghantasala Venkateshwara Rao

lp NT. Rama Rao, Savitri, S.V. Ranga Rao, T.G. Kamaladevi, Nagabhushanam, Suryakantam, Sheshamamba, Padmavati, Baby Krishnaveni

Prakash Rao’s debut, shot by noted Bengali cameraman-director Kar, is a commercial hit introducing a new phase of the Telugu ruralist melodrama. Contrasting scientific enlightenment with backward superstition, the film also pits the progressive hero Chandram (NTR) against the villainous moneylender Ganapati (Ranga Rao). A second plot strand features Kondaiah (Nagabhushanam) who wants to marry heroine Suguna (Savitri). The moneylender tries to close down Chandram’s Vishal Andhra (Greater Andhra) library in order to construct a temple in its place. When the village is hit by famine, he starts hoarding food. The hero opposes him, for which he is arrested and tried in court. The long court scene confronts the peasantry that supports Chandram with the rich landlords who persecute him. The film used verite footage of the Sankranti festival shot in the Krishna district and included progressive poet Sri Sri’s noted lyric Polalananni halaladunni Other ruralist films followed in its wake: e.g. Pedaraitu (1952).

PARASAKTHI

aka The Goddess 1952 188’ b&w Tamil

d Krishnan-Panju pc AVM Prod, National Pics p M.S. Perumal st M.S. Balasundaram sc/dial/co-lyr M. Karunanidhi co-lyr Subramanyam Bharati, Bharatidasan, K.N. Anualthango, K.P. Kamakshisundaram, Udumalai Narayana Kavi c Maruthi Rao m R. Sudarshanam

lp Sivaji Ganesan, S.S. Rajendran, S.V. Sahasranamam, Sriranjanijr, Pandharibai, Kannamma, V.K. Ramaswamy, Kumari Kamala

Ganesan’s debut in a classic DMK Film scripted in line with party policies by the future chief minister of Tamil Nadu. Three brothers, based in Rangoon, go home to Madurai when their youngest sister is to be married. WW2 is declared and the brothers are separated, the eldest, Chandrasekharan (Sahasranamam) becoming a judge, the second, Gnanasekharan (Rajendran), a representative of the beggars’ community. Gunasekharan (Ganesan) arrives home to find their father dead and his newly married sister Kalyani (Sriranjani) widowed and homeless. Concealing his identity, he looks after her like a guardian. In the film’s dramatic as well as political highlight, he wounds a villainous priest who tries to rape Kalyani in the deity Parasakthi’s temple. Significantly, for the DMK’s anti-religious stance, the hero first pretends to be the temple deity and then reveals it to be just a piece of stone. Gunasekharan’s girlfriend Vimala (Pandharibai) represents, with her politically activist brother, the voice of the DMK, esp. that of its chief, Annadurai. When she.isn’t lecturing Gunasekharan on Annadurai’s works, she goes boating in the river, thus finding herself well placed to rescue Kalyani’s child thrown into the river by its mother (recalling the legend of Nallathangal who threw her seven children into a well). Kalyani, accused of infanticide, comes to trial, in a classic DMK formula, before her eldest brother, the judge. When she tells her story, the brother recognises her and has a heart attack. Gunasekharan, accused of the priest’s murder, gets his turn in court to make a speech. This is probably one of the most elaborately plotted melodramas in the Indian cinema and glorifies the Dravidian heritage, contrasted with the ‘pitiable’ state of contemporary Tamil Nadu. The film advocates (e.g. when Gunasekharan is robbed by a vamp with elitist views on the cinema played by Kannamma) traditional kinship relations while castigating caste discrimination, the Brahmin class, superstition and WW2 black marketeering. The soundtrack, released on record and cassette, was, like the book, extremely popular, as was the music. Almost banned, heavily censored for the temple scene, it was a spectacular commercial hit. Ganesan became the dominant icon of the DMK, replacing K.R. Ramaswamy who had achieved that status through Annadurai’s film Velaikkari (1949). The film, its numerous political references, the controversies surrounding its release and the circumstances of its making and showing, have been researched by M.S.S. Pandian: ‘Parasakthi: Life and Times of a DMK Film’ (1991).

Sivaji Ganesan in Parasakthi

PEDARAITU

1952 172’ b&w Telugu

d Kadaru Nagabhushanam pc Rajarajeshwari Films s/co-lyr Kopparapu Subba Rao co-lyr Sambasiva Rao, Babji c P. Ellappa m H.R. Padmanabha Sastry

lp P. Kannamba, Anjali Devi, M. Sriramamurthy, Relangi Venkatramaiah, Doraiswamy, Lingamurthy, D. Sadasivarao, Tulasi, Muthulakshmi

Rural drama in the tradition of Palletooru (1952). The evil son of the zamindar loves the same girl as the hero (Sriramamurthy) and has the hero expelled from the village. The hero manages to return and all zamindar land is eventually redistributed to the poor peasants. There is a parallel comedy story including a prostitute, a manager, the manager’s assistant and the assistant’s lover.

PEDGAONCHE SHAHANE

1952 131’b&w Marathi

d/p Raja Paranjpe pc Makarand Films, Raja Paranjpe Prod, s/co-lyr G.D. Madgulkar dial G.R. Kamat co-lyr Mukhram Sharma c Bal Bapat m Datta Davjekar

lp Raja Paranjpe, G.D. Madgulkar, Chittaranjan Kolhatkar, Dhumal, Master Dwarkanath, Vasant Shinde, Nalini Nagpurkar, Nayana, Prasad Sawkar, Sadashiv Thakar, Ganpatrao Kelkar, Daldaseth

In his best-known film as director and as actor, Paranjpe plays the bearded Kaka Shahane, a once-famous surgeon who went insane when he performed an unsuccessful operation on his girlfriend. Escaping from the mental asylum, he finds shelter with a family, pretending to be their long-lost uncle back from Zanzibar. The family, corrupted by ‘modernity’ (mother is a singer, daughter a dancer, one son obsessed by racing) tries to get the presumably rich uncle’s money. The madman eventually reforms the family and denounces rationalist notions of sanity.

PELLI CHESI CHOODU/KALYANAM PANNI PAAR

1952 191’[Te]/193’[Ta] b&w Telugu/Tamil

d L.V. Prasad pc Vijaya co-p B.Nagi Reddy co-p/s Chakrapani lyr Pingali Nagendra Rao, Utukuri Satyanarayana[Te], Sadasiva Brahmam[Ta] c Marcus Bartley m Ghantasala Venkateshwara Rao

lp N.T. Rama Rao[Te], G. Varalakshmi, Savitri, S.V. Ranga Rao, Suryakantam, Joga Rao, Meenakshi, Doraiswamy, Pushpalatha

L. V. Prasad’s ensemble comedy abounds in intrigues and disguises geared to the making and breaking of marriage alliances. The film pits three pairs of lovers, backed by a kindhearted aristocrat, against traditional parents committed to viewing marriage as a commercial transaction. Govindaiah, a lawyer, wants Raja to marry Chitti. She, however, loves an endearing bodybuilder to whom, by traditional obligations, she rightfully belongs. Govindaiah makes Raja’s marriage to Chitti the precondition for helping to find a husband for Raja’s sister Ammudu (Varalakshmi). Raja rejects the deal and, with his younger brother, sets out to find a groom for Ammudu. In a distant village he meets the Zamindar Veeyanna (Ranga Rao), a complex character of declining fortunes and generous spirit who, as Panchayat President, also serves as a representative of the State. Raju and Veeyanna’s daughter Savitri (Savitri) fall in love and their wedding is quickly arranged. Veeyanna also finds a groom, Ramana (NTR), for Ammudu, but Ramana’s father Venkatapathy is a purana-reciting scrooge who demands a large dowry which Veeyanna promises to pay. Private Govindaiah, meanwhile, plots his own revenge on the wedding day, inciting Venkatapathy to insist on the dowry being paid before the marriage. The narrative that follows is ‘staged’ by the new couple with the help of Raja, Savitri and others. Ramana pretends to give in to his father’s demand to call the wedding off, but starts living with Ammudu and, when his father arrives, feigns mental illness while Ammudu and Raja disguise themselves as nurse and doctor. Ammudu endears herself to Venkatapathy by showing interest in his purana recitals. The groom ‘recovers’ from his madness while Ammudu gives birth to their son, causing a fresh round of gossip in the village and providing the original villain Govindaiah with yet another opportunity to make trouble. The crisis is resolved following a relapse of insanity on the part of Ramana, as well as the discovery of Ammudu’s baby, before the uncaring parents relent and the various couples are reunited. In addition to the extensive use of popular theatre techniques, especially when various characters ‘enact’ scenarios in order to teach other characters a lesson, the narrative is punctuated by two inserted stage performances by schoolchildren. It featured several popular songs, esp. Amma noppule and Petti chesukoni.

PREMA/KATHAL

1952 171’[Tel/169’[Ta] b&w Telugu/Tamil

d V.S. Ramakrishna Rao pc Bharani Pics st P. Bhanumathi dial/lyr K.G. Sharma c Kamal Ghosh m C.R. Subburaman

lp P. Bhanumathi, A. Nageshwara Rao, K. Mukkamala, Sriranjanijr., Relangi Venkatramaiah, Surabhi Kamalabai, K. Siva Rao, Doraiswamy, C.S.R. Anjaneyulu

Rich boy-poor girl romance following on from the successful Nageshwara Rao-Bhanumathi hit Laila Majnu (1949) made by the same production team. The naive village girl Moti (Bhanumathi) meets the rich city youth Raja (Nageshwara Rao) in a rural resort. Moti’s father insists that she marry the villain Parashuram (Mukkamala), but she escapes and goes to Raja. When she sees Raja walking with another woman, Lata (Sriranjani), she becomes a beggar, eventually finding a job with a theatre group. The reconciliation takes place when Raja and Lata happen to see the play, and Moti, recognising Raja, swoons on stage. Remembered mainly for Subburaman’s music (e.g. the song Agavoyi maa raja, sung by Bhanumathi).

RAHI/TWO LEAVES AND A BUD

1952 139’ b&w Hindi/English

d/dial/co-sc K.A. Abbas pc Naya Sansar st Mulk Raj Anand’s novel Two Leaves and a Bud (1937) co-sc Mohan Abdullah, V.P. Sathe lyr Prem Dhawan c Ramchandra m Anil Biswas lp Vev Anand, Balraj Sahni, Nalini Jaywant, David, Manmohan Krishna, Achala Sachdev, S. Michael, Rashid Khan, Habib Tanvir, Shaukat Hashmi

A rather confused attempt to equate a nationalist politics (well after Independence) with class politics. Set in pre-Independence Assam, it tells of oppressed, mostly women, tea plantation workers. The villainous English manager (Michael) employs the hero, a former army officer (Anand), to run the plantation with brutal discipline. He is eventually humanised by one of the workers, Ganga (Jaywant), and when the workers rise in revolt the hero joins them. However, Ganga has to pay for the film’s simplifications with her life. It was made simultaneously in English and a dubbed Russian version called Ganga was released in the USSR.

SANKRANTI

1952 198’ b&w Telugu

d C. Pullaiah pc East India Film s/Zyr Balijepalli Lakshmikanta Kavi c N.C. Balakrishnan, Prabhakar, G. Chandran m Ashwathama

lp Shantakumari, Sriranjanijr, Savitri, K. Siva Rao, Ashalata, Vishwam, Ramana Rao, Chandrasekhar, Rajanala Nageshwara Rao

Uncharacteristic middle-class melodrama by mythological director Pullaiah, showing the ascendancy of melodrama in 50s Telugu cinema. Matriarch Annapurnamma’s (Shantakumari) joint family crumbles when her two sons do not stop their respective wives from quarrelling: one son is henpecked, the other ‘too busy’ to bother with matters domestic. The preachy film bemoans the loss of ‘traditional’ male authority required to control women in the family.

SHIN SHINAKI BOOBLA BOO

1952 ?’ b&w Hindi

d/p/dial/lyr P.L. Santoshi pc Santoshi Prod. st Ramanand Sagar sc Deben Mukherjee c L.N. Verma, P.C. Sinha m C. Ramchandra

lp Sadhona Bose, Rehana, Ranjan, Veera, Baby Tabassum, Radhakrishen, Mumtaz Ali, Tiwari, Samson, Indu Paul, Shama Gulnar

Santoshi based this orientalist fantasy on the modern dance ballets Sadhona Bose had been associated with on stage, using the experiments with jazz and Latin American rhythms of Santoshi’s regular composer, Ramchandra. Shin Shinaki (Rehana) dreams of killing the man, Taishi, who killed her parents. When the villain dies, she transfers her vengeful energies on to the man’s son. The story involves a fortune-teller, Chiang, who only surfaces publicly one day per year. The other key figure is her lover, the bandit Boobla Boo (Ranjan), who eventually falls in with her plans. Classic songs include Sumayati’s Han dai taka lai han dai kali aie in a kind of question-answer mode using a fast-paced chorus, Shin’s number Aare baba and her duet with Boobla, Kuch chahelen ho, kuch charchein ho. This film was the unlikely first victim of the central government’s authority to overrule the censor board, an action enabled by the Indian Cinematograph Act passed that year. Given a Universal certificate by the censors, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting banned the film because of its ‘low moral tone’ and because it ‘throws the glamour of romance and heroism over criminal characters, treats sacred subjects irreverently and is, in consequence, opposed to the interests of public decency and morality’. The ban was later revoked but ruined the film’s commercial chances.

VALAYAPATHI

1952 191’ b&w Tamil

d T.R. Sundaram/Masthan p Modern Theatres dial Bharatidasan m S. Dakshinamurthy

lp G. Muthukrishnan, K.K. Perumal, A. Karunanidhi, T.A. Rajalakshmi, T.P. Muthulakshmi, M.S.S. Bhagyam, Ramakrishnan, Sowcar Janaki

A film adaptation of a well-known legend which inflects the story of the tribulations of a bigamous husband towards a dramatisation of caste status and its associated codes of honour. In Kaveripoopattinam, the rich but childless merchant Vallayapathi (Muthukrishnan) is married to Sundari (Rajalakshmi), which prompts him to take a second wife, Sathyavathy (Janaki) from a Vannaya family, to the distress of his first wife. When the shy Sathyavathy becomes pregnant, Sundari openly feigns pregnancy and manages to arrange matters so that her husband thinks Sathyavathy’s child is not his. Rejected by all, Sathyavathy seeks refuge with an old man and bears Uttaman (Ramakrishnan), who turns out to be an intelligent and brave youth. As for Sundari, she passes off her brother’s lover’s brattish son Azhgan as hers. The two sons are rival students until a tattoo is found on Azhgan’s body, betraying his low-caste origins, but Sundari manages to hide the mark from Vallayapathi, who persecutes Uttaman. The latter eventually learns of his parentage and sues his father. The lengthy court case which follows unravels the various subterfuges and Sundari commits suicide while the nuclear family of father, mother and son is happily reinstated.

AAH/AVAN/PREMALEKHALU

1953 150’ b&w Hindi/Tamil/Telugu

d Raja Nawathe pc R.K. Studio s Inder Raj Anand lyr Hasrat Jaipuri, Shailendra c Jaywant Pathare m Shankar-Jaikishen

lp Nargis, Raj Kapoor, Vijayalakshmi, Pran, Ramesh Sinha, Bhupendra Kapoor, Leela Mishra, Sohanlal, Mukesh

Raj (Kapoor), a poet at heart, is the chief engineer in charge of building the Saraswati dam. Raj’s father wants him to marry the glamorous Chandra (Vijayalakshmi), but he loves Chandra’s sister Neelu (Nargis) who shares his poetic inclinations. Raj discovers that he has tuberculosis. He then pretends never to have loved Neelu and persuades a doctor friend (Pran) to marry her. Raj also pretends to love Chandra to prove to Neelu that he is an untrustworthy man. All his lies create far greater emotional problems than the disease itself but Raj and Neelu do eventually unite. Although one of Kapoor’s less memorable films, it remains important as one of the first movies to deploy the very popular melodramatic device of the hero suffering nobly from a terminal disease. Masochistically wallowing in his suffering while arrogantly spreading misery all around, the infantile yet paternalistic hero, presented as a ‘realist’, denies the heroine, presented as an incurable romantic, the chance to make up her own mind by telling her lies. This device allows for a great variety of twists in the plot and countless displays of emotion. Here, an extra opposition is woven into the plot: the city/country dichotomy, with good tribals and workers being faced with urban profiteers. The ending sees good (country and love) triumph over evil (money and disease). In Bobby (1973), a tribute Kapoor paid to his own early work, some shots of Aah are reprised. He also incorporates a reference to the popular Devdas (1935) by having the dying hero make his way to his beloved’s village in a cart, as Devdas did. Telugu and Tamil versions of the film were also released.

AMMALAKKALU/MARUMAGAL

1953 187’[Te]/177’[Ta] b&w Telugu/Tamil

d D. Yoganand pc Krishna Pics s Sadasiva Brahmam lyr Samudrala Jr c Boman D. Irani m C.R. Subburaman, Vishwanathan Ramamurthy

lp Lalitha, Padmini, N.T. Rama Rao, Relangi Venkatramaiah, B.R. Panthulu, Sivaramakrishnaiah, Rushyendramani, Surabhi Kamalabai

Yoganand’s successful debut. The educated Usha (Lalitha), a 50s Telugu stereotype, marries the hero (NTR) despite the protests of her family. She then takes on, and vanquishes, the oppressive feudalist practices of her husband’s family. The film concentrates on its female lead, featuring the Ammalakkalu (neighbourhood women) indulging in dances, bicycle picnics and pranks before getting down to the story.

AMMALDAR

1953 118’ b&w Marathi

d K. Narayan Kale, Madhukar Kulkarni pc Mangal Pics st N. Gogol’s The Government Inspector co-sc/lyr G.D. Madgulkar co-sc/m P.L. Deshpande c Bal Bapat

lp P.L. Deshpande, G.D. Madgulkar, K. Narayan Kale, Sheila Naik, Leela Ogale, Vinay Kale

With Gulacha Ganapati and Devbappa (both 1953), this is one of the popular Marathi satirist, playwright and stage actor P.L. Deshpande’s best-known films. His adaptation of Gogol’s play is better anchored in the Indian situation than Afsar (1950). Various local stereotypes are incisively cast in this tale of Sarjerao (Deshpande), mistaken for a government official in a corrupt post-Independence village.

ANARKALI

1953 175’ b&w Hindi

d Nandlal Jaswantlal pc Filmistan st Nasir Hussain sc Ramesh Saigal lyr Shailendra, Hasrat Jaipuri, Rajinder Krishen, Ali Sardar Jafri c Marshall Braganza m C. Ramchandra

lp Bina Rai, Pradeep Kumar, Mubarak, S.L. Puri, Sulochana, Kuldeep Kaur

Frequently filmed Mughal romance in which Prince Salim (P. Kumar) falls in love with the common Anarkali (Rai). In Imtiaz Ali Taj’s play of 1922 she was a slave girl (cf. Loves of a Mughal Prince, 1928); in Mughal-e-Azam, 1960, she is a court attendant. Director Jaswantlal alludes to his precursors by casting Sulochana, who played Anarkali in R.S. Choudhury’s famous 1928 version, as the hero’s mother. The Filmistan production does not acknowledge the play and claims to be a direct, unmediated treatment of the Mughal legend with story and script credited to the directors Hussain (Tumsa Nahin Dekha, 1957) and R. Saigal (Railway Platform, 1955). Constructed as a fantasy flashback, Jaswantlal opens the film with a big close-up of Rai’s lips before going on to the customary establishing shots that set the scene. Sustaining his emphatic use of close-ups throughout, the film intercuts emotional episodes with elaborate war scenes used like fillers in between dramatic sequences. On occasion, the visual flair detected by reviewers of Jaswantlal’s work for the Imperial Studio emerges in this Filmistan product: the slow crane movement when Akbar (Mubarak) is told of his son’s secession threat and the abrupt dimming of the lights when he is confronted by his brother-in-law, the Rajput Raja Man Singh (Puri). The music, which by convention dominates this genre, includes hits like Mangeshkar’s Yeh zindagi usi ki hai.

Pradeep Kumar and Bina Raj in Anarkali

AVVAIYYAR

aka Avaiyar

1953 173’ b&w Tamil

d/s Kothamangalam Subbu pc Gemini p S.S.Vasan dial K. Rajagopal lyr Avvaiyyar, Papanasam Sivan c Thambu m M.D. Parthasarathy

lp K.B. Sundarambal, Kushala Kumari, G. Pattu Iyer, M.K. Radha, Gemini Ganesh, Kothamangalam Subbu, Sundaribai, K. Balaji

A hagiography of the legendary Tamil saint poetess of the Sangam period (100BC-250AD), countering the anti-religious DMK movies. Of her 59 surviving lyrics, 33 are in the Puram mode, addressing worldly matters, wars and politics, and 26 in the Akam mode, addressing the ‘inner world’, often of female desire. Kumari plays her as a young girl, Sundarambal as an adult, while Iyer takes the part of Tiruvalluvar. Starting with the story of her birth to a low-caste woman and being found, like Moses (the film often evokes The Ten Commandments, 1923), in a basket adrift in a river, the film chronicles her devotion to her god, Vigneshwara and her wide-ranging travels. She sings her message to all while effectively filmed miracles confirm her sainthood, first revealed when she resists an imposed marriage. There are spectactular scenes, including an army of several hundred stampeding elephants storming a fortress and Avvaiyyar alone facing a massed enemy when a chasm opens creating a barrier they cannot cross. With this ‘purposeful’ picture, the studio’s boss Vasan and his close collaborator, the poet Subbu, tried to extend Gemini’s reputation for spectacles after Chandralekha (1948). It is the culmination of the 40s Tamil films portraying major folk legend figures (cf. Kannagi, 1942) in the context of Tamil Nadu’s political/cultural revivalism: a prologue dedicates the film to ‘Mother Tamil’, while the heroine symbolises Tamil virtues. Remembered mainly for Sundarambal’s classic musical performance. The actress and singer, a Gandhian, made her debut playing a sensational male role in Nandanar (1935). Avvaiyyar remains her best-known screen performance, putting her among Vishnupant Pagnis (Marathi) and Chittor V. Nagaiah (Telugu) as actors indelibly linked with the saint film genre.

BHAGYAVAAN

1953?’ b&w Hindi

d Datta Dharmadhikari pc Rup Kamal Chitra st Dada Mirasi sc Mukhram Sharma lyr Neelkanth Tiwari, Saraswati Kumar Deepak c E. Mahmood m Avinash Vyas

lp Master Alhaad, Raja Nene, Radhakrishen, Nirupa Roy, Balraj, Rattan Kumar, Yashodhara Katju, Shakuntala, Baby Mala

The first Hindi film and an uninhibited weepie by the master of the Marathi melodrama, Dharmadhikari. The orphan Chanda (Alhaad) has to survive on the charity of an uncle and an aunt. He has an elder brother Suraj (Nene) who does not like the attention his wife bestows on the boy. After innumerable hardships, Chanda runs on to the railway track to commit suicide but he suddenly notices the oncoming train is hurtling towards a major accident. He manages to stop the train and saves the lives of his tormentors who, coincidentally, happen to be on the train. The excessively melodramatic style, though common in Marathi, was new to the Hindi cinema. It was later practised by Shantaram and by the ex-Prabhat film-makers involved in this production: Dharmadhikari, Nene and Anant Mane, the latter the assistant director on this movie.

CHANDIRANI

1953 165’[Ta]/164’[Te] b&w Tamil/Telugu/Hindi

d/s/co-m P. Bhanumathi pc Bharani Pics dial[Ta] Uday Kumar dial/lyr[Te] Samudrala Raghavacharya c P.S. Selvaraj co-m C.R. Subburaman, Vishwanathan

lp P. Bhanumathi, N.T. Rama Rao, Relangi Venkatramaiah, S.V. Ranga Rao, Amarnath, Vidyavati, R. Nagendra Rao, C.S.R. Anjaneyulu

Adventure movie on the pattern of Apoorva Sahodarargal (1949) replacing the male twins with female twins (Bhanumathi in a double role), daughters of an imprisoned king. One grows up in the forest, learning fencing and unarmed combat (including vanquishing a lion), while the other leads a sheltered life in the palace. Both love the same hero (NTR). The forest girl gets the hero after she defeats the king’s evil commander-in-chief. Bhanumathi’s debut as director was made as a trilingual but was not a success in Hindi. The duet O taraka was, however, a hit in all three languages.

CHANDRAHARAM

1953 174’[Te]/175’[Ta] b&w Telugu/Tamil

d K. Kameshwara Rao pc Vijaya st Chakrapani dial/lyr Pingali Nagendra Rao c Marcus Bartley m Ghantasala Venkateshwara Rao

lp N.T. Rama Rao, Savitri, Sriranjani Jr., S.V. Ranga Rao, Relangi Venkatramaiah, Joga Rao

Kameshwara Rao’s debut is an elaborate costume drama merging Gemini’s adventure film genre (Chandralekba, 1948) with Vijaya’s own type of folk fantasy (cf. Patala Bhairavi, 1951). Villain Dhoomketu wants to become the crown prince of Chandanadesam, but his ambition is thwarted by the birth of Chandan (NTR). However, Chandan’s life depends on his wearing a magic necklace. He dreams of his unknown beloved, Gauri (Sriranjani), and paints her portrait to show his teacher Mali (Ranga Rao), who then finds the woman. Unfortunately, the search brings the celestial nymph Chanchala (Savitri) into the story. Chanchala promises to lift Chandan’s curse of death if he marries her; when he refuses, she removes the necklace and Chandan dies. Dhoomketu’s ambitions are thus revived but then Chanchala returns Chandan to life for a brief period. Eventually another goddess, taking pity on the hero, unites Chandan and Gauri. There are many opulent court scenes, dance sequences featuring Apsaras in heaven, scenes of gods and goddesses who lift the hero’s curse, and comedy interludes featuring the luckless Dhoomketu and his politician teacher Niksheparayudu.

DAERA

1953 139’ b&w Hindi

d/s Kamal Amrohi pc Kamal Pics lyr Majrooh Sultanpuri, Kaif Bhopali c M.W. Mukadam m Jamal Sen

lp Meena Kumari, Nasir Khan, Kumar, Roopmala, Nana Palsikar, Pratima Devi, Kammo, Jankidass

Amrohi’s least-known but most elegiac film. Sheetal (Kumari) is married to an old, ailing man repeatedly mistaken for her father. She has an affair with Sharan Kumar (Nasir Khan) and eventually commits suicide. From the outset, when the mismatched couple arrives at the dark, windswept scene where they will face their destiny, the symbol-laden film deploys a baroque style of lighting with sparse dialogue and obsessive characters in the grip of their desires. As in Amrohi’s Mahal (1949), the soundtrack is exceptional, from the opening Mukhtar Begum bhajan introducing Sharan to Sheetal, to the hush marking Sharan’s fall from the balcony as the camera cranes over the crowded chaos below into Meena Kumari on a distant terrace.

DEVADASU/DEVADAS

1953 191’ b&w Telugu/Tamil

d Vendantam Ragavaiah pc Vinoda Pics st Saratchandra Chattopadhyay dial/lyr[Te] Samudrala Raghavacharya lyr[Ta]) Udumalai Narayana Kavi c B.S. Ranga m C.R. Subburaman

lp A. Nageshwara Rao, Savitri, Lalitha, C.S.R. Anjaneyulu, Doraiswamy, S.V. Ranga Rao

After P.V. Rao’s 1937 film, this is the 2nd Tamil and the first Telugu version of Saratchandra’s oft-filmed novel about unrequited love. Nageshwara Rao is the weak hero Devadas and Savitri is his tragic beloved Paro while Lalitha takes the role of the golden-hearted prostitute Chandramukhi. The hit film was shot mostly at the Narasu Studios in Madras. The 11 songs (in both languages) of Subburaman’s last film are regarded as among his best and most popular works, while Narayana Kavi’s lyrics enhanced the popularity of the Tamil songs, one of them later providing the title for a Kamalahasan film, Vazhve Mayam (1982), an update of the Devdas plot.

DO BIGHA ZAMEEN

aka Two Acres of Land

1953 142’(134’) b&w Hindi

d/p Bimal Roy pc Bimal Roy Prod, st/m Salil Choudhury sc Hrishikesh Mukherjee dial Paul Mahendra lyr Shailendra c Kamal Bose

lp Bahraj Sahni, Nirupa Roy, Rattan Kumar, Murad, Jagdeep, Nana Palsikar, Nasir Hussain, Mishra, Dilip Jr., Nandkishore, Rajlakshmi, Tiwari, Noor, Kusum, Hiralal, Sapru, Meena Kumari, Mehmood

Realist drama about a small landowner, Shambhu (Sahni) which opens with a song celebrating the rains that put an end to two seasons of drought, Hariyala sawan dhol bajata aaya. Shambhu and his son Kanhaiya (R. Kumar) have to go and work in Calcutta to repay their debt to the merciless local zamindar (Sapru) in order to retain their ancestral two acres of land. The sentimentally portrayed peasants bid farewell to the departing Shambhu and his son with the song Bhai re, ganga aur jamuna ki dharti kahe pukar ke. In Calcutta, Shambhu becomes a rickshaw-puller, facing numerous hardships that lead to his near-fatal accident, the death of his wife (N. Roy) who joins him in the city and, inevitably, the loss of his land to speculators who build a factory on it. Although promoted as the epitome of Indian neo-realism, the film is even more melodramatic than e.g. De Sica’s work (sometimes claimed to have influenced Roy’s work). The script and the humanist acting styles include a hard but kind landlady in the Calcutta slum and the happy-go-lucky shoeshine boy (Jagdeep) who takes Kanhaiya under his wing, all enhanced by IPTA overtones in Choudhury’s music. The film’s neo-realist reputation is almost solely based on Balraj Sahni’s extraordinary performance in his best-known film role.

EN VEEDU/NAA ILLU

1953 191’[Ta]/214’[Te] b&w Tamil/Telugu

d/sc/co-m Chittor V. Nagaiah pc Our India Films co-dial/co-lyr Devulapalli Krishna Sastry co-dial Y. Lakshminarayana co-lyr Samudrala Raghavacharya, G.S. Casshyap, Mohan c M.A. Rehman co-m A. Rama Rao

lp Chittor V. Nagaiah, Mudigonda Lingamurthy, Ramasarma, Gopalakrishnan, A.V. Subba Rao, K. Doraiswamy, T.R. Rajkumari, Girija, Vidyavati, Chhaya Devi, Master Krishna, Lakshmi

Nagaiah’s Tamil directing debut follows his celebrated performance in the epic melodrama Ezhai Padum Padu (1950), repeating the theme of the honest hero trapped in circumstances beyond his comprehension. The story is adapted from Samuel Butler’s autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh (1903) and Louis King’s film version (1940). Bank clerk Shivram (Nagaiah giving a ponderously melodramatic performance) and his wife hope to see their two children grow up into classical Carnatic musicians. Trapped in a theft by the banker’s corrupt brother-in-law, Shivram is believed to have been killed and his family lives in extreme poverty for decades until Shivram turns up again, arrested for theft while watching his daughter’s birthday celebrations from the street. Eventually Shivram manages to unmask the real villains, Dhanraj and the dancer Leela (Vidyavati). Remembered for its extensive use of music, including a classical concert, the playback singing of M.L. Vasanthakumari and the extensive reference to radio via the public-interest broadcasts sponsored by the charitable Balananda Sangham. The Sangham also supports Shivram’s starving family, an initiative apparently adopted from this film by All-India Radio. Extending Nagaiah’s recourse to cross-cultural musical references, the film’s highlights are the two Hindi songs Pushpon ki rani and Main hastigaati aayi (both sung by Meena Kapur) which accompany the Bombay-based courtesan Leela’s dances. Nagaiah’s own hit song is Adigadigo gaganaseema sung along with the children.

FOOTPATH

1953 148’ b&w Hindi

d/s Zia Sarhadi pc Ranjit lyr Majrooh Sultanpuri, Ali Sardar Jafri c M. Rajaram m Khayyam

lp Dilip Kumar, Meena Kumari, Achala Sachdev, Anwar, Kuldip Akhtar, Ramesh Thakur, Jankidass, P. Kailash, Kamalesh Thakkar, Master Romi, Sumati, Maruti, Romesh Thapar

Along with Awaaz (1956), this is Sarhadi’s best-known film as director. Set during WW2, it features the honest but poor writer Noshu (D. Kumar) who falls among black marketeers hoarding medicines in a famine-stricken area. Now that money comes easily, Noshu abandons his brother, his lover Mala (Meena Kumari) and his erstwhile principles. In the end, he comes to his senses and abandons his dream of becoming a millionaire. This morality tale extends the genre practised by Sarhadi’s colleague Mehboob in e.g. Roti (1942). The film was an influential contribution to Dilip Kumar’s reputation for naturalism.

GULACHA GANAPATI

1953 137’ b&w Marathi

d/s/m P.L. Deshpande pc Swati Chitra p Vinayak Rajguru lyr G.D. Madgulkar c A.D. Dev

lp P.L. Deshpande, Vinay Kale, Lele Mama, Vasant Shinde, Chitra

Sentimental melodrama featuring noted Marathi author, playwright and actor Deshpande in his best known film. He plays the gullible fool Narya, in love with the poor Leela (Chitra). He spends most of his time enacting fantasies drawn from popular romance fiction (shown in several sequences in the film’s first half that recreate well known Indian film and stage genres). Hired by a stage troupe to play a working class hero, he is later forced under duress, by the villain Sudarshan (Kale), to actually play that role in real life, so that he becomes a political leader. In the end Leela saves him from the bad guys. A classic 50s Marathi hit marrying the genres of realism, melodrama and comedy, the film is also known for its several song hits, notably Bhimsen Joshi’s bhajan Indrayani kathi, which later became a regular part of that noted classical singer’s stage repertoire.

GUMASTA

1953 187’[Te]/184’[Ta] b&w Tamil/Telugu

d/c R.M. Krishnaswamy pc Aruna Pics s/lyr Acharya Athreya from his play NGO m C.N. Pandurangam, Chittor V. Nagaiah, G. Ramanathan

lp Chittor V. Nagaiah, Ramasarma, Sivaram, Pandharibai, B. Jayamma

Influential realist effort in Telugu and Tamil cinemas based on a major Telugu play (1949) which introduced, along with Vasireddy’s Mundadugu, a new generation in Telugu theatre. Nagaiah plays a clerk in a government office who looks after a sick father (Ramasarma), an unmarried sister and an unemployed brother (Sivaram) who sells tooth powder on the street. The clerk accepts a bribe, is found out and arrested. The father dies and the younger brother delivers the play’s morality lecture on honesty. Athreya added scenes for the film such as the sister’s marriage to a man who promptly dies after the wedding.

GUNASAGARI/SATHYA SHODHANAI

1953 199’[K]/159’[Ta] b&w Kannada/Tamil

d H.L.N. Simha pc Gubbi-Karnataka Films m R. Sudarshanam

lp Honnappa Bhagavathar, Pandharibai, Gubbi Veeranna, B. Jayamma

Melodrama about a traditional heroine who marries the husband (Bhagavathar) selected by her parents. When the husband is away, the heroine has to escape from her vicious in-laws and give birth to her child in the forest. The husband returns, clears up misunderstandings and reintegrates the heroine into the family. The debut production of Veeranna’s Gubbi-Karnataka Films, started in collaboration with AVM Film.

JHANSI KI RANI

aka The Tiger and the Flame

1953 148’ col Hindi

d Sohrab Modi pc Minerva Movietone st S.R. Dubey sc Geza Herczeg, Sudarshan, Adi F. Keeka dial Munshi Abdul Baqui, Shams Lucknowi lyr Radheshyam Kathavachak c Ernest Haller m Vasant Desai

lp Mehtab, Sohrab Modi, Mubarak, Ulhas, Ramsingh, Sapru, Anil Kishore, Baby Shikha

One of the best-known Indian historicals, it is a spectacular account of Rani Laxmibai’s (Mehtab) life, the 19th C. queen of Jhansi known as Manu to her friends and who led her armies into battle against the British East India Company during the 1857 rising (known in Britain as ‘the Mutiny’). The film chronicles Lord Dalhousie’s annexation policies which had forced a treaty upon the aged and childless King Gangadhar Rao (Mubarak). The high priest (Modi), who controls the throne and who had opposed the signing of the treaty, searches for someone capable of leading a revolt and finds the defiant Manu. He persuades the king to marry her, making her the rightful successor to the king instead of the scheming Sadashiv Rao (Ramsingh) who is on the side of the British. Much of the film, shot by Hollywood import Haller, consists of battle scenes, courtesy of the Ministry of Defence and horses, elephants and subjects of the maharajahs of Bikaner and Jaipur.

KANNA TALLI/PETRATHAI

1953 193’[Te]/194’[Ta] b&w Telugu/Tamil

d K.S. Prakash Rao pc Prakash Prod. dial [Te] Sri Sri, Arudra, Sunkara, Vasireddy dial[Ta] M.S. Subramanyam lyr Tapi Dharma Rao, Acharya Athreya c Jagirdar m Pendyala Nageshwara Rao

lp G. Varalakshmi, A. Nageshwara Rao, Rajanala Nageshwara Rao, M.N. Nambiar, Vasantha, Mikkilineni, K. Siva Rao

Melodrama about a middle-class mother (Varalakshmi) who raises her two children when her husband, unable to repay mounting debts, abandons his family. While the daughter (Vasantha) becomes a good soul, like her mother, the son (Nambiar) goes astray and eventually commits murder. Mother takes the blame for the crime and goes to jail, thus reforming her errant son. At this time in Telugu cinema, ‘the struggling mother’ is a nationalist as well as a melodramatic stereotype (cf. L.V. Prasad’s Pempudu Koduku, also 1953).

NATUN YAHUDI

1953?’ b&w Bengali

d/s/co-lyr Salil Sen from his play pc Eastern Artists co-lyr Krittivas Ojha, Suresh Choudhury, Dwija Kanai c Ramananda Sengupta m Chitta Roy

lp Kanu Bannerjee, Bhanu Bannerjee, Bani Ganguly, Sabitri Chatterjee, Nepal Roy

Sen adapted his own play, first staged by the Uttar Sarathi group (1948) to raise funds for refugees from East Bengal (cf. Bhanu Bannerjee), and part of a genre of 40s ‘realist’ theatre addressing the 1942–3 Bengal famine and Partition (cf. plays like Digin Bandyopadhyay’s Bastubhita, Tulsi Lahiri’s Banglar Meye). School-teacher Manmohan Pandit arrives in Calcutta as a refugee from what had become East Pakistan. His eldest son was killed in the freedom struggle and the family is determined to live up to the dead son’s idealism: second son Mohan refuses a job out of solidarity for striking workers and becomes a coolie while the father finds employment as a cook. The other son, Duikhya, is rejected by the family when he turns to crime, but he is the only one with money when the father falls ill. Eventually the criminal son and the father die, shortly before the latter’s delayed pension arrives from Pakistan. Although a straight adaptation of the play, the film followed Chinnamuls (1950) example and used Bangladeshi dialect.

PAKKINTI AMMAYI

1953 164’ b&w Telugu

d C. Pullaiah pc East India Films p Sushil Kumar Haldar st Arun Choudhury’s Pasher Bari dial/lyr: Muddukrishna c Biren De m Ashwathama

lp Anjali Devi, V. Kamaladevi, Mohanakrishna, Shakuntala, Gangarathnam, Relangi Venkatramaiah, C.S. Rao, V.V. Tatachari, R.K. Rao, A.M. Raja, Addala Narayana Rao, Srinivasa Rao

Early Telugu version of a comic Bengali short story first filmed by Sudhir Mukherjee (1952) in Bengali though best known in its Hindi version, Padosan (1968). Anjali Devi plays the sexy neighbour of Venkatramaiah. The music helped assure its success with a rare on-screen performance by the singer A.M. Raja. It was also remade in 1981 with singer S.P. Balasubramanyam and composer Chakravarty playing the two rivals for the heroine’s affections.

PARINEETA

1953 151’b&w Hindi

d/sc Bimal Roy pc Ashok Kumar Prod. st Saratchandra Chattopadhyay dial Vrajendra Gaud lyr Bharat Vyas c Kamal Bose m Arun Kumar Mukherjee

lp Ashok Kumar, Meena Kumari, Asit Baran, Nasir Hussain, Badri Prasad, Pratima Devi, Manorama, S. Bannerjee, Tiwari, Baby Sheela, Manju, Naina, Bhupen Kapoor, Bikram Kapoor, Sailen Bose, Colin Pal

In Calcutta, at the turn of the century, Shekhar (A. Kumar), the son of rich businessman Nabin Rai (Prasad), loves and secretly marries his poor neighbour Lalita (Kumari), the niece of Gurcharan Babu (Hussain). Despite the long friendship between the two families, things deteriorate fast when Nabin Rai insists on Gurcharan Babu repaying an old loan. Gurcharan Babu wants to raise the money by marrying off Lalita. Shekhar misunderstands Lalita’s silence as meaning she acquiesces in this scheme. However, she turns down an old benefactor of the family, Girin Babu (Baran). She admits to being already married and, even though she refuses to reveal her husband’s name, vows to remain faithful to him all her life. Shekhar recognises her sacrifice just in time to cancel a wedding he had arranged out of resentment and he publicly acknowledges his relationship with Lalita. The film rehearses some of the period effects through costume, architecture and lighting of turn-of-the-century Calcutta, later associated with Ray’s Charulata (1964).

Meena Kumari (above) in Parineeta

PATHIK

1953?’ b&w Bengali

d Debaki Bose pc Chitramaya s Tulsi Lahiri from his play c Bibhuti Chakraborty m Dakshina Mohan Thakur

lp Sombhu Mitra, Tripti Mitra, Monica Ganguly, Manoranjan Bhattacharya, Tulsi Lahiri, Gangapada Basu, Kali Sarkar, Sabitabrata Datta

Lahiri’s seminal Bengali play, with which Sombhu Mitra launched his Bohurupee theatre group, was first staged when the CPI’s ‘leftwing deviation’ was causing many key IPTA figures, including Mitra and Bijon Bhattacharya, to leave the organisation. The play continued the IPTA’s experiments with realism and was set in a colliery’s teashop over two days. The events are mainly seen through the eyes of a failed and disillusioned writer, Ashim Roy (Mitra), who ends up fighting for an injured worker’s compensation rights and eventually becomes a heroic figure for the miners. The film version deploys a voice-over quoting from Ashim’s diary and features characters speaking in several languages and accents. It deviates from the play in adding an encounter between Ashim and a criminal, Atmaram, and it has an upbeat ending with the workers pushing the wounded Ashim in a broken-down motor car towards the hospital. Bose’s tightly edited film orchestrates indoor space via intricate tracking shots and an extensive use of different focal depths, although the studio scenes are not always well integrated into the many outdoor scenes.

PEMPUDU KODUKU

1953 163’ b&w Telugu

d/p L.V. Prasad pc Prasad Art Pics st Varadarajan dial/co-lyr Sadasiva Brahmam co-lyr Sri Sri, Anisetty c Adi M. Irani m Saluri Rajeshwara Rao

lp L.V. Prasad, Pushpavalli, Sivaji Ganesan, S.V. Ranga Rao, Kumari, Ramamurthy, Savitri

The debut of Prasad Art Pics, later run by T. Prakash Rao and Pratyagatma, is a melodrama about a woman and her two sons. To make ends meet, Mangamma (Pushpavalli) has her younger son Mohan (Ganesan) adopted, raising her first son Muthu while working as a domestic servant. She witnesses a murder in the house, is arrested for the crime and jailed. When released, she finds the decent Muthu has become the enemy of the bad Mohan. Filmistan’s Munimji (1955) rehearsed similar motifs.

POONGOTHAI/PARADESI

1953 171’[Ta]/190’[Te] b&w Tamil/Telugu

d L.V. Prasad pc Anjali Pictures dial/lyr Sadasiva Brahmam[Ta], Malladi Krishna Sharma[Te] c Kamal Ghosh m Adi Narayana Rao

lp Anjali Devi, Sivaji Ganesan, S.V. Ranga Rao, A. Nageshwara Rao, Pandharibai, K.A. Thangavelu[Ta], Relangi Venkatramaiah[Te], Mohan

The Anjali Pictures debut is an incest melodrama. Chandram (Nageshwara Rao) becomes a pauper on the death of his father. To support the widow and son of a childhood friend, he finds a job and meets the beautiful flower-girl Lakshmi (Anjali Devi) at a hill resort. Defying her conservative father, they marry. When Chandram has to leave for the city in a hurry, Lakshmi believes that he has deserted her. She is persecuted by a suitor who burns down her house, and when Chandram returns he believes his wife is dead. Years later Lakshmi’s daughter and Chandram’s adopted son fall in love. In addition, rumour has it that Chandram’s adopted son is in fact his illegitimate child by the widow he supported, making the incest motif yet more explicit.

PUTTILLU

1953 176’ b&w Telugu

d/st Rajarao pc Raja Prod. dial Sankara, Vasireddy c V.N. Reddy, Ajit Kumar m Mohandas, T. Chalapathi Rao

lp Jamuna, Rajarao, Perumallu, Mikkilineni, Ramana Reddy, Chadalavada, Suryashree

The noted playwright Vasireddy, the composer Chalapathi Rao, future Telugu star Jamuna and the director all emerged from the IPTA’s Andhra Unit, the Praja Natya Mandali. A father insists on having his daughter educated but forbids her to continue studying when she reaches marriageable age. She later leaves her unsuitable husband and the plot also addresses the woman’s problematic relationship with her mother-in-law. The makers of this unsuccessful film were sometimes criticised for having sold out to commercialism, although other histories, notably those of the impact of the IPTA on Telugu cinema, continue to ascribe to it a historically significant role.

SHAREY CHUATTAR

1953?’ b&w Bengali

d/sc Nirmal Dey pc MP Prod. st/dial Bijon Bhattacharya lyr Sailen Roy m Kalipada Sen

lp Uttam Kumar, Suchitra Sen, Tulsi Chakraborty, Molina Devi, Bhanu Bannerjee, Jahar Roy, Nabadwip Haldar

A big hit, this effervescent comedy launches Bengali cinema’s most successful star duo ever, Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen. Rajanibabu (Chakraborty) runs the Annapurna Boarding House. Into this raucous all-male world of mainly unemployed tenants arrives the beautiful Romola (Sen) with her parents. The hero Rampriti (Kumar) in the end triumphs over his main rival (Bannerjee) and gets the girl. Dey’s breakthrough film after Basu Parivar (1952) expertly orchestrates a large number of characters while sustaining a fast pace.

SHYAMCHI AAI

1953 152’b&w Marathi

d/p/sc/co-lyr P.K. Atre pc Atre Pics st Sane Guruji’s novel co-lyr Vasant Bapat, Rajkavi Yeshwant c R.M. Rele m Vasant Desai

lp Vanamala, Madhav Vaze, Umesh, Baburao Pendharkar, Sumati Gupte, Saraswati Bodas, Vasant Bapat, Prabodhankar Thakre, Damuanna Joshi, Nagesh Joshi, Bapurao Mane, Pandurang Joshi, Vimal Ghaisas

Major Marathi melodrama based on one of the most influential 20th C. Marathi novels (1935), a fictionalised account of the childhood years of Sane Guruji (1899–1950). A nationalist influenced by Vinoba Bhave and esp. Gandhi, he was imprisoned repeatedly for his work among the peasantry and participation in the Quit India agitations. His book Shyamchi Aai, written in jail, has 45 episodes in which Shyam, a youth living in poverty in Konkan, recalls the teachings of his mother. The film incorporates the heavy nationalist symbolism associated with the mother (Vanamala), a devoutly religious person with an earthy philosophy, as well as the sentimental depiction of her relationship with her son (Vaze). Despite its emphasis on a ruralist realism, the characters remain exemplary and (surprisingly for Atre) humourless stereotypes. The film, like the book, relies on flashbacks as Sane Guruji (D. Joshi) tells the stories in homage to a person to whom he owes everything. Episodes showing the young Shyam’s maturation culminate in the mother’s death. The hit film has remained a generic landmark in Marathi melodrama, esp. for Vanamala’s maternal prototype. The book has been analysed by Shanta Gokhale (1990).

THIRAMALA

aka Waves

1953 172’ b&w Malayalam

co-d/p P. R.S. Pillai co-d/m Vimal Kumar pc Kalasagar Films s T.N. Gopinathan Nair lyr P. Bhaskaran c V. Ramamurthy

lp Kumari Thangam, Miss Chandni, Kumari Kalyani, M.L. Rajam, P.D. Janaki, Kumari Prabha, T.N. Gopinathan Nair, P. Bhaskaran, Baby Vatsala, Sathyan, Thomas Birly, T.S. Muthaiah, Sasikumar, Govinda Pillai, Adoor Bhasi

Melodrama about separated lovers: Laxmi, the village landlord’s daughter, and Venu, the son of the ferryman. Laxmi is married off to a city wastrel and Venu, who followed her to the city and became a waiter at the hotel where Laxmi stays, witnesses her marriage breaking up. The penniless Laxmi also loses her daughter. Laxmi and Venu each having returned to their village, they meet again in a storm as Venu comes to her rescue with his boat to take her to the opposite shore. However, the boat capsizes and, as the storm subsides, the film shows Venu’s corpse being washed up on the shore. The Merryland Studio production is choreographed by Chandrasekhar to art direction by M.V. Kochhappu.

AAR PAAR

aka From One Side to the Other

1954 146’ b&w Hindi

d/p Guru Dutt pc Guru Dutt Prod, sc Nabendu Ghosh dial Abrar Alvi lyr Majrooh Sultanpuri c V.K. Murthy m O.P. Nayyar

lp Guru Dutt, Shyama, Shakila, Johnny Walker, Jagdish Sethi, Noor, Beer Sakhuja, Rashid Khan, Jagdeep

With this innovative and, for the period, daring film Guru Dutt enters the happiest phase of his career. He plays Kalu, a taxi driver and mechanic who has served a jail sentence for rash driving and is in love with Nicky (Shyama), the daughter of his boss at the garage. Several subplots are woven into their romance: a gang of safe busters led by Captain, kidnappers employed by Nicky’s father and lovable ruffians like Elaichi Sandow (Jagdeep). Considered until recently a relatively minor Guru Dutt film, its bravura song picturisations such as the ‘tragic’ version of the song Ja ja ja ja bewafa (inverting the earlier number Sun sun sun sun zaalimd), where the camera pans over a series of black pillars hiding heroine Shyama from the viewer, announce Pyaasa (1957) and the melodramas that followed. Dutt experiments with novel ways of cutting songs into the story, e.g. omitting introductory music. The opening song sequence introduces the Western musical ploy of interposing incidental characters into the narrative choreography as the street urchins energetically dance in the streets of Bombay. As in all Dutt’s films, the Geeta Dutt songs are perennial hits, including Babuji dheere chalna, Yeh lo main haaripiya, Mohabbat kar lo, ji bhar lo (the last a duet with Mohammed Rafi). The film exudes a lighthearted cheekiness which, coupled with the elaboration of new generic conventions, divided the contemporary audience, offending the stuffier traditionalists and delighting the others.

AMAR

1954 149’ b&w Hindi

d/p Mehboob Khan pc Mehboob Prod. st/co-sc S. Ali Raza co-st Mehrish, S.K. Kalla, B.S. Ramaiah co-sc Agha Jani Kashmiri lyr Shakeel Badayuni c Faredoon Irani m Naushad

lp Madhubala, Dilip Kumar, Nimmi, Jayant, Ulhas, Mukri, Amar, Husnbano, Murad, Shakeel Nomani

Apparently Mehboob’s favourite film in which the cowardly hero Amar (D. Kumar), a lawyer, seduces a milkmaid, Sonia (Nimmi), while engaged to Anju (Madhubala). The hero watches silently as Sonia suffers the consequences of their passionate moment while the villain, Sankat (Jayant), offers her help and comfort. Sankat causes havoc in the village before getting killed in a fight with Amar. Sonia is arrested and defended in court by Amar who eventually marries her. The film continues Mehboob’s fascination with a kind of cultural primitivism (cf. Roti, 1942) shown here in the harvest number and in the temple sequences with both Anju and Sonia. The melodramatic subject combined with some unusually surreal imagery made the film an oddity in the genre. It was not a commercial success, possibly because the audience refused to accept Dilip Kumar in a negative role.

ANTA MANAVALLE

1954 185’ b&w Telugu

d Tapi Chanakya pc Sarathi Pics s Kondepudi Lakshminarayana lyr Tapi Dharma Rao, Kopparapu Subba Rao, Konakalla Venkatrathnam m Master Venu

lp C.S.R. Anjaneyulu, S.V. Ranga Rao, Narasimharao, Ramana Reddy, Krishnakumari, Jamuna, Hemalatha, Rajasulochana, Suryakantam, Perumallu

‘Realist’ corruption melodrama about a politician and village headman, Jagannatham (Ranga Rao), the man behind a gang of extortionists including Chidambaram (Anjaneyulu), Vaikuntam and Purniah. Chidambaram dupes the widowed Rathamma, forcing her family into destitution while he builds his bungalow. The fearless editor of the local newspaper (Perumallu) and his daughter (Krishnakumari), who loves the widowed Rathamma’s son Sathyam, try to expose the corruption. A review in Andhra Patrika compared the film to Ladri di biciclette (1948). Chanakya’s debut, evoking the earlier radical-reformist cinema of Sarathi Pics, and Master Venu’s debut as an independent composer relies heavily on folk-derived music.

BAADBAAN

1954?’ b&w Hindi

d/st Phani Majumdar pc Bombay Talkies Workers Industrial Coop. Society sc/dial Nabendu Ghosh, Shakti Samanta lyr Indivar, Uddhav Kumar c Roque M. Layton m Timir Baran, S.K. Pal

lp Ashok Kumar, Dev Anand, Usha Kiron, Meena Kumari, Jairaj, Sheikh Mukhtar, Bipin Gupta, Leela Chitnis, Gope, Shivraj, Krishnakant, Mehmood

Billed as a ‘Workers’ Own Enterprise’, the film was produced as a last-ditch attempt by its employees to keep Bombay Talkies alive. Lalan, the village headman, leaves to warn fishermen about an impending storm but he disappears followed by his wife Leela. Their child, adopted by the judge Mr Choudhury, grows up to become Naren (Anand). Educated abroad, he is to wed Bina, the daughter of a family friend. Shankar, Naren’s friend and Bina’s music teacher, also in love with Bina, keeps his feelings to himself. The marriage is called off when Mr Choudhury admits that Naren is not his son. The setting then shifts to the village where Naren decides to dedicate his life to the people, starting e.g. an ice factory and a workers’ co-operative society. He falls in love with the village girl Mohna. Naren and Bina get married anyway, but she is unhappy about his rural activism.

BANGARU PAPA

1954 183’ b&w Telugu

d/co-sc B.N. Reddi pc Vauhini st/co-sc Palagummi Padmaraju from George Eliot’s Silas Marner lyr Devulapalli Krishna Sastry c B.N. Konda Reddy m A. Rama Rao

lp S.V. Ranga Rao, K. Jaggaiah, Jamuna, Krishnakumari, Ramasarma, Vidyavati, Ramana Reddy, Jayalakshmi, Hemalatha

The rich Manohar (Jaggaiah) marries the poor Shanta (Jamuna), neglecting to inform his conservative and tyrannical father. The father forces him to marry a girl of his choice, even as Shanta dies in a storm leaving an infant daughter behind. The daughter is rescued by the criminal Kotaiah (Ranga Rao) who, while raising her, becomes a reformed character. Manohar suffers, unable to declare the woman to be his daughter. The melodrama is remembered for Ranga Rao’s performance. A commercial flop though a success among the urban upper class.

BEDARA KANNAPPA

1954 155’ b&w Kannada

d H.L.N. Simha pc Gubbi Karnataka Films s G.V. Iyer from his play m R. Sudarshanam

lp Rajkumar, G.V. Iyer, Pandharibai, Narasimhraju

The screen debut of Kannada superstar Rajkumar in this quasi-mythological melodrama, derived from the Telugu ‘folklore’ genre (cf. Patala Bhairavi, 1951), effectively establishes this specifically Kannada genre in which human beings often turn out to be gods and earthly existence comes to function mainly as a metaphor for exclusion rather than as an engagement with reality. The theme appeared originally in the ragales (metrical compositions in couplets) of Harihara, a 13th C. Saint poet. The genre, inevitably featuring Rajkumar as the questing hero while the earthier sidekicks Narasimhraju and Balkrishna provide the comic interludes, is continued in e.g. Hunsur Krishnamurthy’s Shri Kannika Parameshwari Kathe (1966). Here, Dinna (Rajkumar) and Neela (Pandharibai) are gods banished to earth where they are born to a tribe of hunters. They grow up and become involved with a corrupt temple priest who accuses Dinna of theft. Dinna weathers all the tests, including torture, the gods impose on him. Based on his original play for the Gubbi company, this is G.V. Iyer’s film debut.

BIRAJ BAHU

1954 145’ b&w Hindi

d Bimal Roy pc Hiten Choudhury Prod. st Saratchandra Chattopadhyay sc Nabendu Ghosh dial Nasir Hussain lyr Prem Dhawan c Dilip Gupta m Salil Choudhury

lp Kamini Kaushal, Abhi Bhattacharya, Shakuntala, Pran, Randhir, Bikram Kapoor, Manorama, Kammo, Baby Chand, Iftikhar, Moni Chatterjee, Ravikant

Hindi remake of Amar Mullick’s Bengali film for New Theatres’ Biraj Bou (1946). Based on a story by Bengali novelist Saratchandra, the film’s narrative pivot is the beautiful Biraj who is committed to the happiness of her husband Nilambar. Left in poverty by the callousness of Nilambar’s brother Pitambar and to meet the cost of his sister Punnu’s marriage, Biraj slaves away earning money making and selling dolls until an amorous young zamindar starts paying attention to her. Then, her commitment to her family yields to cynicism about the attitudes of all men towards women, including those of her husband. Edited by Hrishikesh Mukherjee and with Asit Sen as assistant director, this film continued Parineeta’s (1953) effort to transplant themes from Bengali reform literature into the Hindi cinema, influencing the later films of Mukherjee and Sen.

BOOT POLISH

1954 149’(99’) b&w Hindi

d Prakash Arora pc R.K. Films p Raj Kapoor s Bhanu Pratap lyr Shailendra, Hasrat Jaipuri, Saraswati Kumar Deepak c Tara Dutt m Shankar-Jaikishen

lp Baby Naaz, Rattan Kumar, David, Chand Burque, Veera, Bhupendra Kapoor, Bhudo Advani, Shailendra, Prabhu Arora, Raj Kapoor

Following his collaboration with Abbas on Awara (1951), Kapoor presided over and allegedly directed most of this social melodrama credited to his assistant. It is a story about two orphan children, Bhola (R. Kumar) and Belu (Naaz), who are forced to become beggars in Bombay by their wicked aunt Kamala Chachi. They are shown the straight and narrow path by the one-legged bootlegger, Uncle John (David), who encourages them to take up the honest trade of polishing shoes. The film established a realist precedent for e.g. Salaam Bombay (1988), which replaced its sentimental optimism with an unrelenting miserabilism. Kapoor’s film can be seen as an allegorical representation of the newly independent ‘infant’ Indian nation. As the upbeat marching song Nannhe munne bachche suggests, children can control their own destiny. Kapoor makes a guest appearance asleep on a train seat, being mistaken by Bhola as ‘Raj Kapoor the film star’ and silenced by the girl who sensibly remarks: ‘Everybody pretends to be Raj Kapoor.’ A shortened version was released in the USA in 1958.

Rattan Kumar and Baby Naaz in Boot Polish

CHAKRAPANI

1954 171’ b&w Telugu

d P.S. Ramakrishna Rao p/m P. Bhanumathi pc Bharani Pics s/lyr Ravoori c P.S. Selvaraj

lp P. Bhanumathi, T.G. Kamaladevi, Leelakumari, Chhaya Devi, Suryakantam, A. Nageshwara Rao, C.S.R. Anjaneyulu, Vangara, Sivaramakrishnaiah, Ramana Reddy, Amarnath

When Vijaya Studio refused to cast her in their hit comedy Missamma (1955), Bhanumathi apparently produced this film as a rejoinder. For a star best known for musical melodramas, this is an unusual comedy about an ageing miser named after the scenarist and proprietor of the Vijaya Studio, Chakrapani (Anjaneyulu), who promises his wealth to whichever of his two granddaughters (Bhanumathi, Kamaladevi) first bears him a great-grandson. The first is disqualified when she has a daughter while the second attempts to pass off someone else’s child as her own, which leads to the arrest of her husband. Eventually a previously unknown grandson appears on the scene, inherits and distributes the property to all. Bhanumathi’s first independent work as a composer had six songs, including the hit Ananda dayini.

CHAMPADANGAR BOU

1954 111’ b&w Bengali

d/p/sc/c Nirmal Dey pc Nirmal Dey Prod. st/lyr Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay m Manabendra Mukhopadhyay

lp Anubha Gupta, Uttam Kumar, Sabitri Chatterjee, Kanu Bannerjee, Premangshu Bose, Tulsi Chakraborty, Kobita Sarkar

Hit joint family melodrama in a sentimentalised rural setting, scripted by a noted Bengali novelist. The crusty head of the family, Setap Moral (Bannerjee), is contrasted with his irresponsible younger brother Mahatap (Kumar). Their conflicts are usually resolved by the elder brother’s efficient and matronly wife Kadambini (Gupta), who is so fond of Mahatap that it causes a scandal. When the showdown between the brothers comes, Setap blames his wife for everything and wants to kill her. However, he relents when he realises Kadambini’s commitment is really to the maintenance of the family’s unity. A later Hindi version, Aanchal (1980), with Rajesh Khanna and Amol Palekar, emphasised the plot’s association with the Ramayana legend. The boudi or elder sister-in-law’s sexual attraction for a younger brother-in-law is a familiar theme in Bengali literature (cf. Saratchandra’s Niskriti) and film (cf. Ray’s Charulata, 1964).

CHANDNI CHOWK

1954?’ b&w Hindi

d B.R. Chopra pc Hira Films st D.P. Berry sc I.S. Johar dial Kamil Rashid lyr Saif, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Raza Mehdi, Shailendra c Keki Mistry m Roshan

lp Meena Kumari, Shekhar, Kumar, Jeevan, Achala Sachdev, Smriti Biswas, Yashodhara Katju, Agha

Chopra’s first hit is a costumed musical melodrama addressing Muslim feudal orthodoxy. The nawab Safdar Jung (Kumar), anxious about preserving his aristocratic lineage, turns down a proposal by the scheming Ibrahim Baig (Jeevan) that the nawab’s daughter Zarina (Kumari) marry Yusuf (Agha), the rich son of a former vegetable vendor. Baig then tricks the nawab into letting Zarina marry Akbar (Shekhar), a gardener’s son. Later, when Safdar Jung realises he was tricked, Akbar is forced to leave home and goes to Cairo where he meets a dancer, Noorie (Biswas), who later dies. The film is best remembered for Meena Kumari’s performance, esp. the scene where she writes to her missing husband singing Aa jaye jane wale (sung by Lata Mangeshkar).

DHULI

1954 163’ b&w Bengali

d Pinaki Mukherjee pc Aaj Prod, dial Narayan Gangopadhyay m Rajen Sarkar

lp Prashanta Kumar, Pahadi Sanyal, Nitish Mukherjee, Suchitra Sen, Mala Sinha, Anil Chatterjee, Chhabi Biswas, Jahar Roy

Parashar’s (P. Kumar) grandfather Kunja is the celebrated village performer on the dhol (folk instrument), but his grandson chooses the more respected life of a singer and moves to Calcutta to pursue his profession, where he falls in love with Minati (Sen), his music teacher’s daughter. Minati defeats the rich Ratri (Sinha) in a musical contest, the film’s high point presented in terms of Krishna choosing between two Radhas, as Ratri sings the erotic and physical Nigodia neel sari, while Minati sings a Meera bhajan which has her surrendering to her lord (both songs were sung by Pratima Bandyopadhyay). Ratri avenges herself by hiring Parashar as her teacher, thus introducing him into the decadent world of the urban rich. Eventually, a chastened Parashar returns to the village, realising he should never have departed from his ancestral vocation of playing the dhol. As Pother Panchali (1955) was still in production at the time, this is the film which established the Bengali village as a dominant icon in post-Independence romanticism. Placed outside the histories of famine and Partition, the village becomes a poignantly nostalgic repository of the values threatened by modernity. In the process, the country/city divide gets mapped on to the conflicts of tradition versus modernity, erotica versus surrender, innocence versus evil, good art versus bad and, finally, the good woman versus the bad. Importantly, in this form, virtue triumphs only in defeat and in death.

ETHIRPARADATHU

aka Unexpected

1954 182’ b&w Tamil

d/sc Ch. Narayanamurthy p Saravanabava Unity s C.V. Sridhar c P. Ramaswamy m C.N. Pandurangam

lp Sivaji Ganesan, Chittor V. Nagaiah, S.V. Sahasranamam, Padmini, S. Varalakshmi, Friend Ramasamy, Baby Saraswathi

Sunder (Sivaji), the only son of Dayaparar (Nagaiah), a rich man in Madurai, is a student in Madras, living in a house with Sumathi (Padmini) and her father. The latter is depressed because his elder son, Doctor Gopu (Sahasranamam) has left home with his wife Nalini (Varalakshmi) to lead a modern life in Bangalore. Sunder interrupts his studies to visit the USA while, heavily indebted, Gopu and Nalini return home. To settle her brother’s debts, Sumathi offers to marry Dayaparar, not knowing that he is her boyfriend’s father. Besides, she believes Sunder died in a plane crash anyway, and she does not know that he survived, although blinded, rescued by tribals. Dayaparar eventually finds out that his wife was his son’s lover, and he leaves home without a word, in search of his son, whom he finds and brings back to visit Sumathi, who promises to be a faithful friend to him. Dayaparar then tries sending her a message that he has died. She believes herself to be a widow, but still refuses to marry her boyfriend who is now also her stepson, an awkward situation that also troubles Sunder, who has by now regained his sight. In the end, Dayaparar drops dead of a heart attack as he reveals all, leaving Sunder at the feet of his lover. The film was remade in Hindi as Sharada (1957).

MALAIKALLAN

1954 186’ b&w Tamil

d/sc S.M. Sreeramulu Naidu pc Pakshiraja Studio st/co-lyr Namakkal Kavingar dial M. Karunanidhi co-lyr Balasubramanyam, Bharatidasan, Thanjai Ramaiyadas, Makkalanban m S.M. Subbaiah Naidu c Sailen Bose

lp M.G. Ramachandran, P. Bhanumathi, M.G. Chakrapani, P.S. Gnanam, T.S. Dorairaj, Surabhi Balasaraswathi, Ezhumalai, Balasubramanyam, Sandhya, E.R. Sahadevan, Santha, Sriram

Classic MGR movie about an outlaw, Kumaraveeran, who robs the rich to feed the poor while maintaining a double identity as the Muslim merchant Abdul Rahim. He falls in love with Poonkothai (Bhanumathi) who is later used by the police to entrap the hero. Eventually, the police officer turns out to be the bandit’s brother. According to M.S.S. Pandian (1992), in this film MGR established his political persona as a ‘superman’ imposing his own version of justice. The Karunanidhi script, replete with the customary DMK propaganda, inaugurated the crucial device of hinging its political message in a song: Pandian translates its lines as follows: ‘How long will they fool us/in this land of ours?/We’ll open schools in every street/and see that none is unlettered/We’ll teach many vocations/and banish starvation/Because they don’t even get a glimpse/of the hoarded money/Why do they keep yelling/There is no god?/Because He has not shown Himself/for far too long’. Written by Bharatidasan and sung by T.M. Soundararajan, the song was very popular. Malaikallan was remade in Hindi by the same studio as Azad (1955) starring Dilip Kumar.

MANOHARA/MANOHAR

1954 199’[Ta]/184’[Te] b&w Tamil/Telugu/Hindi

d L.V. Prasad pc Manohar Pics st P. Sambandam Mudaliar s/lyr[Ta] M. Karunanidhi dial/co-lyr[Te] Acharya Athreya co-lyr[Te] Balijepalli Lakshmikanta Kavi, Sri Sri lyr[H] Vishwamitter Adil c P. Ramasami m S.V. Venkatraman

lp P. Kannamba, T.R. Rajkumari, Pandharibai, Girija, Sivaji Ganesan, S.A. Natarajan, S.S. Rajendran, K.A. Thangavelu, Sadasivarao, Kaka Radhakrishnan

Costume fantasy allegedly set in the 11th C. at the time of the Chola dynasty. The king (Sadasivarao), seduced by Vasantasena (T.R. Rajakumari), abandons his wife (Kannamba) and his son Manohara (Ganesan). Vasantasena wants Manohara arrested and her own son (Radhakrishnan) made heir. She has the king and queen imprisoned while she attempts to seize power. Manohara escapes from prison and leads a popular revolt against Vasantasena and her general Ugrasen (Natarajan). The hit, scripted by Karunanidhi and featuring a major star cast, is sometimes seen as the most chauvinist of all the DMK films with its anti-North India rhetoric climaxing in Ganesan’s monologue at the end characterising all ‘Aryans’ as intruders and jackals who entered through the Khyber Pass.

MAYURPANKH

1954?’ col Hindi

d/s/p Kishore Sahu pc Sahu Films lyr Hasrat Jaipuri c Andre Thomas m Shankar-Jaikishen

lp Kishore Sahu, Sumitra Devi, Odette Ferguson, Jankidass, Reginald Jackson, Seema, Asha Mathur, Helen, Ramesh Gupta, Cuckoo, Moni Chatterjee

A love story addressing racial division and contrasting European and Indian values. Joan Davis (Ferguson) and William Griffith (Jackson), who loves Joan, arrive in India as tourists. One night, stranded in a dense forest, they meet Ranjit (Sahu), an aristocrat from Jaipur. Ranjit and Joan fall in love to the silent distress of Ranjit’s wife Shanti (Sumitra Devi) as well as that of Griffith but, predictably, ethnic loyalties prevail in the end.

MIRZA GHALIB

1954 145’ b&w Urdu

d Sohrab Modi pc Minerva Movietone st Sadat Hasan Manto sc J.K. Nanda dial Rajinder Singh Bedi lyr Shakeel Badayuni c V. Avadhoot m Ghulam Mohammed

lp Suraiya, Bharat Bhushan, Ulhas, Nigar Sultana, Durga Khote, Mukri, Murad, Baij Sharma

Costume period movie about the life of the best-known poet in the Urdu language, Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797–1869) who was also for a while the court poet appointed by the last Mughal King Bahadur Shah Zafar. The film, chronicling Ghalib’s (Bhushan) rejection and final acceptance by the royal court is mainly a love story between the poet and a courtesan he calls Chaudhvin (Suraiya). The ever-popular Ghalib poetry is sung here by Suraiya, Talat Mahmood and Mohammed Rafi.

MUNNA

1954 139’ b&w Hindi

d/s/p K.A. Abbas pc Naya Sansar c Ramchandra m Anil Biswas

lp Romi, Sulochana Chatterjee, Shammi, Tripti Mitra, Achala Sachdev, David, Manju, Naaz, Jairaj, Om Prakash, Manmohan Krishna, Johnny Walker, Rashid Khan, Nana Palsikar, Jagdeep, Madan Puri, Bhudo Advani

After Wadia Movietone’s Naujawan (1937), this was the 2nd songless film in the Hindi cinema. The absence of songs has remained one of its main claims to realism. It is a sequel of sorts to Abbas’s debut film Dharti Ke Lal (1946), evoked in the opening sequence. Tripti Mitra is the widowed mother of Munna (Romi), a six-year-old boy. Unable to feed her child in the city, the mother eventually commits suicide, leaving Munna in an orphanage. The child escapes and encounters several characters whom he reforms with his innocence: the pickpocket Bhikudada (David), the crooked Seth Laxmidas, a clerk, a magician, a boy who makes a living pasting posters while nursing an ambition to become the prime minister of India, and a couple who want to adopt him. The film intercuts Munna’s adventures with the travails of his mother, the two often narrowly missing each other in various city locations before she kills herself. Later Chetan Anand reworked the plot with an even younger child in Aakhri Khat (1966).

Manju in Munna

NAGIN

1954 139’ col Hindi

d Nandlal Jaswantlal pc Filmistan st Bijon Bhattacharya sc Hamid Butt dial/lyr Rajinder Krishen c Fali Mistry m Hemanta Mukherjee

lp Vyjayanthimala, Pradeep Kumar, Mubarak, Jeevan, S.L. Puri, I.S. Johar, Ram Avtar, Krishnakumari, Kamal, Sulochana

A primitivist love fantasy and a big hit for Vyjayanthimala. She and Pradeep Kumar play professional snake catchers for different tribal groups. When they fall in love (encouraged by the hero’s villainous rival, played by Jeevan) their respective clans go to war. A snake sent to kill the hero bites the heroine instead, but he then rescues her by sucking the poison out of her body. This skeletal plot holds together the dances choreographed by Sachin Shankar, Yogendra Desai and Hiralal and executed by the sinuous Vyjayanthimala. Major hit songs include Man dole mera tan dole sung by Lata Mangeskhar and introducing Hemanta Mukherjee as a front-line Hindi composer as well as Kalyanji’s clavioline which simulates the snake-charmer’s flute. The number was adapted from Bijon Bhattacharya’s play Jiyankanya which is also a distant source for the plot.

NATASHEKHARA

1954 185’ b&w Kannada

d C.V. Raju pc Jairaj Films m P. Kalingrao

lp Kalyana Kumar, Sandhya, Vidya, H.R. Sastry, Jayashree, Comedian Guggu

Melodrama about Raja (Kumar) who wants to act in plays and films while his conservative father wants him to study. Raja runs away from home and eventually makes it as a star when he saves the actress Nalini. A big hit and the debut of Kannada star Kalyana Kumar who, like the character he plays, apparently also ran away from home to pursue an acting career.

NAUKRI

1954?’ b&w Hindi

d/p Bimal Roy pc Bimal Roy Prod, st Subodh Basu sc Nabendu Ghosh dial Paul Mahendra lyr Shailendra c Kamal Bose m Salil Choudhury

lp Kishore Kumar, Sheila Ramani, Kanhaiyalal, Noor, Achala Sachdev, Tulsi Chakraborty, Jagdeep, Bikram Kapoor, Krishnakant

This Kishore Kumar musical features him as Ratan, an incurable optimist who believes that on his graduation he will get a good job and achieve a rosy future for his poverty-stricken family. The film chronicles his gradual disillusionment turning to cynicism and eventually his coming to political awareness. It had one musical hit, Chhotasa ghar hoga (sung by K. Kumar with Usha Mangeshkar).

NEELAKUYIL

aka The Blue Koel

1954 182’ b&w Malayalam

co-d/lyr P. Bhaskaran co-d Ramu Kariat p K.M. Raja, T.K. Pareekutty pc Chandrathara Pics s Uroob (aka P.C. Kuttikrishnan) c A. Vincent m K. Raghavan

lp Kumari, Prema, Kodangallur Ammini Amma, Sathyan, P. Bhaskaran, Master Vipin, Manavalan Joseph, Balakrishna Menon, Kochappan, Balaraman, J.A.R. Anand, Johnson, V. Abdulla, V. Kamalakshi, Thangamani

The Harijan girl Neeli (Kumari) is found dead with her illegitimate child which is adopted by the postman, a high-caste Hindu (Bhaskaran) to the consternation of the village. The child’s real father, a high-caste teacher (Sathyan) with a barren wife (Prema), eventually acknowledges paternity, thus breaking the caste barrier. Kariat’s direction debut is often presented as the first major breakthrough in the Malayalam cinema. The reformist literature of novelist Uroob was extended into a performance idiom, using new-generation actors like Sathyan alongside Vincent’s crisp camerawork to manufacture for the first time a culturally valid and economically successful indigenous melodrama in Kerala. The film was a musical success, representing the best work of singer Kozhikode Abdul Qadir. The trend of realist melodrama inaugurated by this film was to continue for over 20 years, in Kariat’s own work and e.g. in Vincent’s M.T. Vasudevan Nair films.

NIRUPEDALU

1954 163’ b&w Telugu

d T. Prakash Rao pc Gokul Pics

st K. Pratyagatma dial/lyr Anisetty c B.S. Ranga m T.V. Raju

lp A. Nageshwara Rao, Jamuna, Ramana Reddy, Chadalavada, Surabhi Balasaraswathi, Sudhakar, Rajanala Nageshwara Rao

This reworking of the Ezhai Padum Padu (1950) story also had censorship trouble. Apparently the censors, apprehensive of leftist propaganda in a post-Telangana milieu, objected to, among other things, a ‘Keep Left’ traffic sign.

OON PAOOS

1954 127’ b&w Marathi

d Raja Paranjpe pc Navachitra s/lyr G.D. Madgulkar c Bal Bapat m Sudhir Phadke

lp Raja Paranjpe, Sumati Gupte, Ranjana, Shanta Modak, Vasant Thengdi, Rajan, Baby Kala, Jayanti, Sanjeev, Gajanan Jagirdar, Dhumal, Vasudev Palande, Prabhakar Salvi, Anand Hardikar

Whimsical comedy about Bapu Master (Paranjpe), an old schoolteacher, and his wife Kashibai (Gupte). After the graduation of their two sons and the marriage of their daughter, the much-loved teacher and his wife retire. However, fate intervenes: their house is auctioned and the couple are forced to seek shelter with their children, which forces the aged couple to separate. Eventually a grateful student rather than one of their children helps out and offers them shelter together. With Pedgaonche Shahane (1952) this is Paranjpe’s best-known performance as actor-director and is sometimes seen as a predecessor to Panthulu’s School Master (1958).

PEDDA MANUSHULU

1954 191’b&w Telugu

d K.V. Reddy pc Vauhini st Ibsen’s Pillars of Society sc D.V. Narasaraju lyr Kosaraju, Veetukari, N. Raghavaiah c B.N. Konda Reddy m Ogirala Ramchandra Rao, Addepalli Rama Rao

lp Gaurinatha Sastry, Lingamurthy, Relangi Venkatramaiah, Sriranjani Jr., Vangara, Sheshamamba, Swarajyalakshmi, Ramchandra Kashyap, A.V.Subba Rao, Chadalavada

With this Ibsen adaptation by the Telugu playwright Narasaraju in his screen debut, the fantasist K.V. Reddy (Patala Bhairavi, 1951; Maya Bazaar, 1957) shifted to the realist melodrama which dominated Telugu cinema in the 50s. The central characters are chairman Dharma Rao (Sastry) and a widow who has an affair with a chauffeur (the film’s most popular scenes). Other characters include Tikka Shankaraiah (Venkatramaiah) and a newspaper editor (Lingamurthy). The film reintroduced some popular Telugu folk songs, e.g. Nandamaya guruda nandamaya.

PEHLI TAREEKH

1954?’ b&w Hindi

d Raja Nene pc Kamal Chitra st/co-sc Dada Mirasi co-sc/dial/lyr Qamar Jalalabadi co-sc Madhusudan Kalelkar, G.R. Kamat c Bal Bapat, M.N. Kulkarni m Sudhir Phadke

lp Nirupa Roy, Raja Nene, Agha, Yashodhara Katju, Sudha, Ramesh Kapoor, Vasantrao Pahelwan, Javdekar

A realist inversion of Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life (1947), this is an unusual story about the poor Shamlal (Nene) who, faced with starvation, commits suicide. His soul is not admitted into heaven and he is condemned to return to earth as a disembodied spirit. He has to watch his family face starvation and imprisonment and, in the film’s climax, is unable to prevent his wife and daughter from committing suicide as well. The film helped establish Nirupa Roy’s realist image. It was made by an ex-Prabhat director and actor (Daha Wajta/Das Baje, 1942) and contains Kishore Kumar’s classic number Din ho suhana aajpaheli tareekh hai. It was remade in Kannada and Tamil (Modalatedi Mudhal Thedi, 1955) by P. Neelakantan.

RATHA PASAM

1954 179’ b&w Tamil

d R.S. Mani p Avai Prod. sc C.V. Sridhar c Magi m Athmanathan, A.V. Natarajan

lp T.K. Shanmugham, T.K. Bhagavathi, T.S. Baliah, Anjali Devi, Vidyapathi, M.S. Draupadi

Originally a successful play of the T.K.S. Brothers, the brothers repeated their roles in the film version. The Bombay pickpocket Raja (Shanmugham), who ran away from Madras as a boy, loves the street dancer Rani (Anjali Devi) and lives in a hut with her and her grandfather. Raja’s elder brother Raghu (Bhagavathi) is a Madras businessman and lives with his wife Sarala (Draupadi) and their son Mohan. In Bombay on business, Raghu is cheated by his company’s branch manager, Manorama (Vidyapathi), and her lover Madhu (Baliah) and he cannot face going home. Sarala arrives in search of her disappeared husband. She is sheltered by Raja and is employed by the thieves Manorama and Madhu as a maid. The villains escape with all the loot and Raja, who tried to detain them, finds Raghu trying to rape Rani. Raja and Raghu are at each other’s throats when Sarala emerges to solve matters as blood proves to be thicker than water.

SNEHASEEMA

aka Love’s Limits

1954 165’ b&w Malayalam

d S.S Rajan pc Associated Prod. s Poonkunnam Varkey c H.S. Venu lyr Abhayadev m V. Dakshinamurthy, A. Rama Rao

lp Padmini, Sathyan, Kottarakkara Sridharan Nair, P.J. Cherian, G.K. Pillai, Ramankutty, Muthukulam Raghavan Pillai, S.P. Pillai

Johnny (Sathyan), raised by a priest, marries Omana (Padmini) against her father’s wishes. To escape unpleasantness, he quits his teaching job and joins the army and is reported killed at the front. Omana is forced by her father to marry Baby (Nair), a doctor. When Johnny returns and finds her remarried he commits suicide, and she follows suit. Writer Varkey, noted in his writings for his attacks on the Church and the orthodoxy it represents in Kerala, loosely adapted Tennyson’s Enoch Arden for this love tragedy set amid the Christian community in Kerala. Made at the Vauhini Studios and at Star Combines, the film developed a reputation and enduring appeal mainly for its claim to secular credentials.

SORGAVASAL

Gateway to Heaven

1954 211’ b&w Tamil

d A. Kasilingam p Parimala Films s C.N. Annadurai m C.R. Subburaman

lp S.S. Rajendran, K.R. Ramaswamy, P.S. Veerappa, R. Balasubramanyam, Padmini, Anjali Devi

Costume drama about a poor but revered revolutionary poet, Madivannan (Ramaswamy), who has a sister, Thilagavathy (Anjali), who loves his wealthy friend Muthu Manikam (Rajendran). However, Muthu’s father demands the girl’s weight in gold as a dowry. Madivannan then takes his family to Vezha Nadu where he becomes a court poet and is sent to perform at a festival in Cholai Nadu. Having been charged to ask the local queen Kumara Devi (Padmini) to marry King Vetrivelan of Vezha Nadu (Veerappa), the poet falls in love with her himself. Obviously, Vetrivelan is annoyed and seeks revenge on the poet. When the court priest (Balasubramanyam) decides to build a massive temple at the people’s expense, he asks Madivannan to sing at fundraising events, but the poet refuses to become part of such a confidence trick. This causes him to be accused of atheism and he is officially repudiated after an extended trial sequence, the highlight of which is the poet’s lengthy monologue arguing the DMK’s position that a revolutionary is not to be mistaken for an atheist. Vetrivelan then takes the opportunity to jail the poet’s mother and to rape and jail his sister, which makes her go insane. In exile, Madivannan sings his revolutionary songs to incite the people to rise against Vetrivelan, who eventually sees the error of his ways and proclaims the state to be a democracy. Kumaradevi follows suit, renouncing her throne to marry the poet.