KANDAM BACHA COAT

aka The Patched-up Coat

1961 156’ col Malayalam

d/p T.R. Sundaram pc Modern Theatres

st T. Mohammed Yusuf’s novel

sc K.T. Mohammed lyr P. Bhaskaran
c T.M. Sundarababu m Baburaj

lp T.S. Muthaiah, Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair, Prem Nawaz, Ambika, Pankajavalli, Aranmulla Ponnamma, S.P. Pillai, P.K. Bahadur, Kothamangalam Sadanandan, Nellikode Bhaskaran, Kottayam Chellappan, Muttatha Soman, Chandni, Aisha, Omana

The kind-hearted Muslim cobbler Mohammed Kaka saved his life’s earnings in the pockets of his ancient coat to fulfil his dream of going to Mecca. He offers shelter to Kunjubibi when her scheduled marriage to Ummar breaks down following a dowry dispute. Arranging the marriage of the lovers, he offers his life’s savings as a dowry, an act that causes the evil parents of the couple to have a change of heart. Made at the Modern Theatres, Salem, the film was known mainly as the first colour feature in Malayalam.

KAPPALOTIYA THAMIZHAN

aka The Tamil who Launched a Ship

1961 197’ b&w Tamil

d B.R. Panthulu pc Padmini Pics

st/dial S.D. Sundaram lyr Subramanya Bharathi

lp Sivaji Ganesan, S.V. Subbaiah, Gemini Ganesh, T.K. Shanmugam, Savitri, Rukmini, S.V. Ranga Rao, M.R. Santhanam, K.D. Santhanam, S.A. Kannan, M. Saroja, P.S. Gnanam, Sukumari, R. Bharati, Baby Kanchana

Biographical film on the life of Va. Vu. Chidambaram Pillai (Ganesan), a nationalist businessman who launched the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company to break the British monopoly in shipping at the turn of the century, which earned him the honorific title Kappalotiya Thamizhan or The Tamil who launched a ship’. An important film in Ganesan’s post-DMK project of wrapping himself in nationalist colours and one of Tamil cinema’s rare excursions into recent history. Set in Tirunelveli district, it features cultural celebrities like Subramaniya Siva (Shanmugham) and the poet Bharati (Subbaiah) whose poems were set to music and became popular songs. The mandatory duets and romance are updated via references to historical events like Vanchinathan’s (Ganesh) killing of the British collector Ashe, the burning of imported cloth, the Tuticorin riots and the Harvey Mills strike. The launching of the first Tamil ship is the climax. In line with the film’s political ambitions, the dialogue attempts to move away from the high-flown rhetoric of e.g. Elangovan’s 40s style by having some characters speak Tirunelveli dialect, but most still declaim their lines in written, theatrical Tamil. Rukmini plays the hero’s wife.

KITTUR CHANAMMA/RANI CHANAMMA

1961 187’ b&w Kannada/Tamil

d B.R. Panthulu pc Padmini Pics c W.R. Subba Rao, M. Karnan m T.G. Lingappa

lp Rajkumar, B. Saroja Devi, M.V. Rajamma, Leelavathi, Balkrishna, Narasimhraju, Chindodi Leela

Panthulu’s big-budget historical about the legendary Queen Chanamma of Kittur (Saroja Devi in her best-known role) who led her people into battle against the British and eventually sacrificed her life. It features much palace intrigue as some Kittur royals invite the British to represent them; others, led by Chanamma, refuse to pay the British taxes. In the end the Kittur state is abolished.

KOMAL GANDHAR

aka E-Flat

1961 134’ b&w Bengali

d/s Ritwik Ghatak pc Chitrakalpa c Dilip Ranjan Mukhopadhyay m Jyotirindra Moitra

lp Supriya Choudhury, Abanish Bannerjee, Anil Chatterjee, Geeta De, Satindra Bhattacharya, Chitra Mondol, Bijon Bhattacharya, Mani Srimani, Satyabrata Chattopadhyay, Gyanesh Mukherjee

Ghatak’s innovatively filmed critique of both the IPTA style of radical theatre and of Partition caused a major political controversy in Bengal, apparently prompting the director to look for work outside the state. Set in the contentious 50s, the film’s plot is structured around the rivalry of two radical theatre groups. One is led by Bhrigu (A. Bannerjee), the other by Shanta (G. De), while Shanta’s niece Ansuya (S. Choudhury) participates in Bhrigu’s work to the disapproval of her own group. When the two groups join together for a production of Shakuntala (Tagore’s version of the story functioning as a constant reference within the film), Shanta deliberately sabotages it. Bhrigu and Ansuya discover they are both refugees separated from their country (Bangladesh) by a river and they fall in love. Eventually Ansuya, scheduled to marry Samar and move to France, decides to stay with Bhrigu. As in Ghatak’s earlier Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960), the story is interrupted by sound effects including ancient marriage songs, sounds of gunshots and sirens. Music and sound effects mark particularly emotive political moments, as in one of the film’s classic shots: a tracking movement along a disused railway ending abruptly at the national border with a fishermen’s chant rising to a powerful crescendo. Appropriately for a film dealing with both political and geographical division, the most intense interactions of sound and image occur in spaces which simultaneously divide and connect, as in the aforementioned tracking shot or in the 360-degree camera pans showing a theatre group singing in boats on the river Padma which marks the border between India and Bangladesh. Spatial divisions are further elaborated as a critique of the theatre groups with their cramped and fragmented proscenium spaces and cavernous rehearsal rooms and the claustrophobic, expressionistically lit urban scenes. The overall effect, as noted by Kumar Shahani, is the creation of a space-in-formation, a dynamic though static-looking space animated by history.

MANINI

1961 127’ b&w Marathi

d Anant Mane pc Kala Chitra st Mahadevshastri Joshi sc Vyakatesh Madgulkar lyr G.D. Madgulkar, Bahinabai Choudhury c V. Bargir m Vasant Pawar

lp Jayashree Gadkar, Chandrakant Gokhale, Hansa Wadkar, Dada Salvi, Indira Chitnis, Vasant Shinde, Ratnamala, Ramesh Deo, Sharad Talwalkar

Mane’s urban melodrama with stagey realist overtones, although formally very different from the Tamasha hit Sangtye Aika (1959) made by the same crew, almost matched its success. Heroine Malati (Gadkar) marries poor hero Madhav and is disowned by her wealthy aristocratic family. Her father Annasaheb tries to force her to abandon her husband. When she refuses, reprisals ensue: she and her husband are accused of theft and publicly humiliated at her younger sister’s wedding. Malati eventually breaks away from her oppressive feudal family (until then portrayed as the guardians of traditional virtue in Marathi film). The film includes hit numbers like Are sansar sansar (saying you must first burn your fingers on the stove before you get bread to eat). Gadkar’s performance as a demure, exemplary daughter-in-law helps the film to relocate a neo-traditional value system into the emerging urban middle class. A. Vincent remade the film in Malayalam as Abhijathyam (1971), and Krishnakant in Gujarati (Maa Dikri, 1977).

MUDIYANAYA PUTHRAN

aka The Prodigal Son

1961 147’ b&w Malayalam

d Ramu Kariat p T.K. Pareekutty

pc Chandrathara Prod. s Thoppil Bhasi

lyr P. Bhaskaran c A. Vincent, P. Sundaram m Baburaj

lp Sathyan, Ambika, Kumari, P.J. Anthony, Kambisseri, Kottayam Chellappan, P.A. Thomas, Adoor Bhasi

A story mapping good/bad brother relations on to employer/worker relations. The delinquent Rajan (Sathyan) loses his girl Radha (Ambika) to his more serious brother Gopal Pillai and is eventually ordered out of the parental home by his mother. When Rajan is ambushed and beaten, a Harijan girl he once molested, Chellamma (Kumari), nurses him back to health and humanises him. Workers, led by Vasu, who also assisted Rajan, are persecuted and attacked by the ‘good’ brother who nurses old jealousies and believes his wife still to be in love with Rajan. Vasu organises a strike and Rajan is blamed by his brother for knifing one of his thugs. Overcome by the affection the people seem to have for him, Rajan becomes ‘good’ and turns himself in to the police. Kariat’s first major film adapted a Thoppil Bhasi play to inaugurate a uniquely Malayali brand of political melodrama, in which existential aimlessness is extended into a pervasive sense of guilt as feudal institutions crumble and political activism becomes a form of atonement for bad faith. The film was actively supported by the Kerala CPI, with many of its members acting in and otherwise helping with the production. Vincent’s remarkable camerawork sets the tone of the film from its opening scene, in which Rajan lights a cigarette in darkness as he aeaits and then molests the harijan girl. Gopalakrishnan’s melodrama Mukha Mukham (1984) is a retrospective comment on this tradition of melodrama as much as it is on the radical political history it chronicles. Sathyan’s remarkable performance as the delinquent younger brother was later to extend into the definitive element in Kariat’s directorial signature (cf. Chemmeen, 1965).

PASAMALAR

1961 197’ b&w Tamil

d/sc A. Bhimsingh pc Rajamani Pics p Sivaji Ganesan st K.P. Kottarakkara dial Arur Das c G. Vittal Rao lyr Kannadasan m Vishwanathan-Ramamurthy

lp Sivaji Ganesan, Gemini Ganesh, Savitri, K.A. Thangavelu, M.N. Rajam, M.N. Nambiar

Brother and sister story about the orphaned Rajasekharan (Ganesan) who is devoted to his sister Radha (Savitri). However, she marries Anand (Ganesh), a worker and colleague of Rajasekharan. The lonely brother is struck with blindness and spends the rest of the film trying to unite with his beloved sister. Eventually the two die in each other’s arms. One of the earliest and best known of Malayalam scenarist/producer K.P. Kottarakkara’s Tamil films. A popular song in the film was Malarinthum malaratha (sung by T.M. Soundararajan), in which the hero dreams of his sister’s marriage and what he will do for her child.

PAVAMANIPPU

aka Forgiveness of Sins

1961 196’ b&w Tamil

d/sc A. Bhimsingh pc Buddha Pics st Buddha Pics Story Dept dial M.S. Solaimalai c G. Vittal Rao lyr Kannadasan m Vishwanathan-Ramamurthy

lp Sivaji Ganesan, M.R. Radha, Chittor V. Nagaiah, T.S. Balaiah, Kothamangalam Subbu, Savitri, M.V. Rajamma, Devika, Gemini Ganesh

Melodrama with religious stereotypes and symbols about a Hindu diamond merchant (Radha), a Muslim village doctor Rahim (Ganesan) and a Christian do-gooder (Devika), combining Tamil Nadu’s three main religions in an effort to promote communal harmony. Extra twists are provided by a love story between the Muslim and Christian alongside an all-Hindu love story (Ganesh and Savitri). In the end it turns out that all the protagonists descended from the greedy Hindu merchant and from his equally high-caste Hindu chauffeur’s (Baliah) family, providing ample material for tearful recognition scenes. Several famous songs underscore the film’s attempt to advocate a nationalist secularism e.g. Vandhanaal mudhal indhanaal varai (sung by T.M. Soundararajan and G.K. Venkatesh) which castigates man’s tendency to separate nature into categories of distinction, or the Ramzan song Ellorum kondaduvom (also sung by Soundararajan). Kannadasan belonged to the DMK’s Rationalist Group and included ironic lines which redeem the didacticism of the script. The star studded cast - and notably Radha’s remarkable performance - ensured the film’s enduring success and Bhimsingh went on to establish himself as the main purveyor of moralising all-star movies in the 60s.

PRAPANCHA

aka Family Life

1961 138’(97’) b&w Marathi

d Madhukar Pathak pc Indian National Pics s/lyr G.D. Madgulkar c K.B. Kamat, Ghanekar m Sudhir Phadke

lp Sulochana, Amar Sheikh, Kusum Deshpande, Jayant Dharmadhikari, Seema, Shrikant Moghe, Shankar Ghanekar

A miserabilist story about a poor Marathi village potter who tries to feed his wife (Sulochana) and six children in the hope that things will improve when younger brother Shankar completes his education. But they don’t and, to foil Shankar’s plans to start a porcelain factory, the local moneylender starts legal proceedings to claim the family house. The potter dies, causing the younger brother’s marriage to his beloved Champa (Seema) to be cancelled. Eventually the potter’s widow migrates with her children to the big city, so as not to be a burden. Shot mostly on location, it was screened in the USSR and in the West in two versions, one subtitled, the other with a voice over.

PUNASHCHA

aka Over Again

1961 120’ b&w Bengali

d/p/sc Mrinal Sen pc Mrinal Sen Prod.

st Ashish Burman c Sailaja Chatterjee
m Samaresh Roy

lp Soumitra Chatterjee, Kanika Majumdar, Pahadi Sanyal, Kali Bannerjee, Shefali Bannerjee, N. Vishwanathan, Kunal Basu

After the harrowing exploration of a marriage broken by social-historical pressures on rural life in Baishey Shravan (1960), Sen returned to the same issue in an urban context. The problems arise as the established patriarchal relations in a family are disrupted when the wife has to leave the domestic space to join the workforce. The resulting impact of a changing economic system on both male and female subjective attitudes and anxieties forms the substance of the plot. Sen contents himself with simply though critically setting out the problems without offering a solution. In this respect, his film allows for a level of ambiguity usually denied (in favour of an unambiguous validation of ‘traditional values’) in most Indian films with similar themes.

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

1961 54’ b&w English/Bengali

d/co-p/s Satyajit Ray co-p Films Division, Anil Choudhury c Soumendu Roy m Jyotirindra Moitra

lp Raya Chatterjee, Shovanial Gangopadhyay, Smaran Ghoshal, Purnendu Mukherjee, Kallol Bose, Subir Bose, Phani Nan, Norman Ellis

Ray’s semi-documentary on his mentor commissioned for the centenary of Tagore’s birth. The extraordinarily diverse literary and visual output of Tagore, the Shantiniketan experiment and the Tagore family’s contributions to India’s freedom struggle are condensed into one hour, relying on a voice-over commentary that eschews historical analysis in favour of a fairly reverential approach. Ray includes some re-enactements of episodes in Tagore’s life together with images of paintings, photographs, documents, etc. The best moments are the reconstructed Balmiki Pratibha, and the song Tobu mone rekho (‘Yet remember me’) in Tagore’s own voice.

SAPTAPADI

1961 163’ b&w Bengali

d/sc/c Ajoy Kar pc Alochhaya Prod.

st Tarashankar Bannerjee m Hemanta Mukherjee

lp Uttam Kumar, Suchitra Sen, Chhabi Biswas, Tulsi Chakraborty, Tarun Kumar, Preeti Majumdar, Chhaya Devi, Padmadevi, Seeta Mukherjee, Swagata Chakraborty, Sabita Roy Choudhury

Set in WW2, the Jesuit Rev. Krishnendu (U. Kumar) runs a military hospital in Bankura. A wounded woman soldier, Rina Braun (Sen), arrives and he recognises his former lover, triggering a long flashback showing them as fellow medical students. She is an exotic Eurasian and the hero wins her while playing Othello (he was dubbed by Utpal Dutt, renowned for his stage performance of that role) to her Desdemona in a college performance. His orthodox father (Biswas) forbids their marriage. The hero converts to Christianity and exiles himself. Rina discovers that she is the illegitimate daughter of a Hindu maid and becomes an alcoholic, eventually joining the army. Back in the present, Rina tries to kill herself when she regains consciousness but the lovers are united in the midst of the war (Tarashankar’s original story ended tragically). This Kumar/Sen hit (cf. Sagarika, 1956), including their characteristic low-angle, soft-focus close-ups and stylised movements, yielded one of the most popular song picturisations of the decade, the classic motor bike scene number Ei path jadi na shesh hoi.

TEEN KANYA

aka Three Daughters, aka Two Daughters 1961 56’(Postmaster)/61’(Monihara)/56’(Samapti) b&w Bengali

d/p/sc/m Satyajit Ray pc Satyajit Ray Prod.

st Rabindranath Tagore c Soumendu Roy

lp (Postmaster) Anil Chatterjee, Chandana Bannerjee, Nripati Chatterjee, Khagen Pathak, Gopal Roy; (Monihara) Kali Bannerjee, Kanika Majumdar, Kumar Roy, Govinda Chakravarty; (Samapti) Soumitra Chatterjee, Aparna Das Gupta (aka Aparna Sen), Seeta Mukherjee, Geeta De, Santosh Dutta, Mihir Chakravarty, Devi Neogi

Three short films adapted from three Tagore stories compiled for the writer’s centenary. Western versions usually omit Monihara. In Postmaster, the most sentimental of the stories, Nandalal the postman (A. Chatterjee) is assigned the 10-year-old orphan Ratan (Bannerjee) as his assistant. Ill treated by his predecessor, she develops an attachment to Nandalal as he teaches her to read and write. Their acquaintance is abruptly ended when the postman falls ill and is transferred. Their wordless parting, as his rupee tip is rejected, was widely commended. Monihara is narratively the most complicated and the closest Ray has come to horror film. A schoolteacher (Chakravarty) tells of Manimalika (Majumdar), the jewellery-crazy wife of a zamindar (Bannerjee). When her husband has financial difficulties, Manimalika offers to sell her jewellery and then disappears with the shady Madhusudhan (Roy). When the zamindar returns to a deserted house and opens the new box of jewels he brought for his wife, manic laughter resounds and Manimalika’s ghost appears to snatch the jewels. Returning to the storyteller, we discover that the hooded figure to whom the tale is addressed is the husband, who questions its accuracy and then vanishes. In Samapti, university graduate Amulya (Chatterjee) prefers to marry the extrovert Mrinmoyee (Das Gupta) rather than the woman chosen by his family. The wedding is both preceded and followed by a series of comic situations, first as Mrinmoyee disrupts the formal meeting with Amulya and his official bride-to-be and makes off with his shoes, and then on their wedding night when she escapes down a tree to sleep on her favourite perch by the river. Eventually the couple is reconciled as she promises to abandon her childish ways. Ray composed his own music score, combining Tagore and folk compositions with a much greater emphasis on ‘musicalised’ sound effects than in his earlier work.

TERO NADIR PAREY

aka Beyond Thirteen Rivers

1961 82’ b&w Bengali

d/sc/c Barin Saha pc Ramdhanu Pics st Nirmal Ghosh m Gyan Prakash Ghosh

lp Gyanesh Mukherjee, Priyam Hazarika, Narayan Chandra Mondal, Nanda Adhikari

A quiet and intimate Bengali story set in a travelling circus prey to the pressures of commercialism. A clown (Mukherjee) resists the privileging of crowd-pleasing dancing-girls in the circus programme and resents the arrival of a new dancer (Hazarika). When he suffers a drunken accident the dancer nurses him, but he remains unable to reconcile himself to the change and becomes virtually insane. This is the only feature by Barin Saha (1925–93), a former IPTA activist who studied film-making in France and Italy. The film was not released until 1969 and its commercial failure forced its director to abandon film-making in favour of rural activism. It was shot entirely on location at the Tero Nadi aka the Haldi river in Midnapore, and included scenes of remarkable energy, including the arrival of the dancing-girl in the bazaar (a long subjective shot), the sweeping pans over the river and night shots at the end, evoking Ghatak’s work.

THAYILLA PILLAI

1961 173’ b&w Tamil

d L. V. Prasad pc Prasad Movies

s M. Karunanidhi lyr Kannadasan, Kothamangalam Subbu, A. Marudakasi m K.V. Mahadevan

lp T.S. Balaiah, G. Muthukrishnan, Kalyana Kumar, S. Ramarao, Manohar, M.V. Rajamma, Vijayalakshmi, Madhuri, Sandhya, T.P. Muthulakshmi, Nagesh, C.V.V. Panthulu, Seetalakshmi

The conservative Brahmin Patanjali Sastry severs relations with his modern brother-in-law Dr Bharati. When Sastry’s wife, who had had two miscarriages, finds herself pregnant, she goes to her brother to get medical aid and incurs the displeasure of her husband. The wife gives birth to a son but simultaneously adopts the son of a lower-caste woman who died in childbirth, creating some confusion for Sastry as to which baby is his son. Eventually the couple raise the adopted child while their own son becomes a rickshaw-puller. The two boys grow up and become friends. Following scenarist Karunanidhi’s anti-caste politics, the family is reunited in the end.

UNNIYARCHA

1961 138’ b&w Malayalam

d/p Kunchako pc Udaya Studios s Sarangapani lyr P. Bhaskaran c T.N. Krishnan Kutty Nair m K. Raghavan

lp Ragini, Prem Nazir, Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair, Sathyan, Kottayam Chellappan, Sunny, S.P. Pillai, Bahadur, Reetha, Kanchana

One of the most succesful of Kunchako’s early 60s films at Udaya Studio, the film features Ragini, one of the dancing Travancore sisters, as Unniyarcha, a warrior princess and part of North Kerala folklore. Born into the aristocracy, she is married to the kind-hearted Kunjiraman (Nazir) to whom she bears two sons. When her fearless brother is killed by the evil Chandu (Chellappan), she trains her sons in the martial arts so they can carry out her revenge mission. Shot in the Kerala backwaters, the film led to a major trend of adapting legends of folk heroes from the ballads of the Malabar region.

VELUGU NEEDALU

aka Thooya Ullam

1961 ? b&w Telugu

d Adurthi Subba Rao pc Annapurna Prod.

p D. Madhusudana Rao dial Acharya Athreya lyr Sri Sri, Kosaraju Raghavaiah Choudhury c P.S. Selvaraj m Pendyala Nageshwara Rao

lp Savitri, Girija, Suryakantam, A. Nageshwara Rao, K. Jaggaiah, S.V. Ranga Rao, Relangi Venkatramaiah

A sentimental love triangle focussing on Suguna (Savitri), adopted by Rao Bahadur Venkatramaiah and his wife Kanakadurga, who is ill-treated when the couple have a child of their own. She is given away to a clerk, Vengalappa, who educates her and makes her a doctor. She falls for the poet Chandram (ANR), but he insists that she marry the terminally ill Raghu, who loves her too. Chandram now marries Valarakshmi (Girija), the daughter of Venkatramaiah. Varalakshmi, however, suspects that Chandram still loves Suguna. The film was a major 60s hit, mainly for its lyrics and music.

ABHIJAAN

aka The Expedition

1962 150’ b&w Bengali

d/sc/m Satyajit Ray pc Abhijatrik st Tarashankar Bannerjee’s novel c Soumendu Roy

lp Soumitra Chatterjee, Waheeda Rehman, Ruma Guha-Thakurta, Gyanesh Mukherjee, Charuprakash Ghosh, Robi Ghosh, Arun Roy, Sekhar Chatterjee, Ajit Bannerjee, Reba Devi, Abani Mukherjee

Taking over from some friends who lost confidence after one day’s shooting, Ray made his first Christian melodrama (see e.g. the boulders standing in for accumulated sin), set in Northern Bihar. Hero Narsingh (So. Chatterjee), a taxi driver who loses his licence, gets involved in drug smuggling and with two women, the missionary teacher Mary Nilima (Guha-Thakurta) and the prostitute Gulabi (Rehman’s only appearance in a Ray movie). Conflicts of class with feudal Rajput honour inform the story about the villain Sukhanram (C. Ghosh) who is redeemed by the good Joseph (G. Mukherjee), Mary’s brother. The urbane and upper-class Soumitra Chatterjee is cast against type as the rough, bearded Rajasthani driver.

ARADHANA

1962 167’ b&w Telugu

d V. Madhusudhana Rao pc Jagapathi Pics p Ranga Rao, Rajendra Prasad co-dial/co-lyr Narla Chiranjeevi co-dial Athreya co-lyr Sri Sri, Arudra, Kosaraju c C. Nageshwara Rao m Saluri Rajeshwara Rao

lp A. Nageshwara Rao, Savitri, Girija, Relangi Venkatramaiah, Ramana Reddy, K. Jaggaiah, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Chittor V. Nagaiah

Popular 60s love story and lukewarm remake of the Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen Bengali classic Sagarika (1956). Gopi (Nageshwara Rao) meets Anuradha (Savitri) while at medical college. Gopi agrees to marry a woman of his parents’ choice (Girija) because the dowry will allow him to study medicine in the USA. While he is away, Anuradha moves in with Gopi’s family and impersonates his fiance whenever he telephones and also writes the fiance’s love-letters to Gopi. This, and the fact that his fiance wanted to many another man anyway, leads to the happy ending.

BEES SAAL BAAD

1962 158’ b&w Hindi

d Biren Nag pc Geetanjali Pics p/m Hemant Kumar [Hemanta Mukherjee] s Dhruva Chatterjee dial Devkishen lyr Shakeel Badayuni c Marshall Braganza

lp Waheeda Rehman, Biswajeet, Manmohan Krishna, Sajjan, Asit Sen, Madan Puri, Devkishen, Lata Sinha

Suspense movie allegedly derived from The Hound of the Baskervilles. Kumar (Biswajeet) is the last in a long line of Chandangarh zamindars. He returns to his lonely ancestral manor where his father had been mysteriously killed after he was lured into the fields by the sound of anklets and a woman crying. Rumours abound of the ghost of a woman raped and killed by Kumar’s ancestor. Kumar falls for the local belle Radha (Rehman) and meets a gallery of dubious characters: an excon servant, a bearded doctor and a man on crutches who turns out to be a disguised policeman. The first half of the film builds up the suspense, mostly using the soundtrack according to generic conventions. The plot then becomes a whodunit until the murderer is revealed: Radha’s guardian (M. Krishna), the father of the woman killed 20 years ago. Waheeda’s seduction number, associating her with the ghost, is the classic Kahin deep jale kahin dil (sung by Lata Mangeshkar).

BHOODANA

1962 161’ b&w Kannada

co-d/s G.V. Iyer co-d P.S. Gopalakrishna pc Ananthalakshmi Pics c B. Dorairaj m G.K. Venkatesh

lp Rajkumar, Kalyana Kumar, Udaya Kumar, Ashwath, Leelavathi, Balkrishna, Narasimraju, H.R. Sastry, Adavani Lakshmi, Mahalinga Bhagavathar

Iyer’s debut is a political melodrama made in the context of the Bhoodana (land-gift) movement started by the Gandhian Vinoba Bhave, calling on all large land owners to donate l/6th of their land for redistribution to the landless. Exploitative landlord Lakshmipati controls the bonded labourer Dasanna and his two sons Rama and Lakshmana. When he donates his sixth, the land is allotted to this trio who exploit it successfully. The landlord later reappropriates the land, causing Dasanna to go insane. One of the first Kannada political films, it is the only film to feature all three Kannada top male stars: Rajkumar, Kalyana Kumar and Udaya Kumar.

CHINA TOWN

1962 151’ b&w Hindi

d/p Shakti Samanta pc Shakti Films s Ranjan Bose dial Vrajendra Gaud lyr Majrooh Sultanpuri c Dwarka Divecha m Ravi

lp Shammi Kapoor, Shakila, Helen, Madan Puri, S.N. Bannerjee, Mridula, Jeevankala, Gautam Mukherjee, Kanu Roy

Crime movie with ‘Far Eastern’ atmosphere following on from Samanta’s Howrah Bridge (1958) and Singapore (1960). It is set in a township outside Calcutta inhabited by Chinese refugees from WW2, with smoke-filled bars, cabarets, criminals stalking the streets and skulking in alleys and gangland businessmen sporting fat cigars. Kapoor plays a double role of twins separated at birth who meet again as Shekhar, a cabaret entertainer in love with the aristocratic millionairess Rita, and Mike, the gangster. The police use the resemblance to get Shekhar to impersonate Mike in order to track down the gang boss. Only the shoemaker Ching Lee is wise to the substitution. Kapoor’s imitation of Presley is most visible in the hit number Bar bar dekho, sung by Mohammed Rafi

DHEUER PARE DHEU

aka Waves after Waves

1962 100? b&w Bengali

co-d/co-p/co-sc/c B.K. Sanyal

co-d/co-sc Smritish Guha-Thakurta

co-p M. Dutta Gupta pc Renaissance Films

st S. Dey m Ravi Shankar

lp Shankar, Shampa, Badal

Most of the cast and crew headed by the former photographer Sanyal were new to cinema when they made this low-budget film in the wake of S. Ray’s pioneering work in Bengal (Ravi Shankar had also scored Ray’s Apu Trilogy). Set in a small fishing village, it tells of the fisherman Natal (Shankar) and his friend Loton (Badal). Natal marries their childhood companion, Padma (Shampa), but is later feared drowned in a fishing accident. Padma then marries Loton. When Natal returns, observing their happiness through the window of their home, he goes away again and drowns himself. The film’s narrative pace is virtually static but the acting, the music and the extremely aestheticised imagery keep the viewer interested.

GANGA MAIYA TOHE PIYARI CHADHAIBO

1962 ?’ b&w Bhojpuri

d Kundan Kumar pc Nirmal Pics s Nasir Hussain lyr Shailendra c R.K. Pandit m Chitragupta

lp Kumkum, Ashim Kumar, Nasir Hussain, Tiwari, Mishra, Helen, Leela Mishra, Bhagwan Sinha, Tuntun, Kumari Padma

The first feature of the now thriving Bhojpuri cinema, the rhythmic and flowery Central Indian dialect of Hindi approximating Brijbhasha, the language associated with North Indian classical music. In this melodrama Sumitra (Kumkum) is married, according to the film’s publicity, ‘in the style to which all young women aspire’, only to find herself widowed soon after. A variety of villains include her father, the drunken Lakhan Singh, her father-in-law and other members of the village who see her as a harbinger of bad luck, but she eventually overcomes these obstacles and causes the village to revise its orthodox assumptions.

GUNDAMMA KATHA

aka Manithan Maravillai

1962 166’ b&w Telugu/Tamil

d K. Kameshwara Rao[Te]/Chakrapani[Ta) pc Vijaya co-p B. Nagi Reddy co-p/st Chakrapani dial D.Y. Narasaraju lyr Pingali Nagenda Rao c Marcus Bartley m Ghantasala Venkateshwara Rao

lp N.T. Rama Rao[Te]/Gemini Ganesh[Ta], A. Nageshwara Rao, S.V. Ranga Rao, Savitri, Vijayalakshmi, Jamuna, Relangi Venkatramaiah

The old woman Gundamma has a son, an exploited stepdaughter and a spoilt daughter for whom she hopes to get a ‘resident’ son-in-law who can also look after the rest of the family. She gets two: the brothers Anji and Raja, who teach the old woman a lesson. Producer Chakrapani credited himself with the direction of the film’s Tamil version Manithan Maravillai but it was a failure, unlike the major success of the original Telugu. Regarded as the last film of Vijaya’s ‘golden age’.

GYARAH HAZAAR LADKIYAN

1962 152’ b&w Hindi

d/st/co-sc K.A. Abbas pc Film Friends p/co-sc Ali Sardar Jafri lyr Majrooh Sultanpuri c Ramchandra m N. Dutta

lp Mala Sinha, Bharat Bhushan, Helen, Jugnu, Baby Farida, Baby Vidyarani, Baby Vijay, Soni Sultana, Nirmala Mansukhani, Minal, Noor, Nadira, David, Madhavi, Imtiaz

The noted Urdu poet Ali Sardar Jafri co-wrote and produced Abbas’s film set among journalists. Puran (Bhushan) rebels against his millionaire father and joins a progressive journal. Reporting on working women, he falls in love with Asha (Sinha), a clerk in a food-rationing office. When his father forces Puran to leave his job, he starts his own paper. With the end of rationing after the war, Asha loses her job and her younger sister Uma becomes a cabaret dancer. In self-defence, Uma kills the lecherous nightclub boss and Asha takes the blame. Puran defends Asha in court where his speeches extol working women.

HALF TICKET

1962 168’ b&w Hindi

d Kalidas pc Cine Technicians Prod, st Surid Kar sc Ramesh Pant lyr Shailendra c Apurba Bhattacharjee m Salil Choudhury

lp Kishore Kumar, Pran, Madhubala, Manorama, Om Prakash, Helen, Shammi, Tuntun, Moni Chatterjee, Sailen Bose, Dilip Mukherjee, Anil Ganguly, B.R. Kapoor, Mauji, Zeb Rehman

Slapstick crime thriller parodying the genre with Indian cinema’s weirdest and most sustained chase sequence. Raja Babu (Pran) stuffs stolen diamonds into the hip pocket of Vijay (Kumar), standing in front of him in a railway ticket queue. Vijay, a rich man’s socialist son with a bizarre way of organising protests, is running away from home dressed in shorts and a schoolboy cap to obtain the half-price ticket available to schoolchildren. Throughout the rest of the film, Raja Babu chases Vijay and keeps making ineffectual grabs at the hero’s hip pocket as they go through Bombay, visit a Cossack stage dance with Helen, a nautanki performance and eventually wind up in a crane, a hot-air balloon and an aeroplane that lands them atop a palm tree. The crazy plot recalls the Tashlin/Lewis films and the Marx Brothers as well as the boisterous traditions of Indian urbanised folk theatre.

HANSULI BANKER UPAKATHA

aka Folk Tales of River Bend

1962 122’ b&w Bengali

d/sc Tapan Sinha p S.L. Jalan st Tarashankar Bannerjee c Bimal Mukherjee m Hemanta Mukherjee

lp Kali Bannerjee, Dilip Roy, Ranjana Bannerjee, Ansuya Gupta, Lily Chakraborty, Robi Ghosh

Following in the wake of S. Ray’s films set in Bengali villages (cf. Dheuer Pare Dheu, 1962), Sinha situates his film in 1941 in a village by the Kopai river. The isolated, bamboo-surrounded village is dominated by a greedy zamindar and an ineffectual chief, Banwari (K. Bannerjee). Young Karali (Roy) leads the drive for change, abandoning the fields for the railroad yard, which eventually succeeds when Banwari is killed and WW2 makes its impact on the village. Sinha uses pathetic fallacy imagery (a monsoon) to signal the advent of a new era and deploys a flowery style for scenes depicting the past while the present is filmed in an earthier, more humorous manner. The music track is enhanced by folk melodies.

HARIYALI AUR RAASTA

1962 168’ b&w Hindi

d Vijay Bhatt pc Prakash Pics s Dhruva Chatterjee dial Qamar Jalalabadi lyr Hasrat Jaipuri, Shailendra c Bipin Gajjar m Shankar-Jaikishen

lp Mala Sinha, Manoj Kumar, Shashikala, Krishnakumari, Manmohan Krishna, Surendranath, Aroon, Chopra, Samar Roy, Om Prakash

A hit musical melodrama set in Darjeeling’s tea plantations and one of Sinha’s best-known films. Shankar (M. Kumar) falls in love with Shobhana (Sinha), the daughter of the plantation supervisor Shivnath (Krishna). However, Shankar is due to marry the vampish Rita (Shashikala). To make life simpler at the plantation, Shobhana uses a train accident to disappear and to start a new life as Kamala, a hospital nurse. Shankar marries the spendthrift Rita and when their son Ramesh falls ill the boy is nursed back to health by ‘Kamala’. Then Shankar himself falls ill and Shobhana’s second rescue act brings the couple together again. Hits include Ibtyade-ishq hum sari raatjaage and the title number Yeh hariyali aur yeh raasta, both sung by Lata Mangeshkar (the former being a duet with Mukesh).

KANCHANJUNGHA

1962 102’ col Bengali

d/s/m Satyajit Ray pc N.C.A. Prod, c Subrata Mitra

lp Chhabi Biswas, Anil Chatterjee, Karuna Bannerjee, Anubha Gupta, Subrata Sen, Sibani Singh, Alaknanda Roy, Arun Mukherjee, N. Vishwanathan, Pahadi Sanyal, Nilima Chatterjee, Vidya Sinha

Ray’s first colour film and his first original script is a naturalist drama set in ‘real time’ (shot at a ratio of slightly over 1:2) over an afternoon in the tourist hill-station of Darjeeling (cf. a similar plot structure in Ray’s next original script, Nayak, 1966). Indranath Roy Choudhury (Biswas), whom Ray described as a ‘domineering British title-holding father’, heads a large upper-class family on the last day of their holiday in Darjeeling surrounded by snowcapped mountains and swirling mists. His long-suffering wife Labanya (Bannerjee) is relegated to a secondary role while he encourages a possible marriage between their youngest daughter Monisha (Roy) with the pompous, foreign-returned Engineer Pranab Bannerjee (Vishwanathan). The elder daughter Anima (Gupta) confronts her alcoholic husband Shankar (Sen), openly acknowledging her affair with another man. The philandering son Anil (A. Chatterjee) loses one girlfriend and acquires another. Brother-in-law Jagdish (Sanyal) is only interested in bird-watching. The lower-class Sibsankar Roy, Anil’s former tutor, tries to inveigle a job for his nephew Ashok (Mukherjee) from the patriarch, but when a job is offered the nephew turns it down, striking up a close friendship with Monisha instead, the latter having rejected her father’s choice for a husband. The most significant aspect of the film is not the muchtouted non-judgemental humanism nor the ‘rounded’ characters in this ensemble piece, but the mobilisation of a suspense formula (patterned on the country house murder mystery) in which something ‘dramatic’ always seems about to happen but never does. In the end, the only ‘crime’ committed is the wealthy patriarch’s insistence on exerting a ‘traditional’ authority in a new, independent and industrial era. Although largely a naturalist drama, the casting of Biswas consciously mobilises a melodramatic stereotype, giving the film an iconic distance. The film is also remarkable for its use of pastel colours (unfortunately, the original negative lias been damaged and existing prints do not always reproduce Ray’s and Mitra’s intended colour schemes) and the sound effect at the end when the humming of a Nepali boy suddenly expands to echo through the valleys dominated by the Kanchanjungha peak.

KING KONG

1962 ?’ b&w Hindi

d Babubhai Mistri pc Santosh Prod, s V. Pande, Madhur, Masterji dial M.R. Nawab lyr Majrooh Sultanpuri c Keki Mistry m Chitragupta

lp Dara Singh, Kumkum, Chandrasekhar, Pravin Choudhury, Sheila Kashmiri, Kamal Mehra, Leela Mishra, Paul Sharma, Uma Dutt

Dara Singh’s best-known 60s stunt movie. King Kong is the title that King Hingoo bestows upon the strongest man in his kingdom. The reigning King Kong discovers a mysterious man (Singh) in a forest who appears to be stronger than he and who eventually defeats him. It emerges that the new King Kong is the son of the strong man deposed by Hingoo. The new prince is imprisoned but breaks out and defeats the entire palace.

KULAGOTHRALU

1962 166’ b&w Telugu

d/st/sc K. Pratyagatma pc Prasad Arts Pics p A.V. Subba Rao dial Acharya Athreya lyr Kosaraju, Sri Sri, C. Narayana Reddy, Dasarathi

c A. Vincent m Saluri Rajeshwara Rao

lp A. Nageshwara Rao, Krishnakumari, Relangi Venkatramaiah, Suryakantam, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Nirmala, G. Varalakshmi, Ramana Reddy, Sandhya, Girija, Padmanabham

Pratyagatma’s 2nd film is a musical melodrama and tells of hero Ravi who decides to marry a lower-caste woman and has to leave home to do so. The film included several comedy interludes featuring Venkatramaiah and established Krishnakumari as a major Telugu star while confirming the director’s signature in the Prasad tradition of musical family melodramas.

MAHAMANTRI TIMMARASU

1962 177’ b&w Telugu

d K. Kameshwara Rao pc Gauthami Prod. p N. Ramabhramam, A. Pundarikakshyya m Pendyala Nageshwara Rao

lp N.T. Rama Rao, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Lingamurthy, L. Vijayalakshmi, S. Varalakshmi, A.V. Subba Rao, Devika, Relangi Venkatramaiah, Shobhan Babu, Rajashri, K. Mukkamala, Radhakumari

One of the many costumed spectacles featuring the Vijayanagara Emperor Krishnadeva Raya and his court (cf. the popular Tenali Ramakrishna films of 1941 and 1956). The king (NTR) marries two women, Chinna Devi (Vijayalakshmi) and Tirumaladevi (Varalakshmi). The only way he can end his war with Veerabhadra Gajapathi is to claim Annapurna (Devika) in marriage as well. The war drama and court intrigue includes a murder for which Timmarasu (Gummadi) is falsely accused. The musical consolidated Kameshwara Rao’s reputation for making box-office hits in the genre.

NENJIL ORE ALAYAM

1962 164’ b&w Tamil

d/sc C.V. Sridhar p Chitralaya c A. Vincent m Vishwanathan-Ramamurthy

lp Devika, Kalyan Kumar, S.P. Muthuraman, Nagesh, Rama Rao, Raghavan, Manorama, Kutti Padmini

Melodrama shot on one single location in fifteen days. The doctor (Kalyan Kumar) at a cancer hospital is in love with Seetha (Devika) who comes to tend to her dying husband Venu (Muthuraman), who urges his wife not to remain a widow and to marry the doctor. When the doctor has to perform surgery on Venu, Seetha is not convinced that his intentions are strictly medical. Although the doctor succeeds in saving Venu’s life, his relationship with Seetha is spoiled and he dies of a heart attack. The film’s hit song, ‘Engiruadalum vazhga’ became a classic number about unrequited love. Sridhar’s Hindi version Dil Ek Mandir (1963) proved equally successful, featuring Raaj Kumar, Rajendra Kumar and Meena Kumari.

SAHIB BIBI AUR GHULAM

aka Master, Mistress, Servant aka King, Queen, Knave aka King, Queen and Slave 1962 152’(120’) b&w Hindi-Urdu d/sc Abrar Alvi p Guru Dutt pc Guru Dutt Films

st Bimal Mitra’s novel Saheb Bibi Golam (1952) lyr Shakeel Badayuni c V.K. Murthy m Hemant Kumar [Hemanta Mukherjee]

lp Meena Kumari, Guru Dutt, Waheeda Rehman, Rehman, Nasir Hussain, Sapru, Sajjan, S.N. Bannerjee, Dhumal, Krishna Dhawan, Jawahar Kaul, Harindranath Chattopadhyay, Minoo Mumtaz, Pratima Devi, Ranjit Kumari, Bikram Kapoor

After the failure at the box office of Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959), Guru Dutt had let M. Sadiq direct his Chaudhvin Ka Chand (1960) before making this elegiac movie which he credited to his long-term collaborator and scenarist, Alvi. Taken from a classic Bengali novel, the story is set in the 19th C. zamindari milieu of the Choudhury household. It is seen through the eyes of the lower-class but educated Bhoothnath (Dutt) who arrives in colonial Calcutta looking for work (while British troops loot the shops). Through his city relative Bhoothnath finds accomodation in the Choudhury haveli (ancestral mansion) while working at the Mohini Sindoor factory, which allows the narrative to move from the aristocratically indolent world of the zamindars to the more prosaic one of the Brahmo Samaj. The plot has the hero being fascinated by the lady of the house Chhoti Bahu (M. Kumari), whose husband (Rehman) prefers the company of dancing-girls and all-night drinking bouts. The film gradually gives way to a darker mood as the family loses its fortune and descends to ruin while Chhoti Bahu becomes an alcoholic. At times compared to Satyajit Ray’s Jalsaghar (1958) as a commentary on Bengal’s decaying feudalism, Dutt’s film is a romantic and somewhat nostalgic tale about a bygone era, presenting the past and the future through the contradictory attitudes of two female figures. Meena Kumari’s skilful performance, redolent with sensuality (e.g. the scene where she entices her husband to stay by her side through the song Na jao saiyan, sung by Geeta Dutt), is counterpointed by Waheeda Rehman’s robust and girlish presence (esp. in the Bhanwra bada nadaan number sung by Asha Bhosle). The film itself is told entirely in flashback and the long shadows of history invade the images in sequences such as the Saakiya aaj mujhe neend number (sung by Asha Bhosle) where all the dancers are seen in shadow while the singing courtesan (Minoo Mumtaz) is bathed in light.

SAUTELA BHAI

1962 ?’ b&w Hindi

d/co-sc Mahesh Kaul pc Alok Bharati st Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s novel Boikunther Will co-sc/dial Dev Kishen lyr Shailendra c R.L. Nagar m Anil Biswas

lp Guru Dutt, Pronoti Bhattacharya, Bipin Gupta, Raaj Kumar, Ranibala, Asit Sen, Bela Bose, Radheshyam, Samar Chatterjee, Ratna Kanhaiyalal, Lakshman Singh

Melodrama about an extended family in Bengal. Baikunth Majumdar (Gupta), who has a son by a previous marriage, remarries. His new wife Bhawani raises her stepson Gokul along with her own son Vinod. When they grow up Vinod (Raaj Kumar) goes to the city to study while Gokul (Dutt) manages the family shop. Vinod turns bad in the city and his parents decide to leave the family property to Gokul. Vinod returns and contests the will. The battle between the stepbrothers over ‘mother’ and the will is resolved by Gokul’s other-worldly innocence which succeeds in uniting the family.

SHRI KRISHNARJUNA YUDDHAM

1962 174’ b&w Telugu/Tamil

d/st K.V. Reddy pc Jayanti Pics dial/lyr Pingali Nagendra Rao m Pendyala Nageshwara Rao

lp N.T. Rama Rao, A. Nageshwara Rao, B. Saroja Devi, S. Varalakshmi, Sriranjani Jr., Chhaya Devi, Rushyendramani, Balasaraswathi, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Kantarao, Allu Ramalingaiah

Madhabi Mukherjee and Satindra Battacharya in Subarnarekha

Big-budget hit Telugu mythological derived from the Mahabharata. Krishna (NTR) has to confront his disciple Arjuna (Nageshwara Rao) in order to sustain the war. NTR, who made a career playing Krishna roles, here shifts the icon away from the romantic into the warlike, apparently a first in Telugu film. The music of Pendyala and lyricist Pingali was as usual successful, particularly the comedy hit Anchelanchelu sung by B. Gopalam and Swarnalatha.

SIRI SAMPADALU

1962 167’ b&w Telugu

d P. Pullaiah pc Padmasri Pics s Pinisetty lyr Athreya, Kosaraju, Sri Sri m Master Venu

lp A. Nageshwara Rao, Chittor V. Nagaiah, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Chalam, Ramana Reddy, Savitri, Shantakumari, Suryakantam, Girija, Vasanthi, Surabhi Balasaraswathi, Relangi Venkatramaiah

Family melodrama about the decline of a feudal patriarch and the rise of a new generation with different values. The head of the family, Nayudu (Nagaiah), severs relations with his sister’s family since he holds his brother-in-law responsible for his father’s death. He also refuses to let his son Prasad (Nageshwara Rao) marry Padma (Savitri). The family becomes impoverished and Prasad has to restore both his father’s honour and the family fortunes. He also marries Padma. Released at the same time as Kulagothralu (1962), also a family melodrama interspersed with comedy routines, Pullaiah’s film flopped despite his reputation in Telugu cinema.

SUBARNAREKHA

1962 143’ b&w Bengali

d/sc Ritwik Ghatak pc J.J. Films

st/p Radheshyam Jhunjhunwala c Dilip Ranjan Mukhopadhyay m Bahadur Khan

lp Abhi Bhattacharya, Bijon Bhattacharya, Madhabi Mukherjee, Geeta De, Sriman Tarun, Satindra Bhattacharya, Abanish Bannerjee, Jahar Roy

One of Ghatak’s most impressive and complex films, released in 1965, tells of Ishwar Chakraborty (A. Bhattacharya) and his young sister Seeta who start out in a refugee camp after Partition. After a brief scene ironically evoking the vagaries of nationalism, the two rescue the boy Abhiram (Tarun) when his mother Kausalya (De) is abducted. A businessman appoints Ishwar to run a foundry and he takes the two children to the new abode. Abhiram is sent to school and returns years later (S. Bhattacharya) intent on becoming a writer and marrying Seeta (M. Mukherjee). As Abhiram is an Untouchable, Ishwar finds his job prospects threatened and he asks the boy to leave, arranging for Seeta to marry someone else. She elopes with Abhiram and they, with their baby son, live in a shack in Calcutta until Abhiram dies in an accident and Seeta is forced to turn to prostitution. The lonely old Ishwar contemplates suicide and with his old friend Harprasad (B. Bhattacharya) he goes on a drinking binge in Calcutta, culminating in a visit to a brothel. He is ushered into his own sister’s room. Ishwar is devastated and Seeta kills herself, watched by her son. At the end of the film, an aged Ishwar is leading Seeta’s child to the promised ‘new house’ by the river which forms the visual leitmotiv throughout the film. Ghatak endowed virtually every sequence with a wealth of historical overtones through an iconography of violation, destruction, industrialism and the disasters of famine and Partition. Most of the dialogue and the visuals are a patchwork of literary and cinematic quotations enhanced by Ghatak’s characteristic redemptive use of music. This strategy ensconces the characters and their behaviour deep into the fabric of history itself, constantly referring their actions to forces playing on a broader canvas than the space-time occupied by an individual. A famous example is the sequence set on an abandoned airstrip with the wreck of a WW2 aeroplane where the children playfully reconstruct its violence until the girl comes up against the frightening image of the goddess Kali (who turns out to be a rather pathetic travelling performer). Later, in dappled light, the older Seeta sings a dawn raga on the airstrip. In a classic dissolve, the old Ishwar throws a newspaper showing Yuri Gagarin’s space exploration into the foundry where it bursts into flames which then dissolve into the rainwater outside Seeta’s hovel. Harprasad, who had earlier rescued Ishwar from committing suicide by quoting from Tagore’s Shishu Tirtha, later in the night club parodies an episode from the Upanishads using an East Bengal dialect. Other quotes from this extraordinary sequence including Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and, through the music, Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960). Kumar Shahani pointed out that when brother and sister confront each other in the brothel, Ghatak’s sudden and brutal recourse to the highly conventionalised codes of melodrama abruptly stresses the usually hidden theme of incestuous aggression in the commercial Indian cinema while also commenting on the brutalisation of India’s revered classical heritage (cf. Shahani, 1986).

AKHAND SAUBHAGYAVATI

1963 151’ b&w Gujarati

d Manhar Raskapur pc Rajat Films p Rajab Shaida st/dial/lyr Barkat Virani sc Ramnik Vaid m Kalyanji-Anandji

lp Asha Parekh, Mahesh Kumar, Arvind, Agha

Raskapur’s effort to introduce Hindi movie-derived idioms into Gujarati was also the first film in the language to be funded by the FFC (see NFDC). Asha Parekh in her first Gujarati lead role plays the virtuous Usha, who falls for the weak Arun (Kumar). The evil Pankaj however spreads rumours about Usha’s infidelity and causes Arun to disappear on their wedding night. The excessively dramatic scenes that follow feature other characters including the sexy vamp, Maya, and sequences in which Usha’s house is burned down, before she is proved innocent and receives her now-repentant husband.

BABA RAMDEV

aka Baba Ramdev Peer, aka Ramdev

1963 ?’ b&w Rajasthani

d Manibhai Vyas pc Ranglok s Naval Mathur c Narottam m Shivram

lp Mahipal, Anita Guha, Lalita Desai, Ratna, B.M. Vyas, Mohan Modi, Deepak, Madhumati, Dalda, Sarita

Rajasthani Saint film and mythological made by a Gujarati director known for mythologicals like Satyavan Savitri (1949) and Bhakta Tulsidas (1951). Featuring two of the most prominent Hindi stars associated with the genre, Mahipal and Guha, the film tells of Ramdev, a 13th C. Vaishnavite saint poet, unusually presented as a reincarnation of Vishnu (most Saint films usually emphasise the earthly origins of their subjects). Disgusted with his god when famine besets his kingdom, the king of Pokharan tries to commit suicide by jumping into the sea but he is placated by Vishnu who is reborn as the king’s son. A variety of genres are telescoped into this miracle-laden film as Ramdev rescues his future wife, the Princess Netal, from bandits, and then saves his sister from her mother-in-law’s tyranny. He also defeats the orthodox Yogiraj Kumbheshwar while espousing the cause of the lowest Untouchable castes.

Raja Paranjpe and Nutan in Bandini

BANDINI

1963 157’(120’) b&w Hindi

d/p Bimal Roy pc Bimal Roy Prod.

st Jarasandha [Charuchandra Chakraborty] sc M. Ghosh lyr Shailendra c Kamal Bose m S.D. Burman

lp Nutan, Ashok Kumar, Dharmendra, Raja Paranjpe, Tarun Bose, Asit Sen, Chandrima Bhaduri, Moni Chatterjee, Leela, Bela Bose, Iftikhar, Hiralal

Nutan’s best-known film is set in the women’s ward of a pre-independence prison. The story is based on a book by Jarasandha, a former Alipore central jail superintendent who wrote fictional versions of his experiences (Louha-Kapat, 1953; Tamasha, 1958; Nyaydanda, 1961). The gentle inmate Kalyani (Nutan), imprisoned for murder, appears determined to serve her full sentence, resisting the kind overtures of the prison doctor (Dharmendra). Her past is told in flashback. In a 30s Bengal riddled with revolutionary terrorists, she had become involved with the anarchist Bikash Ghosh (A. Kumar), and tries to save his life by claiming to be his wife. Her father (Paranjpe) insists that for her honour’s sake she must really marry the man. Bikash disappears and Kalyani later learns that he has married another woman. To avoid her father’s dishonour she leaves the village and becomes a servant in a nursing home where she encounters a particularly obnoxious patient who is revealed to be Bikash’s wife. Regarding her as the cause of all her and her father’s suffering, Kalyani poisons the woman and assumes her guilt. The sentimental story, which suggests a straight link between terrorism and patricide, is redeemed by the most accomplished cinematography Bimal Roy ever achieved and by Nutan’s performance, perhaps the only consistent expression in Indian film of female guilt.

BLUFF MASTER

1963 ?’ b&w Hindi

d/sc Manmohan Desai pc Subhash Pics

st Madhusudan Kalelkar dial/lyr Rajinder Krishen c N. Satyen m Kalyanji-Anandji

lp Shammi Kapoor, Saira Banu, Pran, Lalita Pawar, Mohan Choti, Tuntun, Rashid Khan, Niranjan Sharma, Santosh Kumar, Ramlal, Shyamlal, Jugal Kishore, Charlie Walker

Desai inaugurates his characteristic ‘performance masquerade’ style with this virtual Shammi Kapoor solo act. Ashok (Kapoor) is a chronic liar who lives by his wits. As a gossip columnist he takes and publishes a photograph of a woman slapping a man in the street. The woman, Seema (Banu), is the boss’s daughter. After many adventures, including an impromptu stage performance when he masquerades as his own father and violent encounters with Seema’s villainous suitor Kumar (Pran), Ashok wins the woman. The film consistently emphasises a lumpenised street counter-culture culminating in the boisterous and popular number Govinda ala re ala performed by Kapoor on the city streets with numerous drunken youths.

GUMRAH

1963 155’ b&w Hindi

d/p B.R. Chopra pc B.R. Films dial Akhtar-ul-Iman lyr Sahir Ludhianvi m Ravi

lp Ashok Kumar, Mala Sinha, Sunil Dutt, Shashikala, Nirupa Roy, Nana Palsikar, Vandana

Chopra’s melodrama about marital infidelity sees Meena (Sinha), who loves Rajinder (Dutt), forced to marry her widowed brother-in-law Ashok (A. Kumar). Most of the story is occupied by a blackmailer (Shashikala) who, it transpires at the end of the film, was prompted by Ashok. The film features some famous Mahendra Kapoor songs (In havaon mein, in fizaon mein; Yeh hawa, yeh fiza; Chalo ek baar phir se ajnabi banjayen hum dono).

IRUVAR ULLAM

1963 165’ b&w Tamil

d L. V. Prasad pc Prasad Movies p Anand s M. Karunanidhi lyr Kannadasan c K.S. Prasad m K.V. Mahadevan

lp Sivaji Ganesan, B. Saroja Devi, M.R. Radha, S.V. Ranga Rao, T.R. Ramchandran, T.P. Muthulakshmi, Sandhya, Padmini Priyadarshini, takshmirajyam, A. Karunanidhi

Medical student and playboy Selvam (Ganesan) falls for the wiles of Vasanthi (Priyadarshini) who only appears to covet his ancestral wealth. Later Selvam meets the schoolteacher Shanta (Saroja Devi) who is forced by her parents to marry him. However, she refuses to live with her husband because of his earlier affair. When Selvam is accused of murdering his former girlfriend, the crisis reconciles the couple. The playboy song Paravaigalpalavidham (sung by T.M. Soundararajan) was a hit. Prasad produced the Hindi version made by T. Prakash Rao as Sasural (1961) starring Rajendra Kumar.

ITO SITO BOHUTO

1963 113’ b&w Assamese

d/s/m Brojen Barua pc J.P. Cine Art lyr Navakanta Barua, Keshab Mahanta c Shankar Bannerjee

lp Phani Sarma, Brojen Barua, Sarat Das, Muazzin Ali, Girin Barua, Probin Bora, Beena Das, Manideepa

Barua’s remarkable debut is Assam’s first comedy feature. It tells of an eccentric retired army major (Sarma) who clings to his authority and continues to expect military discipline. The fast-paced film is remembered mainly for Sarma’s best-known, albeit uncharacteristic, film role.

MAHANAGAR

aka The Big City

1963 131’ b&w Bengali

d/sc/m Satyajit Ray p R.D. Bansal

pc R.D.B. & Co. st Narendranath Mitra’s Abataranika c Subrata Mitra

lp Anil Chatterjee, Madhabi Mukherjee, Jaya Bhaduri, Haren Chatterjee, Shefalika Devi, Prasenjit Sarkar, Haradhan Bannerjee, Vicky Redwood

Ray’s first major incursion into the Calcutta environment after the brief sequence in Apur Sansar (1959). The film chronicles the shift from feudal social arrangements to Independent capitalism and urban mass culture. Middle-class clerk Subrata Majumdar (A. Chatterjee) persuades his wife Arati (Mukherjee) to take a job as a saleswoman. The large joint family, including his sister (played by Bhaduri in her debut) is horrified at the thought of a working woman in their midst. For Arati, going door-to-door selling knitting machines opens up a new world which includes an Anglo-Indian friend, Edith (Redwood), and her employer Mukherjee (Bannerjee). Earning money changes Arati’s status in the family, causing further problems, especially when her husband loses his job. When Edith is unjustly sacked for racial reasons, Arati resigns in protest and throws the family into crisis. The film ends with an almost socialist-realist idiom as the camera cranes up to show the couple striding with determination into the teeming proletariat on the street. Different characters stand in for the conflicting ideologies: the father-in-law expects feudal loyalty from his former students; the entrepreneur Mukherjee espouses ruthless business ethics and the salesgirl Edith exemplifies the orthodox bias against working women as ‘Westernised’ and with loose morals. Ray often adapts a shooting style to suit the different locales represented by these individuals, using e.g. expressionist low and wide-angle shots in Mukherjee’s office and in the conversation between the two women in the ladies’ rest room, whereas ‘period’ realism prevails for life in the family house. In between the sets designed by Bansi Chandragupta are the location shots, beginning with shots of tramlines and ending with the sweeping upward crane. Madhabi Mukherjee’s performance dominates the film, as it would again in Charulata (1964).

MERE MEHBOOB

1963 164’ col Urdu

d/co-sc H.S. Rawail pc Rahul Theatres st/dial/co-sc Vinod Kumar lyr Shakeel Badayuni c G. Singh m Naushad

lp Ashok Kumar, Rajendra Kumar, Sadhana, Nimmi, Johnny Walker, Pran, Sundar, Amita

A romance presumably set in early 20th C. Lucknow. Anwar (R. Kumar) glimpses the veiled Husna (Sadhana) and composes a love song for her while he sings at a college concert. Their subsequent meetings are bedevilled by class differences and family intrigues. The Eastmancolor musical, shot entirely in studios, effectively uses artifice to convey nostalgia for the elaborate courtly manners of a bygone (colonial) era. Naushad’s music enhanced this approach with e.g. the famous title number Mere mehboob tujhe meri mohabat ki kasam (sung in two versions by Mohammed Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar).

MOODUPADAM

1963 161’ b&w Malayalam

d Ramu Kariat p T.K. Pareekutty pc Chandrathara Prod. s S.K. Pottakkad dial K. Padmanabhan Nair, K.T. Mohammed lyr P. Bhaskaran, Yusuf Ali Kacheri c A. Vincent m Baburaj

lp Sathyan, Nellikode Bhaskaran, Sheela, Premji, K. Balakrishnan Menon, Madhu, Adoor Bhasi, Poppu, Venu, Kothamangalam Ali, Kunjam, Ambika, Santha Devi

Kariat’s film made at the Vijaya-Vauhini Studio dramatises Hindu-Christian and Hindu-Muslim relations: sexual relations between the former seem possible but sadly not between the latter. The four children of two working-class neighbours, one Hindu family and one Muslim family, grow up together. The Hindu boy Appu and the Muslim girl Ameena are in love but social taboos keep them apart. Having enabled his sister to marry a Christian man, Appu goes to Bombay where he becomes a respected playwright. Ameena’s brother Ali is killed by communalist fanatics in Bombay but Appu withholds the news from the Muslim family, sending them money and gifts in Ali’s name. Appu eventually arranges his beloved Ameena’s marriage to a Muslim soldier.

MOOGAMANASULU

1963 164’ b&w Telugu

d/sc Adurthi Subba Rao pc Babu Movies p C. Sundaram cost/co-dial/co-lyr Acharya Athreya co-st/co-dial Mullapudi Venkatramana co-lyr Dasarathi, Kosaraju c P.L. Roy m K.V. Mahadevan

lp A. Nageshwara Rao, Savitri, Jamuna, Suryakantam, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Padmanabham, Allu Ramalingaiah, Annapoorna, Nagabhushanam

Hit Telugu musical about rebirth. Boatman Gopi (Nageshwara Rao) ferries Radha (Savitri) every day across the Godavari river and falls in love with her although he is due to marry Gowri (Jamuna), a woman from his own class. Radha marries a rich man (Padmanabham) and later reappears as a widow. Her relationship with Gopi, which causes a scandal, is presented as a continuation of their relationship in a previous life, shown in flashbacks. The film established the reputation of its composer, Mahadevan, and his long-term collaboration with Athreya and Subba Rao, the latter remaking the film as Milan (1967) with Sunil Dutt and Nutan.

NINAMANNINNYA KALAPADAKAL

aka Bloodstained Footsteps

1963 165’ b&w Malayalam

d N.N. Pishareddy pc Navarathna Prod.
s Parappuram lyr V. Bhaskaran c U. Rajagopal m Baburaj

lp Prem Nazir, P.J. Anthony, Ambika, Madhu, Sheela, Kambisseri, S.P. Pillai, Bahadur, Adoor Bhasi, Adoor Bhawani, Shantakumari, Kottayam Shantha, Mavelikkara L. Ponnamma, Susheela

A relentless melodrama about neighbours and childhood sweethearts tragically separated when their fathers die. He joins the army and she has to rely on another man’s financial help. Wounded at the front and comforted by a friendly nurse, he returns to find his girl married to the drunken village butcher. He returns to the war, sees his best friend die and marries the man’s sister but has to go back to the front before consummation can take place. The film adapted a story by Parappuram, who specialised in military stories (cf. Anveshichu Kandatiyilla, 1967) and was the first effort at making a war movie in the language, although much of the action was shot on sets.

NIRJAN SAIKATE

1963 130’ b&w Bengali

d/s Tapan Sinha pc New Theatres (Exhibitors)

st Samaresh Bose c Bimal Mukherjee m Kalipada Sen

lp Anil Chatterjee, Sharmila Tagore, Ruma Guha-Thakurta, Chhaya Devi, Renuka Roy, Bharati Devi, Pahadi Sanyal, Jahar Ganguly, Robi Ghosh, Amar Mullick, Upamanyu Chatterjee

A leisurely tale using a narrative format reminiscent of Ophuls’s Le Plaisir (1951) with the coachload of women transposed to a railway carriage. A young writer meets four widows and a jilted young woman on the train to Puri. The rest of the film consists of their interactions, the revelation of their backgrounds and the touristic scenery (including the temple of Konarak).

PARASMANI

1963 ?’ b&w/col Hindi

d Babubhai Mistri pc Movieland s Vishwanath Pande, Madhur dial C.K. Mast lyr Asad Bhopali, Farooq Kaiser, Indivar c Peter Pereira m Laxmikant-Pyarelal

lp Geetanjali, Mahipal, Manhar Desai, Nalini Chonkar, Maruti, Nazi, Uma Dutt, Jugal Kishore, Aruna Irani, Ajit Soni, Shekhar Purohit, Jeevankala, Helen

A special-effects fantasy about the son of a princely state’s army Chief. Jettisoned from a ship by his father during a storm, the son grows into the fearless Paras who falls in love with the princess of the realm. The king is told by a fortune-teller that his son-in-law will cause his death unless the mythical Parasmani diamond, owned by the witch queen of Mayanagari, is acquired. After many adventures, Paras obtains the jewel. The film, although in the tradition of cheap Hindi Arabian Nights fantasies, seems to take its cue from Tamil costume dramas. The inexpensive effects include a fight between Paras and his father on what looks like a cross between a magic carpet and a spaceship. Remembered mainly as the debut of the celebrated composers Laxmikant-Pyarelal, with hits such as Ooi ma yeh kya ho gaya and Hansta hua nurani chehra, filmed in colour.

PERIYA IDATHU PENN

1963 161’ b&w Tamil

d/p/sc T.R. Ramanna pc R.R. Pics st/dial Sakthi Krishnaswamy lyr Kannadasan c M.A. Rehman m Vishwanathan-Ramamurthy

lp M.G. Ramachandran, B. Saroja Devi, M.R. Radha, T.R. Rajkumari, Ashokan, Nagesh, Manimala, Jyothilakshmi, Kolappan

Kailasam Pillai’s (Radha) children, Sabapathi (Ashokan) and Puridham (Saroja), grow into wealthy spoiled brats. The simple, but courageous and wise, farmer Murugappan (MGR) has two female relatives, Thilai (Jothilakshmi), whom he is to marry, and Valli (Manimala), both trained in traditional silambam (stick fighting). Sabapathi also covets Thilai and he challenges Murugappan to a silambam duel while Puridham drugs the honest farmer, so that Thilai is forced to marry Sabapathi. The angry Murugappan then resolves to impose himself on Puridham, bullying her into become his meekly obedient farmer’s wife.

PUNARJANMA

1963 164’ b&w Telugu

d/sc K. Pratyagatma pc Prasad Art Pics

st Gulshan Nanda sc Acharya Athreya lyr Sri Sri, Dasarathi, C. Narayana Reddy, Kosaraju c P.S. Selvaraj m T. Chalapathi Rao

lp A. Nageshwara Rao, Krishnakumari, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Ramana Reddy, Padmanabhan, Prabhakara Reddy, Vasanthi, Suryakantham, Sandhya, Chadalavada

Melodrama about Gopi, an artist (Nageshwara Rao) who goes crazy when an electrical short circuit destroys his sculpture. The doctor has the dancer and singer Vasanthi (Krishnakumari) move in to restore the sculptor to sanity. The two plan to marry, but his return to health also causes an attack of amnesia. The hero can only recognise his lover when a second accident reminds him of his first illness.

RAKTHA TILAKAM

1963 166’ b&w Tamil

d/sc Dada Mirasi pc National Movies p Panchu Arunachalam co-dial/lyr Kannadasan co-dial P.C. Ganesan, Thyagan c B.S. Jagirdar m K.V. Mahadevan

lp Sivaji Ganesan, C.K. Nagesh, M.N. Kannappa, K. Shanmughasundaram, Savitri, C.R. Parthiban, Pushpalatha, Veerasamy, Manorama, S.R. Janaki, Saradambal, Nambirajan, Natarajan, Dandapani, Dhanapal, Chitra, Suguna, Kannadasan

Ganesan’s nationalist war movie against the background of the 1962 India-China conflict. The hero Kumar (Ganesan) and heroine Kamala (Savitri) are colleagues at university. She begins to appreciate him when he rescues a play she directs by understudying her brother in the role of Othello. Kamala then joins her father in Beijing while Kumar joins the Indian Army. In Beijing Kamala marries a Chinese Army doctor (Nambirajan) and accompanies him to the 1962 war as a nurse by day and an Indian spy by night. Kumar captures her and she is to be shot at dawn when her espionage activities come to light. She is killed by her Chinese husband. Kumar dies in battle holding on to the Indian flag. The film is an important turning-point in Ganesan’s and scenarist Kannadasan’s efforts to repudiate their DMK associations by valorising Congress nationalism. Kannadasan played a small role as a poet, singing two famous songs, the solo Oru koppaiyele and the nostalgic send-off group number Pasumai niraindha ninaivigule (both sung by T.M. Soundararajan, the second a duet with P. Susheela).

RUSTOM SOHRAB

1963 ?’ b&w Hindi-Urdu

d Vishram Bedekar pc Ramsay Prod. s Kumar Ramsay co-dial Iqbal Nadeem, Masood Mashedi, Jagdish Gautam, Sardar Illham co-dial/lyr Qamar Jalalabadi co-lyr Jan Nissar Akhtar c Nariman Irani m Sayed Hussain

lp Prithviraj Kapoor, Suraiya, Premnath, Mumtaz, Sajjan, Shah Agha, Marilyn

Kumar Ramsay, a member of the family best known for their horror films, scripted this version of the classic Persian legend drawn from the 10th C. Shahnama which was a staple item in the Parsee theatre. Rustom (Kapoor in a role reminiscent of his performance in Mughal-e-Azam, 1960) is the king of Persia whose wife Tehmina (Suraiya) bears him a son while he is away fighting wars. The son Sohrab (Premnath) grows into a powerful warrior and ends up challenging his father. Unaware of each other’s identity, they confront each other on the battlefield where, in true feudal tradition, Rustom triumphs over his son.

SAAT PAKE BANDHA

1963 133’ b&w Bengali

d/s Ajoy Kar pc R.D. Bansal c Bishnu Chakraborty m Hemanta Mukherjee

lp Suchitra Sen, Soumitra Chatterjee, Pahadi Sanyal, Chhaya Devi, Molina Devi, Tarun Kumar, Prasanta Kumar

Suchitra Sen gives a major performance in this marital melodrama. The independent Archana (Sen) tries to overcome her domineering and snobbish mother (Chhaya Devi) by marrying Sukhendu (Chatterjee), a serious university lecturer, but mother continues to interfere, reminding her son-in-law of his poverty. Suffering from divided loyalties, Archana’s problems are aggravated when her husband insists that she sever all ties with her parents. She separates from her husband and decides to complete her studies while living independently. When she finally accepts her wifely duties and returns home it is too late, as Sukhendu has resigned his job and gone abroad. Sen’s finely honed performance often undercuts the ideology her character is supposed to exemplify, evoking the possibility of a more egalitarian representation of women in Bengali cinema. Despite the conservatism of the story, issues of marital compatibility are extensively discussed without invoking conventional patriarchal moralism.

Dilip Raj in Shaher Aur Sapna

SHAHER AUR SAPNA

aka Shehar Aur Sapna aka The City and the Dream

1963 140’(120’) b&w Hindi

d/s K.A. Abbas pc Naya Sansar lyr Ali Sardar Jafri c Ramchandra m J.P. Kaushik

lp Dilip Raj, Surekha Parkar, Nana Palsikar, Manmohan Krishna, David, Anwar Hussain, Rashid Khan, Asit Sen

Abbas’s romantic view of Bombay’s pavement-dwellers tells of a man (Roy) who arrives from a poor Punjabi village to find a job. Amazed at the city’s opulence he soon realises the main problem is to find shelter. He finally settles down with his wife (Surekha) in an unused water pipe where she gives birth to their child. The activities of slum landlords and thieves open the way for property developers and bulldozers and the pavement-dwellers again have to find shelter elsewhere, but this time they act together. For the next decade, this film’s sentimentalised way of showing urban class divisions became the standard, popular idiom for these motifs, extending into Abbas’s own documentaries (cf. Char Shaher Ek Kahani, 1968) and into e.g. Sukhdev’s influential ‘progressive’ featurettes (And Miles To Go..., 1965).

TERE GHAR KE SAAMNE

1963 149’ b&w Hindi

d/s Vijay Anand pc Navketan lyr Hasrat Jaipuri c V. Ratra m S.D. Burman

lp Dev Anand, Nutan, Harindranath Chattopadhyay, Om Prakash, Praveen Choudhury, Zareen, Rashid Khan, Rajendranath

After Paying Guest (1957), this is the best-known Dev Anand-Nutan vehicle. Two feuding millionaires, Seth Karamchand (Chattopadhyay) and Lala Jagannath (Prakash), want to build their houses in front of each other. Jagannath’s son, the architect Rakesh Kumar (D. Anand), is commissioned to construct both houses. In addition, he falls in love with Karamchand’s daughter Sulekha (Nutan). A frothy musical comedy with some classic hits such as Dil ka bhanwar karepukar (sung by Mohammed Rafi), Yeh tanhaai hai re hai (sung by Lata Mangeshkar) and bravura song picturisations including the Dil ka bhanwara number on the steps of the Qutub Minar in Delhi, and the title song, performed by Rafi and Mangeshkar, in which an imagined Nutan appears in miniature in Anand’s whisky glass as they sing the duet.

UTTAR FALGUNI

1963 137’ b&w Bengali

d Asit Sen pc Uttam Kumar Films sc Nripendra Chattopadhyay c Anil Gupta, Jyotish Laha m Robin Chatterjee

lp Suchitra Sen, Bikash Roy, Pahadi Sanyal, Dilip Mukherjee, Chhaya Devi, Jahar Ganguly, Ajit Bannerjee, Kalipada Chakraborty

The unhappily married Debjani (Sen) escapes from her drunken husband Rakhalbabu (Chakraborty) and becomes the courtesan Pannabai. Her former lover, the lawyer Manish Roy (Roy), comes to her rescue when he adopts her daughter Suparna. The adult Suparna (Sen in a double role) also becomes a lawyer, unaware of her real parentage. Debjani’s husband, who had blackmailed his wife for several years, reappears on Suparna’s wedding day, demanding money. Debjani shoots him dead and appears in court, where she is defended first by Manish and then by her daughter, who learns the truth. One of Suchitra Sen’s famous roles appearing both as a Thumri-singing courtesan and her emancipated daughter. The film makes extensive use of Asit Sen’s characteristic panning shots and lap dissolves as narrative bridges, most notably in the montage sequences that show Suparna growing up. The director remade the film in Hindi as Mamata (1966).

VEERA KESARI/BANDHIPOTU

1963 177’ col Kannada/Telugu

d B. Vittalacharya pc Rajalakshmi Prod.

p Sundarlal Nahata dial/co-lyr Soorat Ashwath co-lyr K.R. Seetarama Sastry c Raveekant Nagaich m Ghantasala Venkateshwara Rao

lp Rajkumar[K], Leelavathi[K], Udaya Kumar[K], R. Nagendra Rao[K], N.T. Rama Rao[Te], Krishnakumari[Te]

Vittalacharya’s big-budget return to Kannada cinema is a Rajkumar costumed adventure movie with a complicated plot, characteristic of all the star’s films. King Satyasena of Gandhara is overthrown by his evil stepbrother Shurasena (Kumar). The masked hero Veera Nayaka, who leads the oppressed people, attacks the palace of Princess Mandara Male (Leelavathi), but she is rescued by the masked man’s brother Narasimha Nayaka (Rajkumar/NTR). Veera Nayaka is killed together with his benevolent father Dharma Nayaka (Nagendra Rao) by Shurasena. This episode introduces a second masked man, revealed to be Narasimha Nayaka’s brother. The princess tries to apprehend him but is herself caught. She is then told the truth about the palace intrigues. Narasimha Nayaka is captured, escapes, and eventually overthrows the evil empire of Shurasena. Vittalacharya simultaneously made a Telugu version, Bandhipotu, starring NTR and Krishnakumari.

AROHI

aka Aarohi, aka Ascent

1964 124’ b&w Bengali

d/sc Tapan Sinha p Ashim Pal st Banaphool c Bimal Mukherjee m Hemanta Mukherjee

lp Kali Bannerjee, Dilip Roy, Sipra Mitra, Bikash Roy, Tapan Bhattacharya, Shyam Laha, Chhaya Devi

The romanticised story of a peasant (Bannerjee) who lives in a small village. He learns to read and is befriended by a doctor (D. Roy) who helps him improve his status in the community. The film concentrates on atmospherics and the character of the somewhat irascible peasant anxious that others should accept the knowledge he gained from his readings.

AMADA BATA

aka The Untrodden Road

1964 144’ b&w Oriya

d/sc Amar Ganguly p Babulal Doshi

st Basanti Kumar Pattanayak’s novel dial Gopal Chatray c Deojibhai m Balakrishna Das

lp Geeta, Jharana Das, Lakhmi, Menaka, Kiran, Krishnapriya, Umakant, Akhyay, Sharat, Brindavan

The debut of pioneering Oriya producer Doshi tells of the rebellious Maya (Das) who disapproves of her sister-in-law’s meek assent to the role of obedient housewife. However, the latter’s attitude is merely a ploy to get her husband to split from his family. When Maya gets married, the curtailment of her freedom causes her intense suffering. The moral of the story is that by meekly submitting to her husband, a woman can achieve greater happiness. This reactionary critique of women’s desire for emancipation, adapted from a book by one of Orissa’s first female novelists, is best remembered for Das’s performance.

AMARASHILPI JAKANACHARI/AMARASHILPI JAKANNA

1964 161’ col Kannada/Telugu

d/c B.S. Ranga pc Vikram Prod. s/co-lyr[Te] Samudrala Raghavacharya co-lyr[Te] Dasarathi, Kosaraju, C. Narayana Reddy dia/lyr[K] Chi. Sadashivaiah m Saluri Rajeshwara Rao

lp Kalyana Kumar[K]/A. Nageshwara Rao[Te], B. Saroja Devi, Udaya Kumar [K]/Chittor V. Nagaiah[Te], Narasimhraju, Rama Devi, Girija, Pushpavalli, H.P. Saroja, Relangi Venkatramaiah[Te]

The first Kannada colour movie is a costume spectacle about the sculptor Jakanachari (K. Kumar/Nageshwara Rao) who is apparently responsible for the impressive 12th C. temple sculptures of Belur and Halebid during the reign of the Hoysala King Vishnuvardhana, now a major Karnataka tourist attraction. The sculptor is shown to be inspired by his love for Manjari (Saroja Devi), who is seperated from him by a political conspiracy. Later, Jakanachari has a contest with a young sculptor unaware that the youth is his own son. Kalyana Kumar’s best-known screen role.

BHARGAVI NILAYAM

1964 175’ b&w Malayalam

d A. Vincent p T.K Pareekutty pc Chandrathara Prod, s Vaikom Mohammed Basheer lyr P. Bhaskaran c P. Bhaskar Rao m Baburaj

lp Prem Nazir, Madhu, Vijayanirmala, P.J. Anthony, Pappu, Kothamangalam Ali, Baby Shanta, Malashanta, Parvati, Adoor Bhasi

Mystery story, and rare script by noted Malayalam novelist Basheer (whose diaries were later filmed by Adoor Gopalakrishnan, as Mathilukal, 1989). Set in a desolate mansion, it has a novelist (Madhu) who comes to stay and encounters the beautiful ghost Bhargavi (Vijayanirmala). He starts writing her story, a tragic tale about her love for a poet (Nazir) and her evil cousin (Anthony) who ruined the affair. As the novelist reads out the story to the ghost, the cousin turns up and tries to kill the novelist. They fall into a well but the ghost helps the hero out, leaving the villain to drown. Vincent’s directorial debut, and the first ghost story in Malayalam, the film was noted for its elegiac camerawork adapting a highly symbolic script. It was also the first big role of future Telugu star and director Vijayanirmala.

CHARULATA

aka The Lonely Wife

1964 117’ b&w Bengali

d/sc/m Satyajit Ray p R.D. Bansal pc R.D.B.

st Rabindranath Tagore’s Nastaneer (1901) c Subrata Mitra

lp Soumitra Chatterjee, Madhabi Mukherjee, Sailen Mukherjee, Shyamal Ghosal, Gitali Roy, Bholanath Koyal, Suku Mukherjee, Dilip Bose, Subrata Sen Sharma, Joydeb, Bankim Ghosh

Ray considered this film, structured like a musical rondo, to be his best work. Set in 1879 during the social reform movement in Calcutta, it tells of Charulata (M. Mukherjee), the bored and neglected upper-class wife of the reformer Bhupati Dutta (S. Mukherjee) who pursues a political career while editing a progressive English weekly newspaper, The Sentinel. He invites her older brother Umapada (Ghosal) and his wife Manda (Roy) to move in to provide company for Charulata. Bhupati’s cousin, the literary-minded Amal (Chatterjee) also moves in. Charulata and Amal become increasingly intimate, but their acquaintance is abruptly terminated when Umapada embezzles money and disappears. Amal too leaves, guilty about Bhupati’s increasing dependence on him, given his relationship with Charulata. The married couple try to reunite at the end, after she overcomes her loss and he overcomes his feeling of betrayal. The ending, which departs from Tagore’s, freezes their gesture as they reach out to one another. From the opening, as Charulata observes a series of Bengali stereotypes with her opera-glasses through the shutters of her windows, the film boasts some of Ray’s most cinematic sequences: the card game with an incantatory voice-over keeping score; Amal serenading Charulata with the famous Tagore song Ami chini-go-chini, and Charulata daydreaming in the garden. Except for the garden sequence, the film refers to the outside world only via the dialogue, with references to the novelist Bankimchandra, to Gladstone, Disraeli and the dominant political issues of the 1880s which preoccupy Bhupati. The freeze-frames at the end, showing the couple uniting again, were inspired by the ending of Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959). The French New Wave apparently also influenced the extensive use of the tracking camera, sometimes across rooms (ironically Ray was to attack Mrinal Sen the following year, and New Indian Cinema directors in 1972, for being influenced by French cinema). Charulata also has the finest film work of several Ray regulars, including designer Bansi Chandragupta, cameraman Mitra and actors S. Chatterjee and Madhabi Mukherjee.

CHITRALEKHA

1964 ?’ col Hindi

d Kidar Sharma pc Pushpa Pics s Rajinder Kumar Sharma lyr Sahir Ludhianvi c D.C. Mehta, A. Lateef m Roshan

lp Ashok Kumar, Meena Kumari, Pradeep Kumar, Mehmood, Minoo Mumtaz, Zeb Rehman, Bela Bose, Achala Sachdev, Naseem, Neeta, Rehana, Shobhana

Sharma’s opulent costume drama set in the Gupta period (4th C.) is a remake of his 1941 film. With Kumari in the title role of the court dancer, her romance with Samant Beejagupta leads to questions of infidelity, the futility of love and corrupt ascetics. The film contributed to Meena Kumari’s image as the archetypal courtesan in costume spectaculars (cf. Pakeezah, 1971), although its garish colours and costume design betray the degeneration of Sharma’s work since his b&w romances.

  DOOR GAGAN KI CHHAON MEIN

1964 153’ b&w Hindi
d/p/s/co-lyr/yn Kishore Kumar pc Kishore Films co-lyr Shailendra dial Ramesh Pant c Aloke Dasgupta
lp Kishore Kumar, Supriya Choudhury, Amit Ganguly, Raj Mehra, Sajjan, Shashikala, Nana Palsikar, Iftikhar, Leela Mishra, Harilal

The demobbed soldier Shankar (Kumar) returns to find his family perished in a fire and his infant son Ramu (Ganguly) struck dumb by the catastrophe. When he is attacked by the villainous Thakur’s men, Shankar is rescued by Meera (Choudhury) and they fall in love, provoking further trouble from the Thakur whose son Jagga wants to marry Meera. For his directorial debut, the comedian Kishore Kumar cast himself in a tragic role (his own productions were never comedies). The film is remembered mainly for its classic song A chalke tujbe main le ke chalun written by the star for himself.

  DOSTI

aka Friendship
1964 163’ b&w Hindi
d Satyen Bose pc Rajshri Prod, sc Govind Moonis st Ban Bhatt lyr Majrooh Sultanpuri c Marshal! Braganza m Laxmikant-Pyarelal
lp Sushil Kumar, Sudhir Kumar, Nana Palsikar, Leela Chitnis, Abhi Bhattacharya, Baby Farida, Leela Mishra, Sanjay, Uma, Aziz

A crippled boy (Sushil Kumar) and a blind boy (Sudhir Kumar) become close friends in Calcutta and help each other to survive. They befriend a sick rich child (Farida). Famous for its numerous hit songs by Mohammed Rafi including Jaane vaalon zara mud ke dekho mujhe and Chahoonga main tujhe. The film is a remake of the Bengali Lalu Bhulu (1959).

  HAQEEQAT

1964 184’ b&w Hindi
d/s Chetan Anand pc Himalaya Films lyr Kaifi Azmi c Sadanand Sengupta m Madan Mohan
lp Balraj Sahni, Dharmendra, Priya Rajvansh, Vijay Anand, Jayant, Indrani Mukherjee, Sanjay Khan, Chand Usmani, Achala Sachdev, Gulab, Sulochana, Sudhir Jagdev, Levy Aaron, Nasreen

A propaganda film dedicated to Nehru and trading on the resurgence of nationalist sentiment in the wake of the India-China war of 1962 which provides the film’s setting. The war had led to a sobering awareness of India’s military capability and contributed to major schisms about Nehruite notions of non-alignment while accelerating the split in the CPI between Moscow- and Beijing-aligned groups. Made by former Marxists Anand, Sahni et al., the film’s main plot concerns a small platoon of Indian soldiers presumed dead but rescued by Kashmiri gypsies and by Capt. Bahadur Singh (Dharmendra) and his tribal girlfriend (Rajvansh) who die holding the Chinese at bay while their comrades retreat to safety. Rhetorical highlights including the platoon commander (Sahni) excoriating Mao’s Little Red Book which a soldier spears with a bayonet; the commanding officer (Jayant) denouncing the Chinese to documentary footage of Zhou En-Lai landing in Delhi and being given a guard of honour; Kaifi Azmi’s song Kar chale hum fida jaan-o-tan saathiyon (sung by Mohammed Rafi) cut to more documentary shots of Nehru addressing the troops and of the Republic Day parade. Shot on location on the Ladakh border, the film had one other song hit, the soldiers’ qawali Ho ke majboor mujhe usne bulaya hoga (sung by Mohammed Rafi, Bhupendra, Talat Mahmood, Manna Dey and a chorus).

Priya Rajvansh (left) in Haqeeqat

  JOTUGRIHA

1964 130’(118’) b&w Bengali
d/sc Tapan Sinha pc Uttam Kumar Films p Uttam Kumar st Subodh Ghosh c Bimal Mukherjee m Ashish Khan
lp Uttam Kumar, Arundhati Devi, Bikash Roy, Binota Roy, Anil Chatterjee, Kajal Gupta, Bankim Ghosh, Sailen Mukherjee, Geeta De, Smita Sinha, Biren Chatterjee

Marital melodrama often regarded as Sinha’s best film. The upwardly mobile Satadal (Kumar), an officer in a government archaeology department, is estranged from his wife Madhuri (A. Devi) because she cannot bear children. They divorce, leaving him alone to complete their joint dream of building a house while she resumes her earlier career as a school teacher. The voice of middle-class normalcy in this cultural vacuum of the rootless elite is provided by Satadal’s junior, Supriyo (A. Chatterjee). The earlier part of the film, shot on location in Calcutta in the monsoon, sets the pace for a slow, even tempo which Sinha manages to retain throughout, especially in the remarkable sequence when Satadal chances to meet his ex-wife in a railway waiting room and they spend a few hours talking before they part once more. One of the early films in the popular 60s genre chronicling the breakdown of family relations within an urban upper class (cf. Mrinal Sen’s Akash Kusum, 1965) and the ancestor of Basu Bhattacharya’s 70s melodramas.

  KADALIKKA NERAMILLAI

1964 159’ col Tamil
d/p/co-sc C.V. Sridhar pc Chithrasala co-sc Gopu c A.Vincent lyr Kannadasan m Vishwanathan-Ramamurthy
lp Ravichandran, Kanchana, Muthuraman, Rajashri, T.S. Balaiah, Nagesh, Kumari Sachu, V.S. Raghavan

A very successful romantic comedy. The schoolteacher’s son Ashok (Ravichandran) comes to Ooty to manage Vishwanathan’s (Baliah) estate, but falls foul of the man’s daughters Nimmi (Rajshri) and Kanchana (Kanchana), who get him sacked. Angry, Ashok pitches his tent in front of Vishwanathan’s house and demands his job back. However, he falls in love with Nimmi and enlists the help of a rich friend, Mohan (Muthuraman), to fool Vishwanathan into agreeing to the wedding. Actually, Mohan is Kanchana’s lover, and when the trickery is eventually discovered, all nevertheless ends happily.

  KARNAN/KARNA/DAANVEER KARNA

1964 177’[Ta]/187’[Te] col Tamil/Telugu/Hindi
d/p B.R. Panthulu pc Padmini Pics sc A.S. Nagarajan dial Szkthi Krishnaswamy lyr Kannadasan c V. Ramamurthy m Vishwanathan-Ramamurthy
lp Sivaji Ganesan, N.T. Rama Rao, Savitri, Devika, M.V. Rajamma, Sandhya, Jawar Seetaraman, Ashokan, Muthuraman

The big-budget follow-up to Panthulu’s multilingual Ganesan hit Veerapandiya Kattaboman (1959) tells the tragic Mahabharata tale of Karnan (Ganesan), Kunti’s (Rajamma) eldest son, known for his charitable nature and archery expertise. Although a brother of the Pandavas, he remains faithful to Duryodhana (Ashokan) who raised him and fights his kinfolk until Krishna (NTR) overcomes him. Savitri played Duryodhan’s wife, Devika played Karnan’s wife Shubhangi while Muthuraman played Arjuna. Shot with three camera units at Jaipur, the massive action scenes such as the Kurukshetra battle required the participation of the 61st Cavalry, 80 elephants and 400 horses. Tamil and Telugu stars Ganesan and NTR had worked together in K. Somu’s hit mythological Sampoorna Ramayanam (1958). The film is also known for Kannadasan’s remarkable condensation of the Bhagavad Geeta into a poem of seven stanzas, considered one of his most accomplished lyrics.

  KASHMIR KI KALI

1964 168’ col Hindi
d/p Shakti Samanta pc Shakti Films s Ranjan Bose dial Ramesh Pant lyr S.H. Bihari c V.N. Reddy m O.P. Nayyar
lp Shammi Kapoor, Sharmila Tagore, Pran, Anoop Kumar, Nasir Hussain, Sundar, Madan Puri, Padmadevi, Mridula, Tuntun, Bir Sakhuja, Robert, Padma Chavan, Sujata, Neeta, Samar Chatterjee, Aruna, Hamida

Taking its title from the hit song Kashmir ki kali boon main sung by Lata Mangeshkar in Kapoor’s successful Junglee (1961), this is an exotic comedy romance in colour deploying Shammi Kapoor’s established persona as the rich youth who spurns his family’s wealth and after some adventures falls in love with a woman not of his social class who cares little for his wealth. Rajib (Kapoor), constantly criticised by his mother for crazy decisions (e.g. announcing an award of Rs 500,000 to the family’s mill employees), leaves when there is talk of arranging a marriage for him and goes to Kashmir where he falls in love with a flower-girl (Tagore). Rajib lives in his family’s bungalow, sneakily rented out by the caretaker, and is regarded as weak in the head. Kapoor had put on some weight and his physical gyrations are less elegant than they were in his b&w Nasir Hussain films, but the influence of rock music, the exotic locales and the emphasis on upper-class youth culture continues from his previous films. The film includes several Mohammed Rafi hits in the Kapoor style (Kisi na kisise, Yeh chand sa roshan chehrd).

  KOHRAA

1964 153’ b&w Hindi
d/sc Biren Nag pc Geetanjali Pics st R. Sawant dial/lyr Kaifi Azmi c Marshall Braganza p/m Hemant Kumar [Hemanta Mukherjee]
lp Waheeda Rehman, Biswajeet, Manmohan Krishna, Abhi Bhattacharya, Badri Prasad, Madan Puri, Tarun Bose, Chand Usmani, Asit Sen, Samar Roy, Dev Kishen

The former art director Nag (e.g. for Navketan films) tells a ghost story about Rajashree (Rehman), a new bride who arrives at an ancestral mansion to find that it is pervaded by the spirit of her husband Amit’s first wife, Poonam. Known for its classic songs such as Lata Mangeshkar’s Jhoom jboom dhalti raat.

  MAHAPURUSH

aka The Holy Man
1964 65’ b&w Bengali
d/sc/m Satyajit Ray p R.D. Bansal pc R.D.B. st Rajasekhar Bose’s [aka Parashuram] Birinchi Baba c Soumendu Roy
lp Charuprakash Ghosh, Robi Ghosh, Prasad Mukherjee, Gitali Roy, Satindra Bhattacharya, Soumyen Bose, Santosh Dutta, Renuka Roy

First of two short films often shown as Kapurush-o-Mahapurush. Returning to the farces of Parashuram (cf. Parash Pathar, 1957) and to the comedy team of Abhijaan (1962), Charuprakash and Robi Ghosh. The widower Gurupada Mitter (Mukherjee) becomes the disciple of the yogic godman Birinchi Baba (C. Ghosh), followed by his daughter Buchki (G. Roy). Satya (Bhattacharya) and members of an informal club unmask the godman as a fraud. This broadly played, verbose comedy is full of puns, often in English, as the godman claims to have been present in ancient Babylon, argued with Plato and taught Einstein the relativity theory, claiming that the crucifixion of Christ was crucifact because he saw it with his own eyes. The film evokes the popular 50s/60s Calcutta fashion of groups meeting in coffee-houses to swap stories and argue about politics.

  MARATHA TITUKA MELAVAVA

1964 137’ b&w Marathi
d/s Bhalji Pendharkar pc Avinash Films, Jai Bhawani Chitra lyr Sanjeev, Shanta Shelke c Arvind Laad m Anandadhan (Lata Mangeshkar)
lp Alhaad, Sulochana, Jeevankala, Chandrakant Gokhale, Jaishankar, Kashinath Ghanekar, Rajshekhar, Bhimrao, Barchi Bahadur, Govind, Arun Naik, Latkar

Stylised and wordy historical recreating Pendharkar’s favourite subject, the career of the Maratha king Shivaji. This film features the early career of the king (Alhaad) in a Maharashtra riven with internal dissent and threatened by the Adil Shahi sultans. Under the tutelage of his mother, Jijabai (Sulochana), Shivaji overcomes various threats from the Deshmukh, Bandal and Khopde families to found his empire. Pendharkar reveals yet again his penchant for rousing dialogue and his limitations in the action sequences, the biggest scenes in the film being mainly in the epilogue as all of Maharashtra celebrates Shivaji’s rise to power. It includes some all-time song hits in Marathi including Akhercba ha tula dandavata (sung by Lata Mangeshkar) and Shoor aamhi sardar (sung by Hridaynath Mangeshkar) in the powada form.

  MURALI KRISHNA

1964 169’ b&w Telugu
d P. Pullaiah pc Padmasri Pics p V. Venkateshwarulu st P. Radha s/co-lyr Acharya Athreya co-lyr Dasarathi, C. Narayana Reddy c Madhav Bulbule m Master Venu Ip A. Nageshwara Rao, Jamuna, S.V. Ranga Rao, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Haranath, Geetanjali, Sharada, Suryakantam, L. Vijayalakshmi, Ramana Reddy

A comedy of mistaken (gender) identity in which the bluff, retired military man (Ranga Rao) raises his daughter Murali (Jamuna) as though she were a son. She loves and is to marry Krishna (Nageshwara Rao) when a painter, Lakshmikantam (Haranath), appears. Murali had written letters of appreciation believing him to be a woman. When Lakshmikantam wants to marry Murali, she persuades her friend Srilatha (Sharada) to pretend to be Murali, a subterfuge that works until the painter turns out to be a friend of Murali’s fiance.

  NANDI

1964 162’ b&w Kannada
d/st/sc N. Lakshminarayan pc Shri Bharati Chitra p Vadiraj, Jawahar dial/lyr R.N. Jayagopal c R.N.K. Prasad m Vijayabhaskar
lp Rajkumar, Harini, Kalpana, Balkrishna, Udaya Kumar, Soorat Ashwath, Ganapati Bhatt, Hanumanthachar, Jayashree, Rama, Shanthamma, Baby Suma, Baby Anita

Melodrama about deaf-mute people. Murthy’s (Rajkumar) wife (Kalpana) dies in childbirth, and when his son becomes deaf and mute, Murthy marries a deaf-mute (Harini), learns to lip-read and starts a school for the handicapped. When his son dies, his wife joins him in running the school. Eventually, the wife delivers a normal baby. The debut of Kannada cinema’s first self-proclaimed successor to Satyajit Ray, the hit film established Kalpana as a Kannada star.

  PATHLAAG

1964 123’ b&w Marathi
d Raja Paranjpe pc Shripad Chitra st Jayant Devkule’s novel Asha Parat Yete sc/dial/lyr) G.D. Madgulkar c Datta Gorle m Datta Davjekar
lp Bhavana, Kashinath Ghanekar, Ishwar Agarwal, Vasant Thengadi, Ganpat Patil, Raja Nene

Hit suspense thriller introducing the future Marathi stage and film stars Bhavana and Ghanekar. When the noted lawyer Balasaheb Panse (Ghanekar) goes abroad, he receives a telegram informing him of the sudden death of his wife Asha (Bhavana). After she has been cremated and he is still in mourning, a woman arrested as a member of a criminal gang by the police claims to be Asha, whom she resembles absolutely (Bhavana again). She keeps telling Panse intimate details about their lives, expresses surprise that anyone could have thought her dead and implores him to have her released, causing a major emotional dilemma for the hero. Eventually, in an unconvincing end that deflates the suspense, the second woman is revealed as indeed his wife, while the woman who died was her hitherto unmentioned twin sister. An early success by composer Davjekar, the film also included the hit song Ya dolyachi donpakhare. The film was remade as Mera Saaya (1966) by Raj Khosla.

  POOJAPHALAM

1964 156’ b&w Telugu
d B.N. Reddi pc Shri Sambhu Films st Munipalle Raju’s novel Pujari sc/dial V.V. Narasaraju lyr Devulapalli Krishna Sastry, C. Narayana Reddy, Kosaraju c U. Rajagopal m Saluri Rajeshwara Rao
lp A. Nageshwara Rao, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Relangi Venkatramaiah, Ramana Reddy, Savitri, Jamuna, Vijayalakshmi, Rajashree, K. Jaggaiah

Love story about the shy and sensitive Madhu (Nageshwara Rao), a lover of music, who meets and has affairs with three women, each making a radically different kind of sexual proposition. The first, Vasanthi (Jamuna), represents romantic love leading to several musical compositions in her praise; the second, Seeta (Savitri), is the devoted partner who restores his emotional health when Vasanthi leaves, and the third, Neelanagini (Vijayalakshmi), is the seductive courtesan from a family of entertainers. Eventually Madhu selects Seeta. The performances of the leading duo were praised in the popular press, esp. Nageshwara Rao’s as the lovesick poet, continuing his Devadasu (1953) image. The music includes work of the celebrated violinist Paravur Gopalakrishnan.

  RAJKUMAR

1964 178’ col Hindi
d K. Shankar pc Saravana Films st Manmohan Desai sc Ramanand Sagar lyr Shailendra, Hasrat Jaipuri c G. Singh m Shankar-Jaikishen
lp Shammi Kapoor, Sadhana, Prithviraj Kapoor, Om Prakash, Pran, Master Babloo, Ravi Shivdasani, Achala Sachdev, Rajendranath, Manorama

Made in Madras and written by the star combination of Manmohan Desai and Ramanand Sagar, this is one of India’s few successful parodies. It satirises the historical/costumed adventure fantasy, practised in Madras by e.g. the influential fictions generated at Modern Theatres. The king (P. Kapoor) awaits the return of the prince (S. Kapoor) in a direct quote from his role at the beginning of the classic Mughal-e-Azam (1960), but on his arrival from Paris in a two-seater plane the son greets the welcoming committee sent by his father with ‘bonsoir’. A major palace intrigue involves the king’s second wife (Manorama) and her brother (Pran) who plot to overthrow him. The prince tries to foil the villains by pretending to be eccentric. He also falls in love with a tribal princess (Sadhana) with a predilection for singing complicated love songs while standing e.g. at the edge of a giant waterfall. Hit numbers include Aaja aai bahar dil hai bekaraar (sung by Lata Mangeshkar) and the title refrain Aagepeeche zara hoshiyar yahan ke hum hain Rajkumar (sung by Mohammed Rafi).

  SANGAM

aka The Confluence
1964 238’ col Hindi
d/p Raj Kapoor pc R.K. Films s Inder Raj Anand lyr Shailendra, Hasrat Jaipuri c Radhu Karmakar m Shankar-Jaikishen
lp Raj Kapoor, Vyjayanthimala, Rajendra Kumar, Lalita Pawar, Achala Sachdev, Iftikhar, Nana Palsikar, Raj Mehra

Kapoor’s first colour film is presented as a glossy love triangle but can equally well be seen, along with many Indian triangle dramas, as a romance between two men interrupted by a woman. Sunder (Kapoor) is from a lower class than his childhood friends Gopal (Kumar) and Radha (Vyjayanthimala). Although both men, bosom pals, are in love with Radha, Sunder ignores the fact that he and Gopal share the same object of desire. When Sunder finally wins and marries Radha by joining the air force and becoming a national hero, Gopal puts male bonding and his passion for his friend above his attachment to Radha and withdraws. However, Sunder is obsessed by thoughts of Radha’s possible infidelity. In the end, Gopal reassures Sunder of Radha’s fidelity and then commits suicide. The film includes a plea by Radha for fairer treatment of women but the logic of the story demonstrates that the most valuable relationship a man can have is with another man. Mahesh Bhatt (1993) commented that the hit song Bol radha bol, sangam ho ga ke nahin, sung by Mukesh, ‘triggers off memories of a beautiful woman in a picturesque setting dressed in a swimsuit (while) Raj Kapoor, clad in shorts, hangs from a tree with a bagpipe under one arm and begs his beloved Radha for an orgasmic release’. Another hit was Ye mera prem patra, sung by Rafi. One of the early films to use locations in Europe as exotic backdrops as Sunder and Radha honeymoon in snowy Switzerland and ‘decadent’ Paris, where, to the song Main kya karoon ram mujhe buddha mil gaya, Radha behaves like a prostitute to taunt her husband’s virility.

  SERVER SUNDARAM

1964 165’ b&w Tamil/Telugu
d Krishnan-Panju pc Guhan Films sc K. Balachander from his play c S. Maruthi Rao lyr Kannadasan m Vishwanathan-Ramamurthy
lp Nagesh, Muthuraman, Major Sundarrajan, K.R. Vijaya, S.N. Lakshmi

One of the future director Balachander’s plays with an urban middle-class setting is used in this rags-to-riches story set in the film industry. Sundaram (Nagesh, introducing the tragic ‘common-man’ hero to Tamil film with this fictional autobiography) is an inept waiter in a coffee-shop who falls for rich girl Radha (Vijaya). Through his friend Raghavan (Muthuraman) he gets a break in movies and becomes a star, only to see his beloved become his friend’s fiancee. Nagesh, at the peak of his career as the ‘server’, evokes Chaplin and accentuates the sentimentality in the Tamil cinema’s standard mother-son scenes. Balachander provides witty, fast-paced dialogues and the comedy sequences are integrated into the main narrative, giving the film a modern feeling, confirmed by the scenes showing film production and song recording. The original play, staged by Ragini Recreations and featuring Nagesh was very popular, and the film established this now - veteran actor in his first star role. Also released in a (probably dubbed) Telugu version. The directors remade the film in Hindi as Main Sundar Hoon (1971) with Mehmood.

  VIVAHABANDHAM

1964 166’ b&w Telugu
d P.S. Ramakrishna Rao pc Bharani Pics st Ravoori sc Atluri Picheshwara Rao lyr C. Narayana Reddy c Annayya m M.B. Srinivasan
lp N.T. Rama Rao, P. Bhanumathi, Chittor V. Nagaiah, Suryakantam, Hemalatha, Padmanabhan, Prabhakara Reddi, Vasanthi, Balaiah

Telugu remake of Ajoy Kar’s Suchitra Sen hit Saat Pake Bandha (1963), substantially diluting both the performance and plot of the original. Idealists Bharati (Bhanumathi) and Chandrasekhar (NTR) get married against the wishes of Bharati’s mother who wants a richer son-in-law. Chandrasekhar refuses to meet Bharati’s parents and later Bharati falls out of favour with Chandrasekhar’s stepmother. The couple decide to divorce before things work out in the end. The film reunited the successful team of Bhanumathi and NTR at the Bharani Studio. Bhanumathi’s only duet with P.B. Srinivas, Neetilona, was appreciated.

  WOH KAUN THI

aka Who Was She? 1964 140’ b&w Hindi
d Raj Khosla p N.N. Sippy pc Prithvi Pics s Dhruva Chatterjee dial Ehsan Rizvi lyr Mehdi Ali Khan c K.H. Kapadia m Madan Mohan
lp Sadhana, Manoj Kumar, Pravin Choudhury, K.N. Singh, Raj Mehra, Dhumal, Mohan Choti, Ratnamala, Helen, Prem Chopra

A rare big-budget excursion into the thriller genre, the story concerns a young doctor, Anand (Kumar), obsessed by a woman (Sadhana) who appears to him with different names and in different guises, making him doubt his senses. Like Vertigo (1958), the story evokes the supernatural and madness but eventually the hero unravels the plot. The villain of the piece is Anand’s friend Dr Ramesh (Chopra) who concocts the plot to drive Anand insane in order to get hold of an inheritance. The enigmatic, sexually repressed figure played by Sadhana ranges from a ghostlike apparition to Anand’s future wife (with a seduction scene where she momentarily turns ‘human’ to the song Lag jaa gale). In spite of the often woefully inadequate soundtrack and the fact that the suspense hinges mainly on the repeated use of the song Naina barse rimjhim (sung by Lata Mangeshkar), it remains one of director Khosla’s favourites. The film was remade in Tamil as Yar Nee by Sathyam (1966).

Manoj Kumar and Sadhana in Woh Kaun Thi

  YAADEIN

aka Only the Lonely
1964 113’ b&w Hindi
d Sunil Dutt pc Ajanta Arts st Nargis Dutt sc Omkar Sahib dial Akhtar-ul-Iman lyr Anand Bakshi c Ramchandra m Vasant Desai
lp Sunil Dutt, Nargis

Sunil Dutt’s directorial debut was a bizarre ‘One actor movie monument’ according to the opening credit. Anil (Dutt), a successful businessman, returns to his palatial home to find his wife Priya and their two sons are out. This sets off an extraordinary two-hour soliloquy, shot entirely in the flat, describing the days when he first met his wife, how they got married, when they had their two children, the children’s first birthdays, their misunderstandings, his meeting of a new girlfriend, Salma, the nights when they fought, when they made love, and so on. We gather that his wife had many reasons for leaving and he takes this opportunity to accuse her in order to justify himself before committing suicide, hanging himself with her wedding sari. A depressingly uninhibited demonstration of male infantilism and neurosis, the film adopts a naturalist acting idiom played against props such as Mario Miranda cartoon characters animated in the background or balloons representing people whenever the presence of other characters is required. The film’s most interesting moment comes when Dutt is attacked by a bunch of toys berating him for his lack of concern for his family. The only living presence other than Dutt occurs at the end when Nargis, playing Priya, is shown in silhouette.

  AASMAAN MAHAL

1965 172’ b&w Hindi d K. A. Abbas pc Naya Sansar s Inder Raj Anand c Ramchandra m J.P. Kaushik
lp Prithviraj Kapoor, Dilip Raj, Surekha Parkar, Nana Palsikar, Mridula, David, Anwar Hussain, Madhukar, Irshad Panjatan, Rashid Khan

Shot on location in a dilapidated mansion, Abbas’s film suggests that the old feudal order must be allowed to fade away with dignity while its descendants must take their cue from ‘the people’ rather than from entrepreneurs. An old nawab, Aasmaan (Kapoor), refuses the wealth offered by capitalists who want to turn his palace into a hotel. His dissolute playboy son Salim (Roy) is ultimately reformed by a virtuous young woman, Salma (Parkar).

  AKASH KUSUM

aka Up in the Clouds
1965 115’(110’) b&w Bengali
d/co-sc Mrinal Sen pc Purbachal Film st/co-sc Ashish Burman c Sailaja Chatterjee m Sudhin Dasgupta
lp Aparna Das Gupta (aka Aparna Sen), Soumitra Chatterjee, Subhendu Chatterjee, Haradhan Bannerjee, Sova Sen, Sati Devi, Prafullabala Devi, Gyanesh Mukherjee

After seeing Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959) and Jules et Jim (1961) early in 1965, Sen felt inspired to make this bitter-sweet romance set in Calcutta. The lower-middle-class Ajay Sarkar (Soumitra Chatterjee) finds himself having to pretend to be a successful businessman in order to win the hand of Monica (Sen), the daughter of an affluent family. In the end he is exposed as a con man, his own business dealings go wrong and the romance comes to grief. Sen later said that he wanted a film that would ‘physically look youthful’, scripting in his street scenes, extensive use of still frames, voiceovers, and emphasis on unrehearsed sound effects. It sparked a major debate in the press between Burman, Sen, Satyajit Ray and others about notions of topicality, with Ray arguing that despite the ‘modish narrative devices and [s]ome lively details of city life’, and despite the film-makers’ belief ‘that they have made an angry film about struggling youth assailing the bastion of class’, the hero’s behaviour in fact ‘dates back to antiquity’ (cf. Sen, 1977). Ray later continued his tirade against what he thought was the French cinema-inspired ‘new wave’ of the 70s (cf. New Indian Cinema).

  AND MILES TO GO…

1965 14’ b&w English
d/p S. Sukhdev c K. Vaikunth, K. Ghanekar m Vasant Desai

Sukhdev’s first major propaganda film ‘dedicated to all the forces of rationalist thought that are opposed to the path of violence’. After a parallel montage of stereotypical rich/poor oppositions, the camera cuts to the face of the film-maker looking angry. After some shots of street violence in negative images, a voice declaims ‘The people speak with the voice of history’. After some fast cuts of a police blockade and sounds of gunfire comes the film’s message calling for rational thought: the real enemy is greed and corruption, not the State.

  AYIRATHIL ORUVAN

1965 174’ col Tamil
d B.R. Panthulu p Padmini Pics. sc K.J. Mahadevan dial/co-lyr R.K. Shanmugham c V. Ramamurthy co-lyr Vali, Kannadasan m Vishwanathan-Ramamurthy
lp M.G. Ramachandran, Jayalalitha, R.S. Manohar, M.N. Nambiar, Madhavi, L. Vijayalakshmi, Ramarao, Nagesh

The heroic doctor Manimaran (MGR) helps some wounded rebels against the dictator of Naithal Nadu, Chengappan (Manohar), who accuses the doctor of leading the rebellion and puts him in jail. The tyrant’s daughter, Poonkodi (Jayalalitha), falls in love with the good doctor, who is totally preoccupied with the struggle to liberate his motherland. When a pirate ship attacks the town, the tyrant enlists the help of the rebels, promising them freedom but breaks that promise as soon as victory has been secured. The rebels then escape and join up with the pirate leader (Nambiar), Manimaran becoming his second in command. But the good doctor sends all the loot allotted to him to the village folk in his motherland to help them fight Chengappan. When Poonkodi falls into the pirates’ hands, Maniraman has to protect her from his colleagues’ concupiscence and he kills the pirate captain in a duel, his rebel comrades overpowering the rest. They all return home and defeat Chengappan in a sea battle. The film’s rebel tune ‘Ado andha paravai pole paada vendum’ (‘We should sing like free birds’) became a popular freedom song.

  BANGARU PANJARAM

1965 168’ b&w Telugu
d B.N. Reddi pc Vauhini s Palagummi Padmaraju lyr Devulapalli Krishna Sastry, Sri Sri c B.N. Konda Reddy, C.A.S. Mani, Madhav Bulbule m Saluri Rajeshwara Rao, B. Gopalam
lp Shobhan Babu, Vanisree, Geetanjali, Sriranjani Jr, Ravi Kondala Rao, Pushpavalli

Marital melodrama. Hero Venu (S. Babu) marries the poor Neela (Vanisree) despite his crooked employer Rangaiah who tries to prevent the marriage. Venu’s uncle Ramakoti and Ramakoti’s daughter Padma, who loves Venu, plant the maid Mangamma in Venu’s house. Mangamma spreads rumours that lead to marital discord and Neela is forced to leave home. She is in a train accident and her husband believes her to be dead although she finds shelter in the house of a doctor. When Venu falls ill he is taken to that very doctor and husband and wife are reconciled. Reddi’s and the old Vauhini production unit’s last film was not a commercial success though it included some popular music such as S. Janaki’s Pagalai the doravera.

  CHEMMEEN

aka Wrath of the Sea, aka The Shrimp 1965 140’(120’) col Malayalam d Ramu Kariat p Babu Ismail pc Kanmani Films s Thakazhy Shivashankar Pillai from his novel dial S.L. Puram Sadanandan lyr Vyalar Rama Varma c Marcus Bartley, U. Rajagopal m Salil Choudhury
lp Sathyan, Sheela, Madhu, Kottarakkara Sridharan Nair, S.P. Pillai, Adoor Bhawani, Adoor Pankajam, Lata, Kottayam Chellappan, Rajakumari, J.A.R. Anand, Paravoor Bharathan, Kothamangalam Ali, Philomena

Melodrama that put Malayalam cinema on the map. Chambankunju (Nair) manages to prosper as a fisherman thanks to his daughter Karuthamma (Sheela) and to the man she loves, the Muslim trader Pareekutty (Madhu). In order to obey tradition, she cannot marry the trader and so she becomes the wife of the remote stranger Palani (Sathyan). Although Palani accepts that she never slept with the trader, the village does not believe it and Palani is censured. One day Karuthamma meets her old boyfriend again and they make love, even as Palani, out battling a shark on the high seas, dies in a whirlpool that is attributed to Kadalamma, the goddess of the sea, exacting vengeance for an infringment of prevailing chastity codes. The film ends with the dead shark lying on the beach. Known mainly for the remarkable performances of its entire lead cast (notably Sathyan), the film was made as a sprawling epic matching the scale of one of Malayalam literature’s most famous novels. The editing, done by Hrishikesh Mukherjee virtually as a salvation job for a production that had apparently got out of hand, is extremely tight, but the film still retains the frontier realism of a fishing community battling the forces of nature, myth and uncontrolled emotion as dictated by the script. Novelist Pillai’s highly mystical end in the book, as Palani battles the shark while his wife betrays him, nevertheless remains too complex for predominantly realist melodrama. Composer Salil Choudhury’s Malayalam debut was remarkably successful, and both songs and background score are integral to the scale of the drama.

  CID

1965 172’ b&w Telugu
d Tapi Chanakya pc Vijaya co-p B. Nagi Reddy co-p/sc Chakrapani dia T.D. Narasaraju lyr Pingali Nagendra Rao c Madhav Bulbule m Ghantasala Venkateshwara Rao
lp N.T. Rama Rao, Jamuna, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Pandharibai, Ramana Reddy, Meena Kumari, Mikkilineni, Rajanala

The gamber Chalapathi (Gummadi) is presumed dead by the police when they find a corpse wearing his clothes on a railway track. His wife and son are supported by Ramadasu (Mikkilineni) and the son grows up to become a policeman (NTR). Chalapathi, who is not dead, has become the leader of a gang of thieves and becomes the prey of his own son. The film was considered a major let-down from Telugu cinema’s most high-profile banner.

  DAHAM

aka Thirst 1965 130’ b&w Malayalam d/sc K.S. Sethumadhavan p M.P. Anand, P. Rangaraj pc Thirumugham Pics dial Muthukulam Raghavan Pillai, B.K. Pottakkad lyr Vyalar Rama Varma c P. Ramaswamy m P. Devarajan
lp Sathyan, Sheela, K.P. Oomer, Bahadur, Sreenarayana Pillai, B.K. Pottakkad, Vijayan, Murali, M.M. Babu, Kunjan, Pratap Chandran, Kaviyoor Ponnamma, Indira, Parvati

This melodrama, made in 21 days at the Venus Studio, tells of the redemption of Jayarajan, who killed his young wife and her lover in a fit of jealousy and is sent to jail. Transferred to a hospital for an operation, the convict’s humanity is rekindled by a kind widow and her son who turn out to be the family of the man Jayarajan killed. However, the hero dies and the script does not allow a new nuclear family to be formed at the end of the film.

  ENGA VEETU PENN

1965 177’ col Tamil d Tapi Chanakya pc Vijaya sc Chakrapani dials. Ayyapillai lyr Kannadasan, Alangudi Somu c Marcus Bartley m K.V. Mahadevan
lp M.R. Radha, S.V. Subbaiah, A.V.M. Rajan, Jaishankar, K.A. Thangavelu, Nagesh, Chittor V. Nagaiah, O.A.K. Thevar, Nirmala (aka Vijayanirmala), Vasantha, Manorama, Madhavi

Tamil remake of the Vijaya unit’s own Telugu film Shavukaru (1950), modernising the tale of two warring groups in an Andhra village, with e.g. more urban references. M.R. Radha played G. Subbarao’s role of the moneylender. Remembered mainly for the star entry of Nirmala, who changed her name to Vijayanirmala with this film in tribute to the studio.

  GUIDE

1965 183’(120’) col Hindi
d/sc Vijay Anand pc Navketan st R.K. Narayan’s novel (1958) lyr Shailendra c Fali Mistry m S.D. Burman
lp Dev Anand, Waheeda Rehman, Leela Chitnis, Kishore Sahu, Anwar Hussain, Ulhas, Gajanan Jagirdar, Rashid Khan

Adapted from a classic novel written in English, the plot is structured around two processes of transformation. Rosie (Rehman) who belongs to a family of courtesans, is seduced away from her tyrannical archaeologist husband Marco (Sahu) by the brash tourist guide Raju (Anand). Raju helps her to realise her dream of becoming a successful dancer, realising his own ambition to become wealthy at the same time. Their life together is ended when he is jailed for forging Rosie’s signature on a cheque. Released from jail, he becomes a drifter and is mistaken for a holy man. Raju uses his newfound respectability to provide a school, a hospital and other facilities for the villagers. Forced to demonstrate his messianic status when there is a drought, he manages to fast for 12 days and the rain comes, confirming his holy status in the eyes of the villagers (and of the audience) as he dies of starvation. The film can be seen as a regressive comment on ‘national culture’ e.g. the shift from colonial tourism to capitalist enterprise to religious faith, from mass cultural commodification and spectacle to pre-colonial naivety and ritual. There is also a discourse about stardom: starting out as a man of the people, the hero transgresses conventional moral codes and fulfils his dream of wealth, then finds this unsatisfying and, having been freed from material possessions (and women), he ends up fulfilling others’ wishes and finds apotheosis as a god in death. The film’s quasi-expressionist, garish use of colour and of calender art sets provides its own comment on notions of national popular culture, highlighted in the sequence when Raju changes from a fast-talking tourist guide to a saintly figure through dissolves awash with blue and yellow light spots and in the rhythmic cutting of the song He ram hamare ramachandra. Disowned by the novelist Narayan, the film has been attacked mainly for its thematic deviations, esp. the transformation of Rosie: in the novel she is a devadasi (temple dancers and prostitutes liberated by a reformist political movement leading to the Devadasi Bill in 1927 in Madras), a condition defended by orthodox historians for having preserved the South Indian classical Bharat Natyam dance tradition. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay ‘Once Again a Leap into the Postcolonial Banal’ (1990) addresses the irony of a novel, written originally in English and critical of that orthodoxy, itself being assimilated by the orthodox literary establishment in order to attack the film. She suggests a different version of colonial historical continuity than the one dominated by ideas of (literary, historical) authenticity. The film was a musical success with major hits such as Gaata rahe mera dil and Aaj phir jeene ki tamanana hai. A substantially altered 120’ English version (co-sc Pearl S. Buck p/d/co-sc Tad Danielewski) was released in the USA in 1965. It introduced new characters and much enlarged the role of e.g. a bitchy US television reporter played by Sheila Burghart. It also added new scenes (including a sequence in the US Embassy in Delhi). Although the Indian version has Pathe colour, the US version has US-processed Eastmancolor.

  KAPURUSH

aka The Coward 1965 74’ b&w Bengali d/sc/m Satyajit Ray p R.D. Bansal pc R.D.B. st Premendra Mitra’s Janaiko Kapuruser Kahini c Soumendu Roy
lp Soumitra Chatterjee, Madhabi Mukherjee, Haradhan Bannerjee

Ray’s morality play, usually shown with Mahapurush (1964), continues his ensemble play format. Both films were dubbed in Hindi and commercially released. Movie writer Amitabha Roy (Chatterjee) finds shelter with a tea magnate (Bannerjee) in Darjeeling when his car breaks down. He finds that the magnate is married to his former lover Karuna (Mukherjee). The film intercuts the banal conversation of the long evening and a picnic the next day with flashbacks showing how Roy had once betrayed Karuna. He offers, in a hurriedly written note, to marry her if she wishes to leave her husband. She turns him down, arriving at their rendezvous simply to recover a bottle of sleeping pills. Critic Chidananda Das Gupta saw the film as a sequel to Charulata (1964), replaying the man’s inability to defy social norms.

  KAVYA MELA

1965 138’ b&w Malayalam d M. Krishnan Nair p T.E. Vasudevan pc Jayamaruthi Prod, st A.K.V. sc S.L. Puram Sadanandan lyr Vyalar Rama Varma c C.J. Mohan m V. Dakshinamurthy
lp Prem Nazir, Sheela, Adoor Bhasi, Muthukulam Raghavan Pillai, Nellicode Bhaskaran, S.P. Pillai, Murali, Ramesh, Nilambur Aisha

Tear-jerking Malayalam adaptation of Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa (1957) and one of Prem Nazir’s classic tragic lover performances. He plays Jayadevan, a blind poet, who is starved of the love of his family by a cruel sister-in-law. He strikes up a relationship with Shridevi (Sheela) whose doctor father restores his eyesight but forbids a marriage. His best friend steals Jayadevan’s poetry and publishes it in his own name, thus becoming rich and famous while the original author suffers in a cruel world. In the end, when Jayadevan is recognised as the writer and offered a major award, he rejects the honour.

  KELA ISHARA JATA JATA

1965 157’ b&w Marathi d Anant Mane pc Chetana Chitra s Shankar Patil lyr Jagdish Khebudkar c Vasant Shinde m Ram Kadam
lp Leela Gandhi, Arun Sarnaik, Usha Chavan, Barchi Bahadur, Ganpat Patil, Aminabai, Kamal Begadkar, Kamal Dunbale, Maya Jadhav, Kausalya Jadhav, Rajan Salvi

Marathi Tamasha musical by its best-known exponent, Mane (Sangtye Aika, 1959). It is a story about two dancing-girls, the sisters Bakul and Shevanti, who are given a break by drummer Ganpat (Sarnaik). Both sisters fall in love with their benefactor, which causes a split in the theatre group. Shevanti joins the rival Tamasha faction led by Sonbai, sharpening the already fierce competition between the two groups. Much of the film consists of Tamasha numbers, culminating in the long Sawal-Jawab (question and answer) contest where Bakul defeats Sonbai and then her own sister to claim her man.

  MALAJANHA

aka The Dead Moon
1965 164’ b&w Oriya
d/sc Nitai Palit pc Raja Saheb of Ali st Upendra Kishore Dash’s novel dial Govind Senapati, Bhim Singh lyr Kabisurya Baladev Rath c Dinen Gupta m Akshay Mohanty
lp Jharana Das, Manimala, Geeta, Akshay Kumar, Sarat Poojary, Pira, Bhima, Purna Singh

Epic melodrama often presented as Oriya cinema’s coming of age. The sensitive Sati (Das) is forced to marry an old man but refuses to consummate the marriage. She is thrown out of the house when she takes shelter with Nath (Kumar) after a storm. Her parents die in a cholera epidemic and Nath takes her to the city where they live together, fighting unemployment and poverty. On their return to the village they are shunned and, unable to bear further humiliations, Sati drowns herself (in an understated dawn sequence simply showing her footsteps leading to the river). A long, slow-moving film renowned for Bengali cinematographer (later director) Gupta’s sensitive camerawork, for the famous Kabisurya Baladev Rath’s pastoral lyrics and for being probably the first Oriya film to pay attention to its soundtrack (notwithstanding the overuse of flute and sitar). However, the main plaudits go to Jharana Das’s remarkable performance which showed the oppression of women in traditional Oriya society without glorifying suffering womanhood.

  MURAPPENNU

aka Bride by Right aka The Betrothed One 1965 176’ b&w Malayalam d A. Vincent p K. Parameshwaran Nair pc Roopavani s M.T. Vasudevan Nair lyr P. Bhaskaran c A. Venkat m B.A. Chidambaranath
lp Prem Nazir, Madhu, P.J. Anthony, K.P. Oomer, S.P. Pillai, Adoor Bhasi, Jyothilakshmi, Sharada, Nellicode Bhaskaran, Shanta Devi, Bharati Menon, Kaliamma

A relentless joint family melodrama about the social impotence of righteous people. Balan (Nazir) is mercilessly exploited and defrauded by his uncle (Anthony), his cousin and his own brother, even as he dutifully looks after his mother and teenage sister. He sacrifices his own love for Bhagi (Sharada), the daughter of his uncle, so that a complicated (but not unusual) arrangement with the evil uncle can result in Bhagi marrying the hero’s younger brother, in return for a marriage between his sister and the uncle’s son. However, the uncle’s son betrays Balan’s sister at the last minute. Balan, forced to borrow money for a dowry, is too late to prevent his sister from committing suicide. The end leaves him an utterly defeated man. This was one of novelist Vasudevan Nair’s first major scripts, adapting to the cinema his well-known literary format of the hero caught in a vicious but declining feudal system. It was also the debut of his long-term association with director Vincent, creating a distinct brand of melodrama as social critique in Malayalam.

  ODEYIL NINNU

aka From The Gutter
1965 175’ b&w Malayalam
d K.S. Sethumadhavan p/cP. Ramaswamy pc Swami Thirumugham Pics s P. Kesavadev lyr Vyalar Rama Varma m P. Devarajan
lp Sathyan, K.R. Vijaya, Prem Nazir, Adoor Bhasi, S.P. Pillai, Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair, Kaviyoor Ponnamma, Adoor Pankajam, Kottayam Chellappan, Baby Padmini

The rickshaw man Pappu (Sathyan) adopts the baby girl Lakshmi (Baby Padmini/Vijaya) having rescued her, as the title suggests, from the ‘gutter’. Having dropped out of school and earlier worked as a railway porter, he now works hard to provide Lakshmi with an education and with all her needs. She marries a rich man, Gopi (Nazir), which does not, contrary to expectations, signify the end of her foster-father’s struggles, for now she is ashamed of her humble origins. In the end, after Pappu has declined her offer to live in her new home, her husband censures her, and she is punished by fate for her ingratitude when Pappu falls terminally ill. The ‘punishment’ is further heightened by forcing on the woman the guilt of a barely-concealed incest relationship since she insists on seeing Pappu as a parental figure. Sethumadhavan’s first critically acclaimed film featured a rare contribution by noted Malayalam novelist Kesavadev, integrated into Bimal Roy-type realist melodrama. The film was remade in Tamil as Babu (1971).

  OONCHE LOG

1965 144’ b&w Hindi
d/sc Phani Majumdar pc Chitrakala (Madras) st K. Balachander’s play Major Chandrakant dial Arjun Dev Rashk lyr Majrooh Sultanpuri c Kamal Ghosh m Chitragupta
lp Ashok Kumar, Raaj Kumar, Feroz Khan, Kanhaiyalal, Tarun Bose, K.R. Vijaya

Melodrama about an upright father, the blind Major Chandrakant (A. Kumar), with a good son, the policeman Srikanth (R. Kumar), and the other son the dissolute playboy Rajnikant (Khan). Rajnikant impregnates and then abandons a woman who commits suicide as a result. The woman’s brother Mohan (Bose) kills Rajnikant and wants to hide from the pursuing policeman, Srikanth. He is sheltered by the sympathetic major. The melodramatic pivot contrasts the father’s revulsion for his son’s murderer with his even greater revulsion at his son’s callous philandering. Srikanth has to arrest his own father for having sheltered a killer. One of the more successful adaptations of a play to the screen, the film is shot like a thriller, using emphatic ‘suspense’ music to bridge the extended ‘realistic’ longueurs. Made at the Vijaya-Vauhini Studios in Madras, it adapted K. Balachander’s best-known play, filmed by Balachander himself (Major Chandrakant) the following year.

  PANDAVA VANAVASAM

1965 188’ b&w Telugu/Tamil d K. Kameshwara Rao pc Madhavi Prod. s/co-lyr Samudrala Raghavacharya co-lyr Arudra, Kosaraju cC. Nageshwara Rao m Ghantasala Venkateshwara Rao
lp N.T. Rama Rao, Savitri, S.V. Ranga Rao, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Kanta Rao, T.S. Balaiah, Haranath, Satyanarayana, Rajanala, Lingamurthy, Mikkilineni, Prabhakara Reddy, K. Mukkamala, Ramana Reddy, Padmanabham, Vijayalakshmi, Sandhya, Baby Sasirekha, Rajasulochana, Chittor V. Nagaiah, Ajit Singh, Vanisree

Kameshwara Rao’s Mahabbarata-based hit mythological has NTR playing Bhima, Ranga Rao as Duryodhan and Savitri in one of her better-known mythological performances as Draupadi. Ghantasala’s music also became a hit. A version of the film, dubbed in Hindi and starring Hema Malini, was released in 1973, presumably with extra footage cut into the film.

  ROSY

1965 140’ b&w Malayalam d/st P.N. Menon p Mani pc Vrindavan Pics sc P.J. Anthony lyr P. Bhaskaran c E.N. Balakrishnan m Job
lp P.J. Anthony, Kaviyoor Ponnamma, Prem Nazir, Nirmala, Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair, T.S. Muthaiah, D.K. Chellappan, Johnson, C.P. Anthony, M.M. Narayanan Nair, Sushil Kumar, E. Madhavan, Susheela

The former art director Menon’s directorial debut stars the scenarist of this crime melodrama. Having unintentionally murdered a man to save his sister’s honour, Thumman flees and finds shelter in a fisherman’s hut where he falls in love with his benefactor’s daughter Rosy. In spite of the obstacles, the lovers decide to marry. When a police inspector appears in the village, Thumman and the pregnant Rosy escape to the mountains and are sheltered by a Muslim friend. Eventually, Rosy dies giving birth and Thumman, having buried his family, calmly allows himself to be arrested.

  SADHI MANSE

1965 134’ b&w Marathi d/s Bhalji Pendharkar pc Gayatri Chitra lyr Yogesh, Jagdish Khebudkar c Arvid Laad m Anandadhan [pseud, of Lata Mangeshkar!
lp Jayashree Gadkar, Chandrakant, Master Vithal, Sulochana, Barchi Bahadur, Rajshekhar, Chandrakant Gokhale

Pendharkar inflects his regional chauvinist approach, dominant in his historicals, to contrast an idyllic rural Maharashtra with urban corruption. The happy Shankar (Chandrakant) and his wife Parvati (Gadkar) find their lives disrupted when they accept the offer of a truck driver (Rajshekhar) to find them better prospects in the city. Shankar goes to jail when the driver involves him in a crime. Parvati is imprisoned when she kills the villain, just as Shankar is released. The film ends with a socialist-realist work song, Airanichya deva, the woman’s singing punctuated by sounds on a metal lathe, as they return to their profession and their independence. The other song hit was Malachya manyamandi (both sung by Lata Mangeshkar).

  SATYA HARISHCHANDRA

1965 221’ b&w Kannada/Telugu
d/st/dial/lyr[K] Hunsur Krishnamurthy d/p/sc[Te] K.V. Reddy pc Vijaya dial/lyr[Te] Pingali Nagendra Rao c Madhav Bulbule m Pendyala Nageshwara Rao
lp Rajkumar[K], Udaya Kumar [K], K.S. Ashwath[K], Narasimhraju[K], M.P. Shankar[K], Balkrishna[K], Baby Padmini[K], Dwarkeesh[K], N.T. Rama Rao [Te], K Mukkamala[Te], Chittor V. Nagaiah [Te], Rajashri, S. Varalakshmi, L. Vijayalakshmi, Vanisree, Pandharibai, Relangi Venkatramaiah

Famous Ramayana legend of the truth-seeking king of Ayodhya, his banishment and suffering as he is tested by Vishwamitra (Udaya Kumar), culminating in his dilemma of having either to kill his own wife who is accused of murder or to forsake his principles. The elaborate costume drama featured the two top stars of Kannada and Telugu cinemas, Rajkumar and NTR, playing the king. The Kannada version credited to Hunsur Krishnamurthy was a hit, but the Telugu one by K.V. Reddy failed.

  SHEVATCHA MALUSARA

1965 144’ b&w Marathi d/p Vasant Joglekar st Sumati Joglekar sc Datta Keshav dial Madhusudan Kalelkar lyr Jagdish Khebudkar c Bal Joglekar m Datta Davjekar
lp Ramesh Deo, Uma, Shrikant Moghe, Chandrakant Gokhale, Chitrarekha, Sunanda, Master Sachin, Ashok Kumar

An unusual Marathi war movie which mobilises and updates a historical/regional chauvinism associated with 17th-C. Maratha emperor Shivaji. Major Subhanrao Malusare, a direct descendant of Shivaji’s legendary lieutenant Tanaji Malusare, continues a proud family tradition by winning the Victoria Cross as an Allied officer fighting against Italian fascists in WW2. When he dies, his wife Savitri (Uma) vows that their son will never join the army. However, during the India-China conflict (1962), when her son’s friend is killed, she enjoins her son to fight for the nation even though the boy’s death would mean the end of the ancient clan. The film updated the rousing sentimentalism associated with Shivaji historicals into the present via songs such as He bharatiyano aika balidan katha veeranchi.

  THENE MANASULU

1965 174’ col Telugu
d/sc Adurthi Subba Rao pc Babu Movies p C. Sundaram co-st Mullapudi Venkatramana, K.R.K. Mohan co-st/co-dial K. Vishwanath, co-dial/co-lyr Acharya Athreya co-lyr Dasarathi c P.S. Selvaraj m K.V. Mahadevan
lp Rammohan, Krishna, Chalapathi Rao, Sandhyarani, Sukanya, K.V. Ramamurthy, G.S.R. Murthy, Koneshwara Rao

Subba Rao’s ‘experimental’ film announces his co-productions with Nageshwara Rao (Sudigundalu, 1967; Maro Prapancham, 1970). Narasaraju (Murthy) steals money from his friend Srinivasarao (K. Rao) to pay for his daughter’s wedding, leaving Srinivasarao unable to finance his own daughter Bhanumathi’s (Sukanya) marriage and compelling him to abandon his family and run away. To earn a living, Bhanumathi goes to the city where she meets Basavaraju (Krishna), the man she was to have married, and the two fall in love. Of the several new actors making their debuts, only Krishna became a major star.

  WAQT

1965 206’ col Hindi d Yash Chopra pc B.R. Films st F.A. Mirza sc B.R. Films Story Dept. dial /Akhtar-ul-Iman lyr Sahir Ludhianvi c Dharam Chopra m Ravi
lp Sunil Dutt, Raaj Kumar, Sadhana, Sharmila Tagore, Shashi Kapoor, Balraj Sahni, Shashikala, Motilal, Rehman, Achala Sachdev, Madan Puri, Jeevan

A contribution to the lost and found’ genre (cf. Kismet, 1943; Awara, 1951) later associated with Manmohan Desai’s films. The old and prosperous merchant Lala Kedarnath (Sahni) sees his family split and his house wrecked by an earthquake. Trying to trace one of his sons, he learns that the boy was ill treated by an evil orphanage warden (Jeevan) and he kills the warden, earning himself a 20-year stretch in jail. The son is raised by the crook Chinoy (Rehman) and becomes the suave thief Raja (Kumar). Kedarnath’s other sons are the fun-loving Ravi (Dutt) who becomes a lawyer and the hard-working but poor Vijay (Kapoor) who looks after their ailing mother. Vijay is hired as a chauffeur by his girlfriend Renu (Tagore) while Ravi and Raja love the same woman, Meena (Sadhana). After advocating a fatalist approach to the passage of time, the film turns into a suspense and courtroom drama when Chinoy frames Raja for murder. Raja is defended in court by Ravi. Eventually the family is reunited. The film was a major hit, exemplifying a kitschy colour aesthetic (denoting wealth) that was to become popular in Hindi films: a series of living-rooms in pink and blue, with fountains and circular beds in bedrooms, motor boats and fancy cars in which the rich race each other to get the girl in between attending huge parties. Hit songs included Ai meri zohrajabeen (sung by Manna Dey), Din hai baharke (sung by Asha Bhosle and Mahendra Kapoor) and Aage bhijane na tu (sung by Asha Bhosle).

  AAKHRI KHAT

1966 153’ b&w Hindi
d/s Chetan Anand pc Himalaya Films lyr Kaifi Azmi c Jal Mistry m Khayyam
lp Rajesh Khanna, Indrani Mukherjee, Naqi Jehan, Bunty, Nana Palsikar, Manavendra Chitnis

A social-realist melodrama about a man (Khanna in his debut) who secretly marries a gypsy girl from the hills (Mukherjee). They have a son (Bunty) but misunderstandings arise and the wife ends up living on the streets of Bombay with the child. She dies, leaving the boy wandering the city’s streets, having his own little adventures while his distraught father searches for him. With its extensive actuality footage of Bombay’s slums, suburban trains and working-class life, the film evokes e.g. K.A. Abbas’s urban melodramas (Munna, 1954; Shaher Aur Sapna, 1963). The film deploys a simple set of oppositions to signal good and bad: jazzy music and discotheques signify the callous and modern rich while the poor display their human warmth through acts of kindness to the child. Although the soundtrack adheres to the ‘realist’ principle of using the pilot dialogue track for all speech except that of the hero and heroine, it occasionally inserts suspense music to plug the narrative gaps in the plot.

  ANUPAMA

1966 148’ b&w Hindi
d/st Hrishikesh Mukherjee pc L.B. Films p L.B. Lachman sc Bimal Dutt, D.N. Mukherjee dial Rajinder Singh Bedi lyr Kaifi Azmi c Jaywant Pathare m Hemant Kumar [Hemanta Mukherjee]
lp Dharmendra, Sharmila Tagore, Shashikala, Deven Verma, Durga Khote, David, Surekha Pandit, Dulari, Naina, Brahm Bhardwaj, Amar, Tarun Bose

Although dedicated to Bimal Roy, known for his reformist socials, this is a psychodrama. Throughout her life Uma (Tagore), the daughter of Mohan Sharma (Bose), is blamed for her mother dying while giving birth to her. The guilt-laden Uma is contrasted with the flippant, upper-class Anita (Shashikala). Other characters include Arun (Verma), Anita’s boyfriend who returns from abroad, and his idealist friend Ashok (Dharmendra), a writer who loves Uma and eventually rescues her after writing a novel based on his imagination of her life. Classic songs composed and performed by Hemanta Mukherjee include the well-picturised Ya dil ki suno, and Lata Mangeshkar’s Dheere dheere machal.

  CHITTHI

1966 177’ b&w Tamil
d/s K.S. Gopalakrishnan pc Chitra Prod. lyr Udumalai Narayana Kavi, Kannadasan c R. Sampath
lp Padmini, M.R. Radha, Muthuraman, Vijayanirmala, Nagesh, Vijayashree, V.R. Rajagopal, S.D. Subbulakshmi

In her comeback film, Padmini plays the suffering Meenakshi, the eldest daughter in a large family. To look after her handicapped sister and her medical-student brother Balu (Muthuraman), she spurns a rich lover since his property is under litigation, preferring the financial security promised by an ageing widower (Radha). The man’s son disapproves and becomes a cab driver, while the widower’s daughter (Vijayanirmala) falls in love with Balu. Known for its unusually bold dialogues explicitly addressing women’s repression, the film boasted one song hit, Kalamithu kalamithu (sung by P. Susheela). B.A. Subba Rao’s Pinni (1967) is the Telugu version.

  DIL DIYA DARD LIYA

1966 169’ col Hindi
d A.R. Kardar pc Kay Prod, st Kay Prod. Story Dept. dial Kaushal Bharti lyr Shakeel Badayuni c Dwarka Divecha m Naushad
lp Dilip Kumar, Waheeda Rehman, Pran, Johnny Walker, Rehman, Shyama, Sajjan, Rani, S. Nazir, Sapru, Amar, Dulari

Allegedly borrowing the characters of Wuthering Heights, the film tells of the tyrannical Ramesh (Pran), son of the thakur, who falls into bad company while Shankar (Kumar), a farm-hand employed by Ramesh, is unaware that he is the real heir to the kingdom. Shankar loves Ramesh’s sister Roopa (W. Rehman) and vows to earn enough money to win her hand. However, Ramesh’s men beat him up and leave him for dead. Having survived, Shankar later returns a rich but bitter man and he uses a dancing-girl (Shyama) to make Roopa jealous, before things sort themselves out. According to the actress Shyama’s reminiscences (in Movie, Bombay, Sept. 1991), Kardar’s comeback film was directed by Dilip Kumar, uncredited, following a major falling out between the director and the star.

  GABAN

1966 169’ b&w Hindi
co-sc/co-d Krishan Chopra co-d Hrishikesh Mukherjee pc B.I. Prod. st Munshi Premchand’s novel (1930) co-sc Bhanu Pratap dial Baij Sharma, Akhtar-ul-Iman lyr Hasrat Jaipuri, Shailendra c K. Vaikunth m Shankar-Jaikishen
lp Sunil Dutt, Sadhana, Zeb Rehman, Kanhaiyalal, Agha, Anwar Hussain, Minoo Mumtaz, Badri Prasad, P. Kailash, Kamal Kapoor, Mishra, Pratima Devi, Leela Mishra, Brahm Bhardwaj, B.B. Bhalla, Surekha Pandit

Set in Allahabad, 1928, in the anti-British terrorist actions that peaked between the Simon Commission and the Gandhi-Irwin Pact (1929), Premchand’s story tells of Ramnath (Dutt), son of a small-time clerk in the Allahabad court, who borrows large amounts of money in order to satisfy his wife’s desire for jewellery. This forces him to embezzle money at the court, and gets the police after him. On the run, and unaware that his wife has repaid the embezzled money, he is blackmailed by a repressive police force into presenting a false eyewitness account that would convict non-violent nationalists for terrorist acts. One of Dutt’s better-known screen performances holds together a film that was patched together by Mukherjee following the death of the original director, Chopra.

  GALLAN HOYIAN BEETIYAN

1966 117’ b&w Dogri
d/sc Kumar Kuldip pc Tawi Films st Narendra Khajuria’s play Pyasi Dharti dial Ramnath Shastri lyr Yash Sharma, Kehari Singh ‘Madhukar’
lp Ram Kumar Abrol, Jitender Sharma, Kaberi, Veena Kotwal

The only film made to date in the language of the Dogra community, which comprises c.25% of the Kashmiri people. Made mainly on the initiative of several well-known Dogri writers, the melodrama revolves around the problems of intermarriage between two villages and of water scarcity in the Kandli area of Duggar. A canal is dug between two villages when the marriages of a village chieftain’s brother and sister are arranged with their counterparts from the other community. The sister Shano’s marriage takes place, but when her brother dies, negotiations over the water-sharing agreement break down. Trying to resolve the resulting drought Shano is killed and, in the dramatic finale, her dead body reaches her marital home at the same time as the water from the reopened canal. The film is best-known for evoking Khajuria’s realist idiom.

  KAA

1966 165’ b&w Oriya
d/sc Siddharth p Parbati Ghosh st Kanhucharan Mohanty c Deojibhai, Bijoy De m Shrikumar
lp Guruprasad, Chandana, Geeta, Manimala, Sarat Pujari, Byomkesh, Sudhangsu

Oriya melodrama based on Mohanty’s popular fiction. According to some sources, the film was pseudonymously directed by Ramchandra Thakur. Nandika, childless after eight years of marriage, persuades her husband Sunanda to remarry. Both Nandika and the second wife Lalita are unhappy though superficially affectionate. After Lalita and Sunanda move to the city, Nandika finds herself pregnant and follows them. The tensions are resolved when Nandika dies in childbirth. This is the first production of Parbati Ghosh, actress and director (Chamana Atha Guntha, 1986) and known for producing, with husband Gauraprasad Ghosh, quality Oriya cinema (cf. Nitai Palit’s Bhai Bhai, 1956; Sharada Prasanna Nayak’s Lakhmi, 1962).

  KALAPI

1966 137’ b&w Gujarati
d Manhar Raskapur pc Pragya Pictures st Prabodhjoshi co-lyr Kalapi c Shankar Bakel co-lyr/m Avinash Vyas
lp Sanjeev Kumar, Padma Rani, Aruna Irani, Vishnukumar Vyas, P. Kharsani, Pratap Ojha, Nandini Desai, Narayan Rajgor, Dineshkumar, D.S. Mehta, Ashok Thakkar, Premshankar Bhatt, Ajit Soni, Nutan, Manoj Purohit, Jayant Vyas, Miss Jayashree, Madhumati

Film based on the life of Kalapi (1874–1900), a Gujarati romantic poet who died aged 26 leaving one anthology, Kelkrav, consisting mainly of love poems, apparently addressed to his wife’s maid. Some evoke the legend of Bilwamangal, while others adapt Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats into a local idiom. Prince Sursinhji Takthasinghji Gohil (Hindi star Sanjeev Kumar), the ruler of Lathi, marries two princesses on the same day. However, Rama, the princess he loves, is more interested in power than in him. The prince rejects the throne, becomes a poet and falls in love with Rama’s maid Shobhana (Irani).

Kaa

  KAYAMKULAM KOCHHUNNI

aka The Dear One of Kayamkulam
1966 131’ b&w Malayalam
d/p P.A. Thomas dialjzgaxhi N.K. Achari lyr P. Bhaskaran, Abhayadev c P.B. Mani m B.A. Chidambaranath
lp Sathyan, Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair, K.P. Oomer, Adoor Bhasi, Manavalan Joseph, Muthukulam Raghavan Pillai, Kaduvakulam Anthony, O. Ramdas, Kothamangalam Ali, Lateef, Usha Kumari (aka Vijayanirmala), Kamaladevi, Sukumari, Nalini, Parvati, Laxmi

A story featuring Central Travancore’s Robin Hood-type folk hero, Kochhunni (Sathyan), an expert in Kerala’s martial arts who became a notorious dacoit, allegedly with a golden heart. Betrayed by his lover, the palace maid Janaki, he escapes, settles the score with Janaki and her accomplice and then gives himself up to the law.

  KUMARI PENN

aka Kanne Pilla
1966 154’ b&w Tamil
d Ramanna pc E.V.R. Pics lyr Kannadasan c G. Dora m M.S. Vishwanathan lp Jayalalitha, Ravichandran, Madhavi, S.V. Ranga Rao

Early Jayalalitha and Ravichandran hit featuring her in body-hugging tights and sexy numbers like the train song Varushattaiparu arubatthi aaru (sung by L.R. Ishwari). She plays Shyamala, whose rich but ailing grandfather (Ranga Rao) insists she marry before he dies. She passes off an illiterate shepherd (Ravichandran) as her chosen groom to keep the old man happy, but eventually marries the man. The Hindi film Manchali (1973) had a similar story.

  KUNJALI MARAKKAR

1966 147’ b&w Malayalam
d S.S. Rajan pc Chandrathara Prod. s K. Padmanabhan Nair lyr P. Bhaskaran c C.A.S. Mani m B.A. Chidambaranath
lp Kottarakkara Sridharan Nair, Prem Nazir, Adoor Bhasi, S.P. Pillai, Kottayam Chellappan, P.J. Anthony, G.K. Pillai, Sathyapal, Premji, Nellicode Bhaskaran, Jyothilakshmi, Sukumari, Nalini

Major Malayalam historical telling the story of the legendary 16th C. naval captain Kunjali Marakkar (Nair). Following Vasco da Gama’s landing in Calicut (1498) the Portuguese dominated the Malabar trade for the next century, opposed only by the Zamorin of Calicut (Premji). In the film, the zamorin’s evil nephew (Anthony) sides with the Portuguese. Marakkar defeats the imperialist enemy in several sea battles, but the perfidy of the nephew and a scheming Namboodiri priest causes the zamorin’s downfall. Marakkar is arrested and killed. The film belonged to Nair in his best-known role, supported by Nazir playing the double role of the Portuguese Antonio and Narayana Nair.

  MAJOR CHANDRAKANTH

1966 163’ b&w Tamil
d/sc K. Balachander p AVM Prods. c S. Maruthi Rao lyr Vali m V. Kumar
lp Sundarrajan, Nagesh, Muthuraman, A.V.M. Rajan, Jayalalitha

When Vimala’s (Jayalalitha) wayward lover Rajnikant (Rajan) is killed by her brother Mohan (Nagesh), the brother is sheltered from the police by the victim’s blind father, Major Chandrakanth (Sundarajan). The major’s elder son, the zealous cop Srikanth (Muthuraman), is in charge of finding Mohan, whom he finally arrests in his own house. Realising that his father knowingly sheltered a murder suspect, Srikanth arrests the blind old man as well. Based on a noted play by Balachander himself, the story was however filmed earlier in Hindi as Oonche Log (1965).

  MATIR MANISHA

aka Two Brothers
1966 113’ b&w Oriya
d/sc Mrinal Sen p Babulal Doshi pc Chhaybani Pratishthan st Kalindi Charan Panigrahi’s novel (1930) dial Gopal Chatray c Sailaja Chatterjee m Bhubhaneshwar Mishra
lp Sarat Pujari, Prashanta Nanda, Ram Mania, Sujata, Dukhiram Sain, Bhim Singh, Kartick Ghosh, Bhanumathi, Snehalata, Meera

Sen’s only feature in Oriya, based on a major Oriya novel, tries to elaborate a new way of representing rural India. The director wrote his script and dialogues in Bengali, first translating them into Oriya, then adapting and modifying the text during the shooting on advice from the actors and the local villagers. Set in a small Orissa village in the late 30s as WW2 breaks out and the Indian economy is neglected in favour of the war effort, the film contrasts different attitudes, exemplified by two brothers, Baraju (Pujari) and Chakkadi (Nanda), to tradition and modernity, an important debate within nationalist politics at the time. Sen’s film was criticised for its symbolic imagery and for bringing a ‘Communist’ angle to the Gandhian fable (referred to via the elder brother’s character), but it remains a pioneering attempt to inscribe a rural world into history, divesting it of both nostalgia and idealisation. Produced by Oriya’s main producer Doshi, Pujari and Nanda later became the top male stars in the language.

  MOTOR SUNDARAM PILLAI

1966 160’ b&w Tamil
d Balu pc Gemini s Vembattur Kittu lyr Kothamangalam Subbu c P. Ellappa m M.S. Vishwanathan
lp Sivaji Ganesan, Sowcar Janaki, Manimala, Kanchana, Asha, Jayalalitha, Pandharibai, Chittor V. Nagaiah

Motor magnate Sundaram Pillai (Ganesan) disappears on weekdays to his workplace, leaving his wife (Sowcar Janaki) behind, until it is revealed that he has a second wife (Manimala) at another residence. The Gemini Studio production - made after a long period of inactivity, and also Ganesan’s sole film with this studio - was a remake of Kishore Sahu’s Grihasthi (1963).

  NAYAK

aka The Hero
1966 120’ b&w Bengali
d/s/m Satyajit Ray p R.D. Bansal pc R.D.B. c Subrata Mitra
lp Uttam Kumar, Sharmila Tagore, Bireshwar Sen, Soumyen Bose, Nirmal Ghosh, Premangshu Bose, Sumita Sanyal, Ranjit Sen, Bharati Devi, Lali Choudhury, Kamu Mukherjee, Sushmita Mukherjee, Subrata Sen Sharma, Jamuna Sinha, Hiralal, Jogesh Chatterjee, Satya Bannerjee, Gopal Dey

Ray’s first original script since Kanchanjungha (1962) seems inspired by Bergman’s Smullstronstallet (1957) and uses an ensemble piece with the structure of a suspense plot: a group of characters interact during a 24-hour train journey between Calcutta and Delhi. The film is dominated by its insecure male lead, movie megastar Arindam Mukherjee (played by Bengali megastar Uttam Kumar). In nightmares he drowns in a sea of banknotes amid jangling telephones operated by skeletons. On the train, he tells his story to Aditi (Tagore), the sexy but severe (her intelligence is signalled conventionally by her glasses, her beauty equally conventionally by having her remove her glasses) editor of a women’s magazine. In the end, she destroys her notes because journalists should respect the privacy even of film stars. As in Kanchanjungha, the bizarre protagonist, the dream sequences and the flashbacks constantly suggest an impending dramatic event: e.g. the tensely edited sequence in which he gets drunk, contemplates suicide, gets the attendant to call Aditi, starts confessing to her about his affair with a married woman, etc. The presence of a small set of bit players, including an advertising man, a religious guru (Bannerjee) who wants to advertise his business, an old writer who sees the hero as exemplifying contemporary decadence and a businessman with his family, are typical of the whodunit ploy of creating a small but varied set of potential murder suspects. Here, unlike Kanchanjungha or the film that would use the format with greater skill, Aranyer Din Ratri (1969), the ‘clues’ to the unfolding drama point not to a crime but to a notion of cultural identity hidden in verbal, gestural and dress nuances (e.g. when Aditi gets off the train, Arindam puts on his dark sunglasses again). Ray made his first real thriller the following year, Chidiakhana (1967).

  RANGULA RATNAM

1966 181’b&w Telugu
d B.N. Reddi pc Vauhini st Palagummi Padmaraju dial D.W. Narasaraju lyr Dasarathi, C. Narayana Reddy, Kosaraju c U. Rajagopal m Saluri Rajeshwara Rao, B. Gopalam
lp Anjali Devi, Pushpavalli, Rekha, Chandramohan, Rammohan, Vanisree, Vijayanirmala, Sukanya, Ramana Reddy, Kakarala, Radhakumari

Hit family melodrama about a formerly rich but now impoverished rural family that migrates to the city. The father dies, leaving behind his widow (Anjali Devi), two sons and a daughter. The elder son Suryam (Rammohan) marries the daughter of a corrupt politician. Younger son Vasu (Chandramohan) starts working at a young age to help his mother but retains his idealism and he eventually comes to represent the oppressed classes. The two brothers clash, first ideologically and then physically, during an election in which they fight on opposite sides. The mother tries to intervene and is injured, leading to a family reconciliation. Reddi cast several newcomers, some of whom (Kakarala, Chandramohan, Vanisree) later became stars. Hindi star Rekha debuted in this film as child actress Baby Bhanurekha, acting alongside her mother Pushpavalli.

  TEESRI KASAM

aka The Third Vow 1966 159’ b&w Hindi
d Basu Bhattacharya p/co-lyr Shailendra pc Image Makers st/dial Phanishwar Nath Renu’s Mare Gaye Gulfam sc Nabendu Ghosh co-lyr Hasrat Jaipuri c Subrata Mitra m Shankar-Jaikishen
lp Raj Kapoor, Waheeda Rehman, Dulari, Iftikhar, Asit Sen, C.S. Dubey, Krishna Dhawan, Vishwa Mehra, Samar Chatterjee, Nabendu Ghosh, Keshto Mukherjee

Wonderfully photographed by Mitra, who shot S. Ray’s early films, this musical melodrama sees Kapoor return to his role as a country bumpkin called Hiraman, a bullock-cart driver. Transporting a Nautanki dancer, Hirabai (Rehman) to join a performing troupe, he wins her affection with his old songs and by treating the ‘dancing-girl’ as a respectable woman. Hiraman eventually finds out that a dancing-girl in a troupe is in no position to refuse sex with local potentates. However, his innocence has persuaded her to fight off unwanted advances and to leave the Nautanki theatre. She bids farewell to Hiraman at the railway station and invites him to come and see her in a different show. The film ends with Hiraman taking his third vow, telling his bullocks that he will never carry a Nautanki dancer again. The sentimental story touches on the gross sexual oppression of women but in the end places its sympathies with the disillusioned Hiraman rather than with the woman. The film is notable mostly for its seamless, lyrical imagery and for Kapoor’s best performance of his archetypal persona.

  TEESRI MANZIL

1966 172’ col Hindi
d Vijay Anand pc United Producers, Nasir Hussain Films s/p Nasir Hussain lyr Majrooh Sultanpuri c N.V. Srinivas m R.D. Burman
lp Shammi Kapoor, Asha Parekh, Premnath, Helen, K.N Singh, Raj Mehra, Prem Chopra, Laxmi Chhaya, Neeta, Sabina, Salim, Rashid Khan, Iftikhar

Musical love story and murder mystery repeating the star pairing of the hit Dil Deke Dekho (1959) as well as its locales, the hill-station and the hotel dance-floor. Sunita (Parekh) goes to Mussoorie with her college hockey team. She is also determined to avenge the death of her sister Rupa, who had apparently committed suicide when she was rejected by her lover Rocky (Kapoor), a drummer in the hotel’s jazz band. Rocky meets her and, wise to her intentions, disguises his identity. The two fall in love. The story picks up again when a policeman (Iftekhar) reveals that Rupa was murdered. The dancer Ruby (Helen), who is in love with Rocky, and Rupa’s jealous fiance (Chopra) are prime suspects. In the end, a subplot is quickly developed and the murderer caught. The film included classic Mohammed Rafi and Asha Bhosle duets such as O hasina zulfonwali, Aaja aaja, O mere sona re sona re and the quixotic Rafi solo, Diwana mujhsa nahin, energetically picturised on the ageing but lively lead duo.

  YARUKAKA AZHUDAN

1966 111’b&w Tamil
d/sc Jayakantan p Asai Jyothi Films c Nemai Ghosh lyr Kannadasan m S.V. Ramanan
lp Nagesh, K.R. Vijaya, T.S. Balaiah, S.V. Sahasranamam, Prabhakar, Wahab Kashmiri, Kokila

A melodrama with thriller overtones set entirely in a small lodge in Madras. A drunken Seth (Kashmiri) who comes to stay gives his cash to the owner (Balaiah) in safekeeping. The next morning the customer, having forgotten to whom he gave the money, accuses the retarded servant boy Joseph (Nagesh). The owner takes advantage of the situation and keeps the money. A woman lodger (Vijaya), deserted by her lover, tries to help, but only the return of the vacationing head cook Naidu (Sahasranamam) finds out the truth and clears Joseph’s name.

  AADA PADUCHU

1967 162’ b&w Telugu
d K. Hemambharadhara Rao pc Subhashini Art Pics sc L.V. Prasad dial K. Pratyagatma lyr Dasarathi, Kosaraju, Sri Sri, C. Narayana Reddy, Arudra c M.G. Singh, M.C. Sekhar m T. Chalapathi Rao
lp N.T. Rama Rao, Relangi Venkatramaiah, Padmanabham, Shobhan Babu, Chandrakala, Vanisree, Geetanjali

Melodrama written by noted Telugu directors Prasad and Pratyagatma. Satyam (NTR) looks after his sister Sharada (Chandrakala) and younger brother Shekhar (Shobhan Babu). The sister has an accident and goes blind just before her marriage. The younger brother gets married and takes to drinking and gambling. Satyam finally succeeds in bringing the family together and restores his sister’s sight. The film adapted two earlier versions of the same plot, C. Narayanamurthy’s Naa Chellelu (1953) and Prasad’s own Chhoti Bahen (1959).

  AGNIPUTHRI

1967 144’ b&w Malayalam
d M. Krishnan Nair p Prem Nawaz pc Prem and Balaji Movies s S.L. Puram Sadanandan lyr Vyalar Rama Varma c N.S. Mani m Baburaj lp Prem Nazir, T.S. Muthaiah, T.K. Balachandran, S.P. Pillai, Adoor Bhasi, Bahadur, Sheela, Vasantha, Aranmulla Ponnamma, Baby Usha, T.R. Omana, Meena

Melodrama taking Malayalam cinema’s fascination with incest to its limit. The respectable college teacher Rajan (Nazir) marries Sindhu (Sheela), the orphaned inmate of a home for destitutes. The feudal conservative hypocrisies of the hero’s family are graphically criticised: Rajan’s cousin Chandran admits he once had sex with Sindhu, and Rajan’s snooty brother, the doctor Jayadev, fathered Sindhu’s daughter Bindu. Sindhu further confesses on her wedding night that she suffers from venereal disease, and eventually dies. The gruesome film is adapted from a popular play by Nazir’s brother Prem Nawaz. The theatrical gestures and painted backdrops were maintained in the film version. The film was remade in Hindi as Darpan (1970) starring Sunil Dutt and Waheeda Rehman.

  ANTONY FIRINGEE

1967 157’ b&w Bengali
d Sunil Bannerjee p B.N. Roy lyr Pranab Roy c Bijoy Ghosh m Anil Bagchi
lp Uttam Kumar, Tanuja, Lolita Chatterjee, Asit Baran, Chhaya Devi, Haridhan, Ruma Guha-Thakurta, Jahar Roy, Ashim Kumar

Reformist musical recounting the legend of a Portuguese-Indian who in the early 19th C. became a famous Bengali poet-musician (in the Kabigan genre). Antony Firingee [Antony the Foreigner] (U. Kumar) falls in love with the famous courtesan Shakila (Tanuja). At first she rejects him, but later reveals her tragic story: she is a widow who escaped when she was forced to commit sati (ritual immolation) and was later raped. She then agrees to marry Antony and they try to overcome social ostracisation when, under her tutelage, he defeats a series of famous poets (e.g. Bhola Moira) in the tradition of the Kabir Larai (contest between poets emphasising improvisation). However, he returns home to find his wife killed by a mob and resigns himself to being a social outcast, ‘the fate of all poets and foreigners’. Bagchi’s music was the film’s most successful feature.

  ANVESHICHU KANDATIYILLA

aka Sought But Didn’t Find 1967 150’ b&w Malayalam
d/lyrV. Bhaskaran p K. Ravindranathan Nair pc Kollam General Pics s Parappuram c E.N. Balakrishnan m Baburaj
lp Sathyan, Madhu, Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair, P.J. Anthony, T.S. Muthaiah, Adoor Bhasi, Bahadur, G.K. Pillai, Latif, K.R. Vijaya, Vijayanirmala, Kaviyoor Ponnamma, Mavelikkara Ponnamma, Meena, Sukumari, Sharada, Baby Sheela, Baby Kausalia, Nellicode Bhaskaran

Emotional drama about a woman’s unsuccessful search for happiness, made as a reply to the biblical homily, ‘seek and ye shall find’. Susamma (Vijaya), born eight months after her parents’ marriage, is for this reason rejected by her father and ridiculed by her village community. She eventually becomes a nurse during WW2 and falls for a dashing captain who turns out to be a philanderer. He is killed and she returns home where she has a relationship with Anthony, who turns out to be a married man. Disillusioned, she finds peace in the very hospital where she used to be a nurse. Bhaskaran’s biggest film to date, with a major star cast, adapting one of Parappuram’s war stories (cf. Ninamanninnya Kalapadakal, 1963). Bahadur and Bhasi have independent comedy routines.

  ARUNDHATI

1967 145’ b&w Oriya
d/sc Prafulla Sengupta p Dhiren Patnaik st Gurukrishna Goswami dial Anand Shankar Das c Bishnu Chakraborty m Shantanu Mahapatra
lp Minati Mishra, Sarat Pujari

Ambitious but unsuccessful big-budget Oriya musical extravaganza. Arundhati (Mishra), studying dance at her father’s performing arts establishment, loves Manoj (Poojari), a singer whom her father hopes will become his successor. The industrialist Biswajit claims Arundhati is his wife Madhu, believed to have died in a train accident. He presents various kinds of proof and accuses the bewildered Arundhati of infidelity. Eventually a twin sister, lost when still a child, turns out to have been the cause of the confusion. The skeletal plot was mainly an excuse for several classical dance numbers by Mishra, choreographed by the legendary Odissi dancer Guru Kelucharan Mahapatra.

  ASHWAMEDHAM

aka The Liberation Ritual
1967 135’ b&w Malayalam
d/c A. Vincent p Hari Pothan pc Supriya Pics s Thoppil Bhasi lyr Vyalar Rama Varma m P. Devarajan
lp Sathyan, Prem Nazir, Madhu, Sheela, Indira Thambi, Sukumari, P.J. Anthony, Adoor Bhasi, G.K. Pillai, T.R. Omana, Bahadur, Kambisseri Karunakaran

Vincent’s reform drama adapted a noted Bhasi play about attitudes to disease. Sarojan’s (Sheela) marriage to lover Mohan (Nazir) is called off when she contracts leprosy. She is cured in six months, but neither her lover nor her own family accept her back. Eventually she returns to the sanatorium that cured her, and finds happiness helping others afflicted by the disease. Sathyan plays the good doctor Thomas.

  AVAL

aka She 1967 142’ b&w Malayalam
d Aziz p Mohammed Sarkar pc Beena Films s Thoppil Bhasi lyr Vyalar Rama Varma c Ravi Varma m P. Devarajan lp Usha Nandini, Madhu, K.P. Oomer, Adoor Bhasi, Bahadur, Kothamangalam Ali, Ramchand, Maya, Meena, Shanta, Baby Waheeda, Kaduvakulam Anthony, Krishnan Kutty, Shanta Devi

Bizarre Bhasi melodrama about sexual impotence, divorce and a social system that is shown as riddled with incestuous relationships. Sridevi (Usha Nandini) becomes a schoolteacher in a remote village in the mountains, where a widower falls in love with her. This leads to a long story in flashback, where she tells him about how she was betrayed by her lover (Madhu). It appears that her brother had rejected his sister, and in retaliation he does the same to her. She marries a second man even through she is pregnant by her first lover. Her new husband turns out to be sexually impotent. When she delivers her child, she is told that it is dead, but the child survives and is adopted by its biological father. In the end she has to choose between her duties to her new husband and her maternal desire to raise her own child. The problem is solved by the generosity of her husband who accepts her with her baby. This film was the debut of former FTII student Aziz, at this time a member of an informal collective.

  BAMBAI RAAT KI BAHON MEIN

1967 136’ b&w Hindi
d/s/p K.A. Abbas pc Naya Sansar lyr Hasan Kamal c Ramchandra m J.P. Kaushik
lp Surekha, Vimal Ahuja, Jalal Agha, Madhavi, David, Persis Khambatta, Irshad Panjatan

Characteristic of many CPI ideologues’ work in the 60s (cf. Sukhdev), this is a demagogic melodrama bewailing the city’s effect on ‘traditional’ values. The city is represented by nightclubs, swindlers and drunken women. The hero is Amar Kumar (Ahuja), a crusading journalist under pressure to accept a bribe to kill his story about corruption in high places. Returning from Delhi, he meets a bootlegger named Johnny (Agha) on the plane. An old passenger, Sevakram (Panjatan), dies and leaves a wad of money he stole from a bank. Amar, debating the future with his estranged wife Asha, winds up in Bombay at a nightclub. At Toto’s house, Amar meets the cabaret singer Lily (Khambatta) and the drunk Rosy (Madhavi). Although Rosy loves Johnny, he loves Lily. Eventually it transpires that Johnny strangled the old man and as the police chase him through Bombay, his car runs over Rosy and he is caught.

  BELLIMODA

1967 163’ b&w Kannada
d/s SR. Puttana Kanagal pc Srinivasa Arts st Triveni c R.N.K. Prasad m Vijayabhaskar Kalpana, Kalyana Kumar, Pandharibai, Ashwath, Balkrishna

Kanagal’s Kannada debut is a classic melodrama inaugurating his characteristic type of expressionist psychodrama. The story is set in a hilly orchard belonging to Indira’s (Kalpana) father Sadashiva (Ashwath). She loves Mohan (Kumar), who goes abroad to study sponsored by Indira’s father. Although the two are supposed to marry, a problem arises when Indira’s mother Lalitha (Pandharibai) dies giving birth to a son, the official heir to Sadashiva’s property. Believing himself too indebted to her father and socially beneath her, Mohan refuses to marry Indira. In the film’s extraordinary end, Indira hacks a tree to pieces and rises ‘to catch a rainbow’. Although mobilising the Kannada version of Mills & Boon romances, Kanagal’s work evokes the psychotic undertone of these lower middle-class fictions e.g. Indira nurses her infant brother as she would her own child, intensifying Mohan’s envy. The lush orchard is disturbingly filmed with a hand-held camera and the film’s imagery repeatedly refers to calendar art: the stars, the moon, curved wash-stands and a fan-shaped bed, painted backdrops, etc. The film established Kalpana as Kannada cinema’s reigning star, and composer Vijayabhaskar. Kanagal remade the film in Malayalam as Swapnabhoomi (1967) with Prem Nazir and Sheela.

  BHAMA VIJAYAM/BHALE KODALU

1967 179’ b&w Tamil/Telugu
d K. Balachander pc Manohar Pics/Sekhar Films lyr Kannadasan c P.N. Sundaram,
K.S. Prakash m M.S. Vishwanathan, T.V. Raju lp Rajashri, Nagesh, Muthuraman, Sundarrajan, T.S. Balaiah[Ta] /S.V. Ranga Rao[Te], Jayanthi, Kanchana, Sowcar Janaki, K. Mukkamala, N.T. Rama Rao

Balachander’s satire is reminiscent of his stage work. A movie star Bhama (Rajshree) moves into the neighbourhood where a joint family of three husbands (Nagesh, Muthuraman, Sundarrajan) and their wives (Jayanthi, Kanchana, Janaki) live. Her presence sends the wives into a spending spree as they buy radios and fancy goods in order to keep up with their glamorous neighbour, while accusing their husbands of being more than friendly with the star. The comic song Varavu ettanna salavu path anna (Earn Eight Annas and Spend Ten) was a hit.

  CHHUTI

1967 119’ b&w Bengali
d/sc/m Arundhati Devi pc Purnima Pics
st Bimal Kar c Bimal Mukherjee
lp Nandini Maliya, Mrinal Mukherjee, Ajitesh Bannerjee, Romi Choudhury, Debabrati Sen, Dipali Chakraborty, Tinku

Actress Arundhati Devi’s directorial debut is a lyrical melodrama. When Bhramar’s (Maliya) father (Bannerjee) remarries, she does not get on with her stern stepmother Himani (Sen), who is a disciplinarian and a moralist, and who helps the story become a critique of protestant ethics. Bhramar falls ill but hides her illness, which develops into tuberculosis. Into this family arrives Amal (Mukherjee) and the two fall in love. In the end Bhramar is taken to hospital and Amal, aware she is terminally ill, promises to wait for her. The elegaic film is set in a Christian community in Bihar, whose sylvan landscape, where the tragedy is played out, serves to comment on the contemporary - both geographically and generically, as it distances itself from the tradition of popular romances addressing similar themes of terminal illness - by a literal process of exclusion.

  CHIDIAKHANA

aka Chiriakhana aka The Zoo
1967 125’ b&w Bengali
d/sc/m Satyajit Ray p Harendranath
Bhattacharya pc Star Prod. st Saradindu
Bannerjee’s novel Chidiakhana c Soumendu Roy
lp Uttam Kumar, Sailen Mukherjee, Sushil Majumdar, Kanika Majumdar, Subhendu Chatterjee, Shyamal Ghosal, Prasad Mukherjee. Subira Roy, Nripati Chatterjee, Subrata Chatterjee, Gitali Roy, Kalipada Chakravarty, Chinmoy Roy, Ramen Mullick, Brajadas, Nilatpal Dey, Jahar Ganguly

This relatively unknown Ray film, made to help out some friends, is his first real detective thriller (cf. Sonar Kella, 1974; Joi Baba Felunath, 1978) although he had deployed the generic narrative structure often before (cf. Kanchanjunga, 1962). The detective Byomkesh Bakshi (Kumar) is hired by a retired judge (S. Majumdar) to trace a former screen actress who lives in a colony for social outcasts (run by the judge to atone for sentencing several convicts to death). Bakshi ends up investigating the mysterious death of his own client. He unmasks the culprit when he notices that, in a series of tape-recorded interviews with the inhabitants, a woman (G. Roy) betrays her identity by her accent. The woman turns out to be the former film actress, whose career was ruined by her lover when he changed her looks with plastic surgery.

Mrinal Mukherjee (left) and Nandini Maliya (right) in Chhuti

  CHITRAMELA

Aka Image Festival
1967 172’ b&w Malayalam
d T.S. Muthaiah pc Shri Movies s Nagarathinte Mukhaugal. M.K. Mani, S.L. Puram Sadanandan; Penninte Prapancham. T. Vasudevan, Bharathan Kutty; Apaswarangak Srikumaran Thampic N.S. Mani m P. Devarajan
lp Nagarathinte Mukhangal: Sheela, K.P. Oomer, Kottayam Chellappan, Baby Rajani, Baby Usha; Penninte Prapancham: S.P. Pillai, Adoor Bhasi, Bahadur, Manavalan Joseph, Shri Nagendra Pillai, Meena, Khadija, C.R. Lakshmi; Apaswarangak Prem Nazir, Sharada, Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair, Sukumari, G.K. Pillai, Nellicode Bhaskaran, T.R. Omana, Wahab Kashmiri

Malayalam cinema’s first portmanteau film, consisting of three short films, is also Tamil/Malayalam actor Muthaiah’s debut as director. Nagarathinte Mukhangal [Faces of the City] (38’) shows the tragic fate of children left at home by pleasure-loving parents who frequent nightclubs. Penninte Prapancham [A Woman’s World] (39’) is a Laurel and Hardy-inspired comedy speculating on life 50 years in the future when sex-change operations become commonplace. The longest story, Apaswarangal [Discordant Notes] (95’), is a tragic love story between a street singer and a blind woman. To achieve success, the street singer has to accept the patronage of a famous dancer, which estranges him from his girl. In the end she dies in his arms.

  HATEY BAZAREY

1967 133’(128’) b&w Bengali
d/sc/m Tapan Sinha pc Priya Films
st Banaphool lyr Rabindranath Tagore
c Dinen Gupta
lp Ashok Kumar, Vyjayanthimala, Ajitesh Bannerjee, Chhaya Devi, Samita Biswas, Rudraprasad Sengupta, Bhanu Bannerjee, Geeta De, Samit Bhanja, Chinmoy Roy, Partha Mukherjee

Maudling Sinha melodrama about a benevolent rural doctor Mukherjee (Kumar) working in a village on the Bengal-Bihar border where, along with some good villagers, he opposes the cruel landlord and rapist Lachhman (A. Bannerjee). The doctor solves local problems and becomes a political hero. The comely widow Chhipli (Vyjayanthimala) is the dramatic pivot, as the villain first tries to seduce and then rape her. The doctor rescues her, but both hero and villain die. The villagers unite to ensure the success of the doctor’s new mobile hospital. With this film Sinha began using major Hindi stars to play larger-than-life, explicitly anti-Communist ‘common-man’ heroes (cf. Dilip Kumar in Sagina Mahato, 1970) opposing the Left Front’s rise in West Bengal. The film is remembered mainly for the well-known stage star Ajitesh Bannerjee’s performance of untramelled villainy.

  INDIA 67

aka An Indian Day, aka India Today
1967 57’ col wordless
d S. Sukhdev pc Films Division

Sukhdev’s best-known documentary was a more muted work than his more demagogic And Miles To Go … (1965). A wordless montage strings together shots from various parts of the country, moving from the village to the city. Sequences include well-known political figures e.g. Bal Thackeray, now head of the notorious right-wing Shiv Sena, making a streetside speech. Some shots were admired by S. Ray: the drop of sweat on the nose of a perspiring Rajasthani musician, followed by an ant on the desert sand, or the dog urinating on a bicycle. The film consciously recalls Rossellini’s India 57 (1958). The film was recut into shorter versions with alternative titles.

  IRUTINTE ATMAVU

aka The Soul of Darkness
1967 147’ b&w Malayalam
d/lyr P. Bhaskaran p P.I. Muhammad Kasim
pc Sony Pics s M.T. Vasudevan Nair
c E.N. Balakrishnan m Baburaj
lp Prem Nazir, Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair, P.J. Anthony, T.S. Muthaiah, Balaji, Sharada, Ushakumari (aka Vijayanirmala), M.S. Namboodiri, Shankaradi, Adoor Bhasi, Shanta Devi, Philomena, Padmini, Selina, Rukmini, Shobha

One of scenarist Vasudevan Nair’s best-known scripts, critiquing the feudal values of a declining Nair community in Kerala. The key figure prising out the biases and attitudes of the family headed by the karanavar (Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair) is the partiarch’s mentally retarded nephew Velayudhan (Nazir). To the family his condition symbolises the curse that has led to its decline. He has a good relationship with Ammukutty (Sharada), his cousin and traditionally his future bride. When she is molested by a foreign-returned relative, he protests his innocence but is chained and locked up in a cage. She is married off to an old widower, but when she too rejects his pleas to reconsider her decision, Velayudhan finally acknowledges defeat and agrees to be defined as mad. The film was also cut out as an actorial challenge for megastar Nazir, playing his role with aplomb in scenes such as the one where he swings in ecstacy from one areca tree to another, and generally exploits the tearjerking sympathy generated by his character.

  JEWEL THIEF

1967 186’ col Hindi
d/sc Vijay Anand pc Navketan Films
st K.A. Narayan lyr Majrooh Sultanpuri, Shailendra c V. Ratra m S.D. Burman
lp Dev Anand, Ashok Kumar, Vyjayanthimala, Tanuja, Helen, Fariyal, Anju Mahendru, Nasir Hussain, Sapru, Pratima Devi

Hero Vinay (Anand), son of the police commissioner (Hussain), finds himself repeatedly mistaken for notorious jewel thief Amar. He is accused by Shalini (Vyjayanthimala) of being the man who had promised to marry her, and the accusation is substantiated by her brother (Ashok Kumar). Vinay masquerades as Amar to try to crack the gang, even as it appears that Amar too masquerades as Vinay, leaving the audience guessing for most of the film on the identity of the hero. Eventually Amar turns out to be a piece of fiction, created by the real thief, Shalini’s brother, who turns out not to be her brother at all. This cult movie, using concealed bars, moving walls and hidden safes, snowlifts and aeroplanes, determined the look and the fashions of much of late 60s Hindi cinema. Vijay Anand’s direction, demonstrating a greater control over colour than e.g. Guide (1965), goes well with the taut editing despite a meandering plot. Song hits include Yeh dil na hota bechara (sung by Kishore Kumar), Rulake gaya sapna mera and Hoton pe aisi baat main dabake chali aayi (both by Lata Mangeshkar).

  KANDAN KARUNAI

1967 146’ col Tamil
d/s A.P. Nagarajan pc ALS Prod.
lyr Kannadasan, Sankaradas Swamigal c K.S. Prasad m K.V. Mahadevan
lp Sivaji Ganesan, Savitri, Gemini Ganesh, K.R. Vijaya, Jayalalitha, Ashokan, Balaji, V. Gopalakrishna, Nagesh, K.B. Sundarambal, Shakuntala, Manorama, Sridevi

Major Nagarajan mythological with Ganesan unusually starring as a minor local deity, Veerabaghu, apprenticed to the more popular male deity Muruga (Sivakumar). Muruga is born to earth specifically to eliminate the evil Soorasura (Ashokan), and the film includes spectacular footage of the war between the two kings Athigaman and Malayaman, halted by Awaiyyar’s (Sundarambal) pacificist speech. The dialogue was noted for its lofty classical Tamil idiom. Jayalalitha and Vijaya played Muruga’s consorts. The film is also known for being 80s star Sridevi’s debut, aged 5, in the role of the child Muruga.

  KAVALAM CHUNDAN

aka The Racing Boat aka Fisherman Chundan
1967 136’ b&w Malayalam
d/st Sasikumar p V.P.M. Manikkam pc Bhagawathi Pics sc Thoppil Bhasi lyr Vyalar Rama Varma c U. Rajagopal, Benjamin m P. Devarajan
lp Sathyan, Sharada, Aranmulla Ponnamma, P.J. Anthony, Pankajavally, S.P. Pillai, Adoor Bhasi, Manavalan Joseph, Joseph Chacko, Adoor Pankajam, Adoor Bhawani, Radha, Kadhija

Family melodrama set in one of the most spectacular festivals in Kerala, the traditional boat race during the festival of Onam (and a major tourist attraction). Kavalam Chundan is the name of a famous racing boat, the symbol of the village’s pride, strength and unity. Saraswathi Kunjamma (Ponnamma), a widow, owns the boat. Her son Chandran (Sathyan) loves his cousin, the woman traditionally destined to be his bride, Sharada (Sharada), but when his sister comes home pregnant the family is torn apart by disputes over succession and property rights, including the right to the racing boat. The drama involves the entire village, leading to gory scenes when Sharada’s jealous father gains the traditional secret of how the boat is made, after which the master carpenter kills his own son-in-law for having divulged the knowhow. In the end, Chandran’s rights are restored and he wins the race thereby also signalling the victory of traditional values, after which he dedicates the boat to the entire village.

  KOTTAYAM KOLA CASE

1967 143’ b&w Malayalam
d K.S. Sethumadhavan pc Jayamaruthi Prod.
st Chembil John dial S.L. Puram Sadanandan lyr Vyalar Rama Varma c C. Namashivaya m B.A. Chidambaranath
lp Prem Nazir, Sheela, Kottarakkara Sridharan Nair, Adoor Bhasi, T.K. Balachandran, G.K. Pillai, Kamaladevi, Sukumari, Shankaradi, Shanta Devi, Indira Priyadarshini

Sethumadhavan changed his style to make this joint family melodrama that turns into murder mystery. The two brothers Shekhar and K.G. Nair part ways when the latter refuses a loan. Shekhar, who leaves his wife to live with his mistress, is mysteriously murdered. Police investigations disrupt the marriage ceremony of Shekhar’s son Prabhakaran. When Nair’s son Rajan is the next to get killed, the police accuse Prabhakaran. He, however, evades arrest and eventually catches the real criminal, Nair himself.

  MADHUCHANDRA

1967 148’ b&w Marathi
d Rajdutt pc Madhuvasant Chitra
s Madhusudan Kalelkar lyr G.D. Madgulkar c Datta Gorle m N. Datta
lp Kashinath Ghanekar, Uma, Shrikant Moghe, Raja Pandit, Barchi Bahadar, Nana Palsikar, Master Sachin, Raja Paranjpe

Poor hero Dinu Khare (Ghanekar) elopes with rich girlfriend Malu (Uma), using a false railway pass. Malu’s rich father searches for the missing couple but they are caught by the railway authorities and have to spend their wedding night in jail. Rajdutt’s debut is a whimsical comedy. The highlight is the hero and heroine, interned in two seperate cells in the prison, singing a love duet to each other, the hit number Madhu ithe ani chandra tithe. The film made Ghanekar, a noted stage actor, a major Marathi film star.

  PRANAMITHRULU

1967 177’ b&w Telugu
d P. Pullaiah pc Padmasri Pics
p V. Venkateshwarulu s Mullapudi Venkatramana lyr Athreya, Dasarathi, C. Narayana Reddy c P.S. Selvaraj m K.V. Mahadevan
lp A. Nageshwara Rao, K. Jaggaiah, Savitri, Shantakumari, Kanchana, Girija, Geetanjali, Relangi Venkatramaiah, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Allu Ramalingaiah

Melodrama about two friends, Babu (Jaggaiah), a third-generation owner of a business, and his best friend, his employee and childhood friend Chinna (Nageshwara Rao). When Babu wills all his property to his friend, the diwan (Venkateshwara Rao), who runs the company’s affairs, leaves and Babu’s mother Jagadamba (Shantakumari) tries to break up the friendship. This happens anyway when the diwan incites a workers’ strike and Chinna becomes a labour leader opposed to Babu. Chinna is eventually shot dead by a killer hired by the diwan. First of the several versions of Peter Glenville’s Becket (1964) adapted to contemporary conditions, and the original version of Mukherjee’s Namak Haram (1973) with Bachchan and Rajesh Khanna in Jaggaiah’s and Nageshwara Rao’s roles.

  RAM AUR SHYAM

1967 171’ col Hindi
d Tapi Chanakya pc Vijaya International st D.V. Narasaraju lyr Shakeel Badayuni
c Marcus Bartley m Naushad
lp Dilip Kumar, Waheeda Rehman, Mumtaz, Pran, Nirupa Roy, Kanhaiyalal, Nasir Hussain, Zebunissa

A successful Hindi remake of Chanakya’s equally successful Telugu Ramudu Bheemudu (1964, with NTR) and Tamil Enga Veetu Pillai (1965, with MGR). In a double role Dilip Kumar plays twins separated at birth who grow up to become the timid Ram, who is terrified of villain Gajendra (Pran), and the boisterous Shyam. They are mistaken for each other, even by their respective girlfriends Anjana (Rehman) and Shanta (Mumtaz).

  SAAKSHI

1967 142’ b&w Telugu
d/sc Bapu pc Nandana Films st/dial Mullapudi Venkatramana lyr Arudra, Dasarathi c P.S. Selvaraj m K.V. Mahadevan
lp Krishna, Vijayanirmala, Jagga Rao, Ramana Panthulu, Rajababu, Sivarakrishnaiah, Chalapathi Rao, Saakshi Rangarao

Bapu’s debut is regarded as an ‘experimental’ movie (it flopped) about rural politics. The villain Fakir (Jagga Rao), a truck driver paid by a local politician, kills two men. A boatman (Krishna) witnesses the murders and the entire village, hoping to get Fakir imprisoned, supports the witness when the case comes to court. However Fakir claims self-defence and he gets a light jail sentence. When Fakir comes out, he publicly announces his intention to kill the boatman. Eventually the boatman’s lover (who is also Fakir’s sister) (Vijayanirmala) kills Fakir. The film introduced the then unknown lead pair of Krishna and Vijayanirmala acting without make-up in outdoor sequences, a standard aspect of New Indian Cinema realism.

  SHRI KRISHNAVATARAM

1967 211’ b&w Telugu/Tamil
d K. Kameshwara Rao p N.T. Rama Rao pc Tarakarama Pics s/co-lyr Samudrala Raghavacharya co-lyr C. Narayana Reddy
c Annayya m T.V. Raju
lp N.T. Rama Rao, Shobhan Babu, Satyanarayana, Rajanala, Chittor V. Nagaiah, Lingamurthy, K. Mukkamala, Dhoolipala, Devika, Kanchana, Sukanya, Rushyendramani, Krishnakumari, Vijayalakshmi, Geetanjali, Sandhyarani, S. Varalakshmi, Chhaya Devi

This big-budget mythological is one of the best known of NTR’s screen versions of the Krishna myth and recounts several of the Mahabharat’s well-known episodes, including Krishna’s childhood in Dwarka, the slaying of Shishupala, the visit of Kuchela, the killing of Kansa, etc. Raju’s score, adapting the Tirupati Venkatakavulu, was widely admired.

  TAQDEER

aka Destiny
1967 108’ b&w Hindi
d/sc A. Salaam pc Rajshri lyr Anand Bakshi c Nariman Irani m Laxmikant-Pyarelal
lp Bharat Bhushan, Shalini, Kamal Kapoor, Farida Jalal

All this film shares with Mehboob Khan’s Taqdeer (1943) is its title. The plot concerns a music teacher who leaves wife and children to try to earn money abroad. When his wife hears that her husband’s ship has been wrecked, she tries to make ends meet by marrying a rich, villainous mine owner. Later, the husband, who suffers from amnesia, returns and the nasty industrialist tries to kill him. In the end, the villain gets killed and the musician’s family is reunited. The film’s main interest resides in its nostalgic music track.

  THANGAI

1967 159’ b&w Tamil
d/sc A.C. Trilogchander pc Sujata Cine Arts p K. Balaji dial Aroor Das lyr Kannadasan c T. Muthuswamy m M.S. Vishwanathan
lp Sivaji Ganesan, K. Balaji, K.R. Vijaya, Nagesh, Kanchana, Sundarrajan, Baby Kausalya, Ramadas, Baby Nalini, Devi Chandrika, Vasundhara, Mysore Sudarshan, T.S. Bala, Harikrishna, Master Sridhar

Madan (Ganesan), sent to jail in his teens for a crime he did not commit, is released and becomes a gambler to support his sister. He falls in love with the rich Leela (Vijaya) who is, however, supposed to marry Sridhar (Balaji), the cop who wants to bust the gambling racket. Fellow gambler Lalitha (Kanchana) also loves Madan. When an argument at the gambling tables leads to a fight, a gang leader shoots at Madan but kills Lalitha instead.

  THANGA THAMBI

1967 139’ b&w Tamil
d Francis Ramanath pc Unmayal Prod.
st/dial M. Karunanidhi
lp Sundarrajan, Ravichandran, Vanisree, Bharati, Nagesh, Manorama, O.A.K. Thevar

Karunanidhi’s domestic melodrama about two loving brothers torn apart by their respective wives. Elder brother Varadan (Sundarrajan) marries Sundari (Vanisree). He wants younger brother Venu (Ravichandran) to marry a rich woman, but Sundari wants a poor and obedient sister-in-law. Although Sundari initially refuses pregnancy for fear of ruining her looks, she eventually bears a child at the same time as the meek sister-in-law Parvathi (Bharati). Parvathi raises both children, causing an estrangement between the brothers.

  THAIKKU THALAIMAGAN

1967 159’ b&w Tamil
d/dial M.A. Thirumugham pc Devar Films
sc M.M.A. Chinnappa Devar lyr Kannadasan c N.S. Varma m K.V. Mahadevan
lp M.G. Ramachandran, Jayalalitha, Sowcar Janaki, Manorama, S.V. Ranga Rao, Nagesh, Manohar, M.M.A. Chinnappa Devar, S.N. Lakshmi

A good and bad brother morality play. Younger brother Maradhur (MGR) marries the rich Malathi (Jayalalitha) but refuses to move into his father-in-law’s (Ranga Rao) house. Elder brother Somu uses this impasse to persuade Maradhur’s father-in-law to finance a new garage and to have the entire family move in, forcing Maradhur to follow suit, but the plan is foiled when Somu falls in love with a dancing-girl, driving his family into poverty. Both Somu and the brothers’ beloved mother (Lakshmi) die. MGR’s melodrama, enlivened by several fight sequences, deploys his usual persona of the working-class hero who marries a rich heiress and wins his battles by virtue of his sterling lower-class morality.

  UPKAAR

aka Good Deed
1967 172’ col Hindi
d/s Manoj Kumar pc Vishal Pics lyr Prem Dhawan. Indivar, Gulshan Bawra, Qamar Jalalabadi c V.N. Reddy m Kalyanji-Anandji
lp Asha Parekh. Manoj Kumar, Pran, Kamini Kaushal. Prem Chopra. Kanhaiyalal, Madan Puri, Manmohan Krishna, David

Stridently nationalistic melodrama with which Manoj Kumar launched a series casting himself as good hero Bharat, contrasting his son-of-the-soil simplicity with Westernised decadence (cf. Purah Aur Paschim, 1970). He tends to the family fields to pay for bad younger brother Puran’s (Chopra) education, but Puran spends it all in a dissolute life in the city. When the villain (Puri), who had killed their father, encourages enmity between the brothers, Bharat surrenders all his property and joins the Indian Army. The villain follows him into the war and tries to kill him, but he is rescued by the crippled soldier Making Baba (Pran, attampting a change of screen image). Meanwhile Puran, who heads a nationwide network of smugglers and black marketeers, recants and helps the government to crack the gang. Bharat is saved in a medical operation performed by his girlfriend (Asha Parekh). Much of the strident rhetoric along with the peasant-and-soldier iconography (illustrating the Jai jawan jai kisan slogan) is in the context of India’s war with Pakistan the previous year. The film’s nationalism is encapsulated in its theme song Mere desh ki dharti (sung by Mahendra Kapoor), and the other hit is Lata Mangeshkar’s Har khushi ho wahan.

Padmini (right) in Adhyapika

  ADHYAPIKA

1968 139’ b&w Malayalam
d/p P. Subramanyam pc Neela Prod. s Kanam E.J. lyr Balamurali c E.N.C. Nair
m V. Dakshinamurthy
lp Padmini, Madhu, Ambika, S.P. Pillai, Bahadur, Shanti, Aranmulla Ponnamma, Leela, Meena, Shobha, Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair, Kottarakkara Sridharan Nair, Piravam Mani, Ramakrishna, T.K. Balachandran

Unremittingly tragic melodrama, drawing on the paingili type of popular sentimental fiction, about a middle-class schoolteacher, Saramma (Padmini). She supports her father and two siblings, but receives nothing but ingratitude. The only man in her life marries her sister, her brother refuses all responsibilities to the family when he completes his education, and her father prevents her marriage for fear of losing his only source of income. Eventually she dies of tuberculosis, sad and lonely, apparently loved only by her dog (the pet featured prominently in the poster campaign for the film). The film is designed to show off Padmini’s melodramatic talents and remains one of her best-known Malayalam weepies.

  APANJAN

1968 123’ b&w Bengali
d/sc/m Tapan Sinha pc K.L. Kapoor Prod. st Indramitra lyr Rabindranath Tagore, Atulprasad Sen c Bimal Mukherjee
lp Chhaya Devi, Swarup Dutta, Samit Bhanja, Partha Mukherjee, Kalyan Chatterjee, Robi Ghosh, Bhanu Bannerjee, Dilip Roy, Premangshu Bose

Tapan Sinha’s violent and cynical melodrama in response to the Naxalite student movement in Bengal (cf. Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi, 1970 and Seemabaddha, 1971, Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta trilogy). An old woman, Anandamoyee (Chhaya Devi), ‘adopts’ a group of lumpen youth, sensing the emotional vulnerability beneath their violent reduction of democracy to a series of gang wars. Two gangs clash when their respective political leaders (representing also the ongoing conflict between local’ people and post-Partition migrants from East Bengal) fight an election. Anandamoyee eventually dies trying to save one of the students from a bullet. The hit film is remembered for its tightly edited portrayal of the farcical election campaign and for its climactic confrontation. The film was remade by Gulzar (Mere Apne, 1971) with Meena Kumari emulating Chhaya Devi’s performance.

  ASHIRWAD

aka The Blessing aka Aashinvaad
1968 146’- col Hindi
d/s Hrishikesh Mukherjee p N.C. Sippy dial/co-lyr Gulzar co-lyr Harindranath c T.B. Seetaram m Vasant Desai
lp Ashok Kumar, Sanjeev Kumar. Sumita Sanyal, Veena, Sajjan, Abhi Bhattacharya

A flamboyant melodrama about a poet. Shivnath (A. Kumar) who studies folk-songs but is married to a woman who owns much land and ruthlessly extorts taxes from the local Untouchables. She even threatens to burn down their village unless they pay. At this point, the mild husband rebels and kills one of his wife’s allies, which earns him a spell in jail. When he is released, he is a broken old man. He attends his daughter’s wedding and offers his blessings without telling her that he is her father.

  ASURAVITHU

1968 158’ b&w Malayalam
d A. Vincent pc Manoj Pics s M.T. Vasudevan Nair lyr P. Bhaskaran c A. Venkat
m K. Raghavan
lp Prem Nazir, Adoor Bhasi, P.J. Anthony, Shankaradi, N. Govindankutty, Nilambur Balan, Sharada, Kaviyoor Ponnamma, Shanta Devi Political melodrama sometimes considered to make a Vasudevan Nair trilogy with Vincent’s Murappennu (1965) and Bhaskaran’s Irutinte Atmavu (1967) about life in feudal Kerala. This one is set in the communally charged situation of violence between Hindu and Muslim communities. The rich Shankaran Nair tries to bribe his brother-in-law, the good hero Govindankutty (Nazir), to marry his daughter Meenakshi. The reason for the haste is that Meenakshi is pregnant by Govindankutty’s wayward nephew Kochuppan. Govindankutty, however, refuses, and is thrown out by the family. He moves in with his Muslim friend Kunjarikkar (Anthony), a daring thing to do given the prevailing political atmosphere. He eventually converts to Islam, renaming himself Abdullah.

  BANGARU PICHIKA

1968 145’ b&w Telugu
d Bapu pc Shri Ganesh Pics s Mullapudi Venkatramana lyr Arudra c Kannappa m K.V. Mahadevan
lp Shantakumari, Vijayanirmala, Padmanjali, Chandramohan, Ramana Panthulu, Rajababu, Chalapathi Rao, ‘Sakshi’ Rangarao

The rich mother (Shantakumari) of hero (Chandramohan) wants him to marry but his worldly-wise father advises him to escape from his mother’s clutches and to seek his own fortune. He runs away, pursued by several people seeking to collect the reward offered by his mother for locating him. A criminal gang uses one of its female members (Vijayanirmala) to lure the hero into its control. Eventually she falls in love with her target and proves to be his only true friend. The fast-paced movie is noted for its racy script, although Vijayanirmala claimed it as an art-house movie since she wore the same costume throughout.

  CHAR SHAHER EK KAHANI

aka A Tale of Four Cities
1968 16’ b&w English/Hindi
d/sc/p K.A. Abbas pc Naya Sansar

Abbas’s best-known political documentary and a notorious censorship case. Fast-paced editing intercuts touristic images of India’s ‘achievements’ in industry and agriculture with verite long shots of Bombay’s red-light area. Rhetorical devices include a shot of the first indigenously launched rocket, from the Thumba base, which freezes a missile in mid-air and turns the image into its negative to a distorted soundtrack. Shot in Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi and Madras, the film also has a dramatised sequence enacted by a real-life prostitute. Abbas was a member of the G.D. Khosla Committee on Film Censorship (New Delhi: 1969) and writes that he made the film during the committee’s investigations especially to put its proclaimed political liberalism to the test. The Censor Board objected mainly to the prostitution scenes, alleging them to be pornographic. Abbas fought the case up to the Supreme Court, rejecting even the compromise of an Adult certificate, and when he won his case he shifted his legal argument to claim all forms of censorship as ultra vires, leading to Chief Justice Hidaytullah’s landmark judgment on safeguards in the censorship process, including the setting up of an appellate tribunal. When Abbas later released the short, along with his Saat Hindustani (1969), he shot the mandatory censor certificate at the beginning of the copy with a zoom lens and used suspense music.

  EZHU RATHRIKAL

aka Seven Nights
1968 140’ b&w Malayalam
d Ramu Kariat p Babu Ismail pc Kammani Films s Kaladi Gopi from his play lyr Vyalar Rama Varma c Kamal Bose m Salil Choudhury
lp Alumoodam, Chachhappan, Nellikode Bhaskaran, Govindankutty, Shihaab, J.C. Kuttikkad, Kamalamma, Kamaladevi, Latha, Radhamony, K.R. Rajam, Kothamangalam Ali, Kuttan Pillai, Raghava Menon, Aravindan, Kaduvakulam Anthony

Kariat’s film follows Kaladi Gopi’s play in weaving together a number of melodramatic plots, realist acting conventions and the theatrical device of enclosing disparate characters into a socially ambiguous space. A number of vagabonds and social outcasts shelter every night in a dilapidated house, the dim, municipal light setting the atmosphere for their interactions. Characters include the hypocritical Pashanam Varky who exploits religious bigotry; Maria the street vendor; the ex-con Ikka, an old Muslim who murdered his unfaithful wife and is now searching for his daughter; a blind and victimised young woman; Abu, who went to jail to protect his girlfriend’s father but lost his girl in the process, and the hunchback Paramu, who acts as a metaphor for a crippled but still decent moral universe. In the end, the blind girl turns out to be Ikka’s long-lost daughter, tying up some of the diverse narrative strands designed to give a picture of contemporary social problems.

  GOOPY GYNE BAGHA BYNE

aka The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha
1968 132’(118’) b&w/col Bengali
d/sc/m Satyajit Ray p Nepal Dutta, Ashim Dutta pc Purnila Pics st Upendra Kishore Roy-Choudhury c Soumendu Roy
lp Tapen Chatterjee, Robi Ghosh, Santosh Dutta, Jahar Roy, Santi Chatterjee, Harindranath Chattopadhyay, Chinmoy Roy, Durgadas Bannerjee, Govinda Chakravarty, Prasad Mukherjee, Haradhan Mukherjee, Abani Chatterjee, Khagen Pathak, Binoy Bose

Ray’s children’s fantasy is his first major commercial success and became a cult movie in Bengal. It is a fairy-tale about ghosts and kings written originally by his grandfather and published in 1914. The impoverished amateur musicians Goopy (T. Chatterjee) and Bagha (R. Ghosh), banished for their inept playing, receive a magic pair of slippers from an animated ghost-king which allow them to travel anywhere they like. They can also conjure up food. They become master performers, arriving in the kingdom of Shundi whose king (Dutta) makes them his court musicians. The twin brother of this king (Dutta again), who rules neighbouring Halla, is held prisoner by his despotic and warlike prime minister (J. Roy). The musical duo are captured by the prime minister but they escape and, with a series of magical effects, overthrow the villain and live ‘happily ever after’ having married two princesses. The film mobilises a range of sources from Lewis Carroll to the bawdy Bengali jatra, held together by the sheer cinephilia which animates the performances, the sets and the soundtrack. The high point is the spectacular ghost dance followed by the rhyming dialogue of the ghost-king amid flashing lights. The dance, nearly 7’ long and set to percussion music, calls on mime, shadow puppetry and Pat painting traditions and is shot with shimmering effects and negative images to tell of the four classes of colonial society: well-fed Brahmins, kings, peasantry and the colonial bureaucracy. The melange of musical styles, from keertan to Carnatic, and local folk idioms, as used e.g. for Barfi the magician (Chattopadhyay) talk of war, power and greed. Ray felt the film was probably unique, although it coincides with French, British and Italian comic-strip-inspired films of the mid-60s. Ray made a sequel, Hirak Rajar Deshe (1980), and his son Sandeep continued with Goopy Bagha Phere Elo (1991). Salman Rushdie, in a tribute to the enduring appeal of this loveable duo, introduced them briefly in his children’s novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990).

  HANNELE CHIGURIDAGA

1968 161’ b&w Kannada
d/sc M.R. Vittal pc Srikanth & Srikanth Ents
p Srikanth Nahata, Srikanth Patel st Triveni’s novel dial/lyr R.N. Jayagopal c Srikanth, Kumar m M. Ranga Rao
lp R. Nagendra Rao, Rajkumar, Kalpana, Arun Kumar, B.V. Radha, Ranga, Dinesh, Pradhan, Jayakumar, Premalatha, Jayashree, Papamma, Indira George, Baby Rani

An orthodox patriarch (Nagendra Rao) is upset when one of his five sons (Arun Kumar) wants to marry a theatre actress (Premalatha). The old man’s daughter Malathi (Kalpana) is widowed and her friend Prasad (Rajkumar), who had arranged Malathi’s marriage, also loses his wife. The patriarch refuses to let Malathi marry Prasad, leading to extensive debate and a revolt within the family before he relents. The original novel, working within a social reform tradition, strongly advocated widow remarriage, but the film weakened the arguments to avoid questioning the legitimacy of patriarchal despotism. One of veteran Kannada thespian Nagendra Rao’s best-known roles. The film also has the Kannada song hit Hoovu cheluvela endendithu.

  HASINA MAAN JAYEGI

1968 165’ col Hindi
d/co-lyr Prakash Mehra pc Mangatram Films s S.M. Abbas co-lyr Qamar Jalalabadi, Akhtar Roomani, Kafeel Azar c N. Satyen m Kalyanji-Anandji
lp Shashi Kapoor, Babita, Johnny Walker, Amita, Yunus Pervez, Manmohan Krishna, Niranjan Sharma, Hari Shivdasani, Sapru, Brahm Bhardwaj

Two identical look-alikes Kamal and Ramesh (Kapoor in both roles) love Archana (Babita). She loves Kamal, but often mistakes the one for the other. The evil Ramesh tries to take advantage of this resemblance to have Kamal kidnapped on the day of their marriage, but becomes the victim of his own ploy when his henchmen make the same error as everyone else. The plot expands to take in the India-China War (1962), as Kamal enlists and Ramesh once again tries to kill him. When only one of the two emerges from a muddy pond, the audience is inducted into the confusion as Archana, who initially accepts the man as her husband, starts getting suspicious and eventually has him arrested for impersonation. It is only when Ramesh reappears that the man she has been living with is revealed to be indeed her husband. Mehra (cf. Zanjeer, 1973, Muqaddar Ka Sikandar, 1978) in his debut reveals only one element of his trademark plotting in this convoluted film, that of Kamal’s illegitimacy and unknown parentage.

  KANAVAN

1968 152’ b&w Tamil
d P. Neelakantan pc Vali Films p Satiappan st M.G. Ramachandran dial Sornam lyr Alangudi Somu, Vali c V. Ramamurthy
m M.S. Vishwanathan
lp M.G. Ramachandran, Jayalalitha, Vijayakumari, Vasantha, Kannan, Ashokan, Manohar, Cho, Manorama, Rama Rao, Sundaribai, Shanmughasundari, Kannaiah, Justin, Soundararajan, Venkatraman

The self-willed Rani (Jayalalitha) does not want to marry, but according to her father’s will she cannot inherit her property until she does. She marries Valaiyan (MGR), a prisoner on death row, but Valaiyan is acquitted of the murder charge when a documentary showing a Prosperity Brigade rally proves his alibi.

  LEELUDI DHARTI

1968 138’ col Gujarati
d Vallabh Choksi pc K.V. Films st Chunilal Madia sc Manu Desai dial Jitubhai P. Mehta lyr Avinash Vyas c A.G. Dhanik
m Purushottam Upadhyay, Gaurang Vyas
lp Daisy Irani, Mahesh Desai, Kala Shah, Champsibhai Nagda, Upendra Kumar, Kishore Bhatt, Mahendra Zaveri, Shashikant Bhat, Veena Prabhu, Vanlata Mehta, Shirin, Sudha Zaveri, Arvind Kamdar, Suvarna Kapadia

The first Gujarati colour feature mixes fertility rituals with rural melodrama in an adaptation of Chunilal Madia’s short story. One of the three sons of farmer Hada Patel falls in love with the accursed Santu Rangili, accused of having caused a drought. The accusation is confirmed when her child is stillborn. She and her marriage are rehabilitated when an other woman abandons her own child in favour of Santu. Eventually, when another of the farmer’s sons returns, having become a holy man, the family settles down ‘to make the earth greener’.

  MAHATMA - LIFE OF GANDHI 1869–1948

1968 330’ b&w English
d/s Vithalbhai Jhaveri pc Gandhi National Memorial Fund m Vishnudas Shirali

Landmark compilation documentary on Gandhi, made with the assistance of D.G. Tendulkar, the author of the 8 vol. biography Mahatma, which is the source of the film’s narrative. Edited down from over 50 hours of footage assembled by Gandhi’s son Devdas, the film chronicles political events with little analysis e.g. the famous salt agitation, the Swadeshi movement, village reconstruction programmes, Gandhi’s march through the communal riots in Noakhali, his fast which almost singlehandedly forced an end to the Partition riots, etc. These events are intercut with footage revealing Gandhi’s unfamiliarity with world literature, his controversially conservative positions on birth control and his statement that under socialism all property would belong to God. Although there is very little material of Gandhi actually speaking, the film has been used as a standard reference for Gandhian iconography (cf. Attenborough’s biographical). Tendulkar, known mainly for his biography, studied film in Germany and Moscow and may briefly have been a student of Eisenstein. Director Jhaveri is a former jeweller and freedom fighter.

  PADOSAN

1968 157’ col Hindi
d Jyoti Swaroop pc Mehmood Prod. st Arun Choudhury’s Pasher Bari sc/dial/lyr Rajinder Krishen c K.H. Kapadia m R.D. Burman
lp Sunil Dutt, Saira Banu, Kishore Kumar, Mehmood, Om Prakash, Mukri, Agha, Keshto Mukherjee

Slapstick musical comedy in which the innocent Bhola (Dutt) gives up his commitment to celibacy when he falls for sexy neighbour Bindu (Saira Banu). His rivals in love are his own uncle (Prakash) and Bindu’s traditionalist Carnatic music teacher (Mehmood). He, however, wins his girl with the assistance of the crooked guru (K. Kumar), when he serenades her using the guru for a musical playback. The high point of the film is a zany take-off on the jugalbandi (musical contest) between the guru and the Carnatic musician (Ek chatur naar karke singaar, sung by Manna Dey and Kumar). The original Bengali story had previously been filmed by Sudhir Mukherjee (Pasher Bari, 1952), C. Pullaiah (Pakkinti Ammayi 1953) and Raghavaiah (Adutha VeetuPenn, 1960).

  PUDHIYA BHOOMI

1968 144’ b&w Tamil
d Tapi Chanakya pc Jayanti Films, Jayaar Movies p K. Shankaran, Arumugham sc V.C. Guhanathan dial S.S. Thenmarasu lyr Kannadasan, Poovai Senguttuvan c P.N. Sundaram m M.S. Vishwanathan
lp M.G. Ramachandran, Jayalalitha, M.N. Nambiar, S.A. Ashokan, T.S. Muthaiah, Sheila, Trichy Sundarrajan, Nagesh, S. Ramarao, Pandharibai, Ramapriya

Bandits kidnap Dr Katheeravan (MGR) to treat their ailing leader in his secret lair and send him back, attaching a bomb to his car. Katheeravan survives the blast and is nursed to health by a girl in a remote village, Kannamma (Jayalalitha). He sets up a hospital in the village, causing problems for the bandit chief Kankeyan (Nambiar), who informs Katheeravan’s urban fiancee (Sheila) of her lover’s village affair. Eventually, Kannamma turns out to be the bandit’s daughter. Although not a mainstream DMK film, it included the mandatory political symbology: the hero’s name Katheeravan (the sun) refers to the DMK party symbol; the hero reveals his social consciousness as much through his medical commitment to the villagers as through rejecting his city-bred fiancee to marry a rural woman.

  SANGHARSH

1968 ?’ col Hindi
d/co-sc H.S. Rawail
pc Rahul Theatres st Mahashweta Devi’s story co-sc Anjana Rawail dial Gulzar, Abrar Alvi lyr Shakeel Badayuni c R.D. Mathur m Naushad
lp Dilip Kumar, Vyjayanthimala, Balraj Sahni, Sanjeev Kumar, Jayant, Durga Khote, Sulochana, Sundar, Iftikhar, Sapru, Mumtaz Begum, Padma, Urmila, Mehmood Jr., Master Arun, Kamaldeep, Jagdish Raj, Master Levy, Ram Mohan

Big melodrama set in the 19th C. Thuggee, a cult of bandits in Central India. Bhawani Prasad (Jayant), a legendary bandit whose own relatives have threatened to destroy him, adopts his grandson Kundan against the wishes of his wife (Khote) in order to initiate him into the ancestral profession. The boy, however, grows up (D. Kumar) into a pacificist. When his cousins (Sahni, Sanjeev Kumar) try to kill him, he is saved by a mysterious dancer (Vyjayanthimala). The original story was by noted Marxist novelist Mahashweta Devi.

  SARASWATICHANDRA

1968 156’ b&w Hindi
d Govind Saraiya pc Sarvodaya Pics
st Govardhanram Tripathi’s novel sc Vrajendra Gaur dial Ali Raza lyrlndivar c Nariman Irani m Kalyanji-Anandji
lp Nutan, Manish, Vijaya Choudhury, Sulochana, Sulochana Chatterjee, Ramesh Deo, Seema, B.M. Vyas, Surendra, Babu Raje, Jeevan Kala, Madhumati

Set in the 19th C. and adapting the most important reform novel in Gujarati (1887–1901). The rich Saraswatichandra (Manish) is to marry Kumud (Nutan), daughter of a neighbouring dewan. Initially committed to nationalism and reluctant to marry, he changes his mind when he falls in love with his fiancee. However, a jealous sister-in-law forces him to leave his ancestral residence, and Kumud is forced into marrying a drunk and a debauchee (Dev). She tries to commit suicide but is rescued by the nuns in a reformist charitable mission. Here she once again meets her former betrothed. Following the death of her degenerate husband, she is free to remarry, and is indeed encouraged by her family to do so, but instead she dedicates her life to charitable work. The 19th C. novelist Tripathi had been personally opposed to widow remarriage, contradicting his otherwise progressive reformism (cf. Sudhir Chandra, 1992). Extraordinarily, a century later, the film endorses this attitude with a variety of melodramatic effects, making a contemporary love story with silhouetted split-lighting and a sentimental soundtrack even though the story is periodised by a commentary and ‘period’ decor. One of Nutan’s typical performances of reformist romance fiction, the film is known for some major song hits including Phool tumhe bheja hai khat mein, Chandan sa badan and Main to bhool chali babul ka des.

Nutan and Manish in Saraswatichandra

  THILLANA MOHANAMBAL

aka Dancer Mohanambal
1968 175’ col Tamil
d A.P. Nagarajan pc Shri Vijayalakshmi Pics s Kothamangalam Subbu c K.S. Prasad
lyr Kannadasan m K.V. Mahadevan
lp Sivaji Ganesan, T.S. Balaiah, Padmini, Manorama, A.V.M. Rajan, M.N. Nambiar, K.A. Thangavelu, Chittor V. Nagaiah, C.K. Saraswathi, C.K. Nagesh, K. Balaji

A major hit celebrating nostalgia, set in the Kaveri delta in TN, the nursery of many dance and music traditions, the plot features a musical contest and love story between dancer Mohanambal (Padmini) and the nadasivaram player Sikkil Shanmugha-sundaram (Ganesan). The love story, overcoming many hurdles presented mainly by the dancer’s mother and her rich suitor Nagalingam (Balaji), reaches a happy ending and the couple bids farewell to the audience from the wedding dais when ‘tradition’, so crucial to Nagarajan’s neo-traditionalism, has been valorised. Although the film claimed to represent ‘classical’ art, using noted nadaswaram players Sethuraman and Ponnuswamy dubbing the hero’s performances, and Padmini in probably her most elaborate Bharat Natyam film performance, its aesthetics are borrowed mainly from the commercial theatre with a mise en scene using mostly frontal shots, even lining up the characters to deliver their lines facing the camera. A major song hit was Nallamdana (sung by P. Susheela). Nagarajan, a former TKS Brothers employee, pays tribute to Sankaradas Swamigal (a major theatrical figure from whom the TKS group traced its ancestry) by naming a drama company after him and providing cameo roles for many old stage actors (Balaiah, K. Sarangapani, Chittor V. Nagaiah, M.N. Nambiar, S.V. Sahasranamam, E.R. Sahadevan, P.T. Sambandham, K.A. Thangavelu and A. Karunanidhi). References to the courtesan tradition, horse-drawn carriages and palaces suggest a 19th C. setting, but contemporary images of Madurai and Thanjavur railway junctions belie this. Similarly, actual locations are mixed in with a fictional town, Madanpur, ruled by an achkanclad king with a Western wife, turning the entire film into a fantasy scene.

  THIRICHADI

1968 145’ b&w Malayalam
d/p Kunchako pc Excel Prod. st Kanam E.J. sc S.L. Puram Sadanandan lyr Vyalar Rama Varma c Dattu m Sudarshanam
lp Prem Nazir, Govindankutty, Kottarakkara Sridharan Nair, Adoor Bhasi, S.P. Pillai, Bahadur, Manavalan Joseph, Kaduvakkulam, Sheela, Pankajavalli, Adoor Pankajam, Kanchana, Devaki

The vagabond and petty thief Kuttappan (Nazir) goes to the city to discover and settle scores with his unknown father. The father had abandoned his pregnant wife and moved in with another woman. Kuttappan finds the father, and also a look-alike stepbrother, the policeman Venu (Nazir again). His way of taking revenge is to impersonate the cop and commit crimes. He also kidnaps Venu’s fiancee. Major Nazir double role, and typical 60s Kanam script for the Excel Studio.

  THULABHARAM

1968 152’ b&w Malayalam
d A. Vincent p Hari Pothain pc Supriya Pics s Thoppil Bhasi lyr Vyalar Rama Varma c Bhaskar Rao m P. Devarajan
lp Prem Nazir, Madhu, Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair, Adoor Bhasi, Nellicode Bhaskaran, Paravoor Bharathan, Thoppil Bhasi, Sheela, Sharada, Adoor Bhawani

Vincent’s political melodrama, based on Bhasi’s play staged by the KPAC, tells of two friends, Vijaya (Sharada) and Vatsala (Sheela), who part ways when Vatsala’s father, a lawyer, causes Vijaya’s father, a businessman, to lose a case which leads to the man’s death. Vijaya is forced to marry the trade unionist Ramu (Nazir) who leads a strike but dies when the strike turns violent. The suffering Vijaya kills her three starving children and is arrested before she can commit suicide. She is sent to the gallows by her former friend Vatsala, now a noted lawyer. The film is the best known of the Vincent/Bhasi collaborations (cf. Ashwamedham, 1967). It was remade with great success by Madhusudhana Rao in Telugu (Manushulu Murali, 1969) and in Hindi (Samaj Ko Badal Dalo, 1970). All three films featured Sharada, and collectively they represent her best-known screen image.

  VARAKATNAM

1968 176’ b&w Telugu
d/s N.T. Rama Rao pc Ramakrishna/NAT Combines dial Maddipatla Suri, Samudrala Ramanujacharya lyr Kosaraju, C. Narayana Reddy c Ravikant Nagaich m T.V. Raju
lp N.T. Rama Rao, Krishnakumari, Nagabhushanam, Hemalatha, Savitri, Satyanarayana, Chandrakala, Suryakantam, Relangi Venkatramaiah, Padmanabham, Ravi Kondala Rao

Anti-dowry melodrama in which Meesala Venkaiah (Nagabhushanam), who wants his son Devasimha (NTR) to marry in a manner befitting the father’s social status, demands a dowry of Rs 50,000. The marriage is stopped just before the ceremony is completed. Eventually the groom marries the bride, after overcoming the oppressive attitudes of his family. The film includes a parallel narrative of another groom who, in a situation similar to the hero’s, marries the bride anyway, which leads to the woman being exploited by her husband’s family in various ways.

  ADIMAGAL

aka Slaves
1969 145’ b&w Malayalam
d K.S. Sethumadhavan p M.O. Joseph pc Manjilas Cine Ents s Thoppil Bhasi from M.K. Menon’s novel lyr Vyalar Rama Varma c Mehli Irani m P. Devarajan
lp Sathyan, Prem Nazir, Sheela, Sharada, Adoor Bhawani, Adoor Bhasi, Shankaradi, Bahadur, Jaycee, N. Govindankutty, Bharathan, Ammini, Kuttan Pillai, Padmini, Kumudam

Ponnamma (Sharada), the beautiful servant of the devout Saraswathi Amma, is seduced and made pregnant by Saraswathi’s brother Anandan, an office worker. Ponnamma is thrown out of Saraswathi’s house, but finds shelter with a progressive-minded neighbour, Appukuttan (Sathyan), who brings the absconded Anandan back and forces him to offer to marry Ponnamma. She refuses and prefers to marry the deaf-mute odd job man Raghavan (Nazir) who has loved her all along. Saraswathi finally realises that her religious gullibility caused much suffering, and she discards her saffron robes in favour of a new life (to be reached by train) with the tolerant Appukuttan. The film is adapted from a novel by Pammen aka M.K. Menon.

  ADIMAI PENN

1969 180’ col Tamil
d K. Shankar p MGR Pictures
sc R.M. Veerappan, Vidwan V. Lakshmanan,
S.K.D. Sami c V. Ramamurthy lyr Vali, Alagudi Somu, Avinasiarani, Pulamaipithan
m K.V. Mahadevan
lp M.G. Ramachandran, Ashokan,
R.S. Manohar, O.A.K. Thevar, Jayalalitha, Pandharibai, Jothilakshmi, Rajshri

Chengodan of Soorakadu lusts after Mangamma, the wife of the chieftain of Vengaimalai. When the woman cuts off her unwelcome suitor’s leg, he takes revenge by enslaving all the women of Vengaimalai and beheading all the men. However, Mangamma’s son Vengaiyyan (MGR), kept in a cell since childhood, escapes the slaughter and grows up to become an illiterate hunchback who, with the help of a slave woman, eventually reconquers his ancestral domain and kills the tyrant.

  APARICHITA

1969 ?’ b&w Bengali
d/sc Salil Dutta pc R.D. Prod. st Samaresh Bose lyr Pranab Roy c Bijoy Ghosh m Robin Chatterjee
lp Uttam Kumar, Soumitra Chatterjee, Aparna Sen, Sandhya Roy, Bikash Roy, Utpal Dutt, Haradhan Bannerjee, Dilip Roy

Bizarre and spectacular psychodrama based on Samaresh Bose’s novel with overtones of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Sunita (Sen), forced into prostitution by her ‘respectable’ politician-employer Priyanath, is abducted by the gangster Ranjan (Kumar) from a nightclub. She travels with Ranjan as though in a dream, and when she is rescued meets a similarly disoriented and unbelievably naive Sujit (Chatterjee) who has just recovered from a mental breakdown. When Sunita’s marriage is arranged, mainly to avoid scandal, she tries to elope with Sujit but Ranjan prevents it. Eventually, Ranjan, unable to subdue her, kills Sunita and lands in jail, while Sujit has a second breakdown. The film is known mainly for Chatterjee’s remarkable performance.

  ARADHANA

1969 169’ col Hindi
d/p Shakti Samanta pc Shakti Films s Sachin Bhowmick dial Ramesh Pant lyr Anand Bakshi c Aloke Dasgupta m S.D. Burman
lp Rajesh Khanna, Sharmila Tagore, Sujit Kumar, Pahadi Sanyal, Anita Dutt, Abhi Bhattacharya, Madan Puri, Asit Sen, Subhash Ghai, Farida Jalal

The musical romance about non-family-sanctioned sex that established Khanna as a major star backed by the singing voice of Kishore Kumar and Burman’s music. The film helped set the pattern for 70s entertainment cinema. Arun (Khanna), an Air Force officer, secretly marries Vandana (Tagore) who bears him a son. Arun dies in an air crash. Vandana is rejected by Arun’s family as his legal wife. To safeguard her son’s honour, she decides to let him be adopted by a childless couple while making sure she is responsible for raising the child by becoming his nanny. She devotes the rest of her life to raising her son to become an air force pilot like his father. Khanna plays both father and son. Remembered mainly for its music with e.g. Mere sapnon ki rani and Kora Kaagaz. The film’s best-known song, Roop tera mastana (sung by Kishore Kumar), was picturised in a single 4’ take deploying the conventional cloudburst as a metaphor for sex as the drenched heroine, clad only in a blanket, succumbs to the hero’s advances after a sexual encounter in the next room has been shown in silhouette. This sequence was for years presented to students of Indian film schools as the definitive example of mise en scene.

  ARANYER DIN RATRI

aka Days and Nights in the Forest
1969 115’ b&w Bengali
d/sc/m Satyajit Ray p Nepal Dutta, Ashim Dutta pc Priya Films st Sunil Ganguly’s novel c Soumendu Roy, Purnendu Bose
lp Soumitra Chatterjee, Subhendu Chatterjee, Samit Bhanja, Robi Ghosh, Pahadi Sanyal, Sharmila Tagore, Kaberi Bose, Simi Garewal, Aparna Sen

Four young male Bengali urban stereotypes leave. Calcutta for a holiday in the forest of Palamau, Bihar: the suave executive and former political activist Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee), the middle-class Sanjoy (Subhendu Chatterjee), the sportsman Hari (Bhanja) and the insecure comedian Sekhar (Ghosh). They bribe a caretaker and hire a government bungalow in the forest where they meet the sophisticated Aparna (Tagore) and her widowed sister-in-law, Jaya (Bose). Completing the ensemble is the sexy Santhal tribal Duli (Garewal). The film moves in a series of episodes as Ashim falls for Aparna and then has some embarassing encounters which shake his patriarchal attitudes. The climactic sequence takes place at a village fair as the group splits up into couples: Hari seduces the tribal woman, Sanjoy is unable to accept Jaya’s overtures, Aparna’s tragic autobiography causes Ashim to replay some of the anxieties of his predecessors in previous Chatterjee roles in Ray’s films (cf. Charulata, 1964; Kapurush, 1965). The many references to Bengali literature, colonial history and recent political events provide the viewer with an array of clues to some pervasive but unspoken off-screen enigma which has taken the place of the ‘crime’ which usually powers this type of plot. This use of a suggested trauma, indirectly shaping the lives of the characters as they try not to deal with it, was taken up by other Bengali New Indian Cinema directors (cf. B. Dasgupta’s work) to deal with middle-class ambivalence and guilt in the face of the political events of the 70s (cf. Naxalite). It also informed Ray’s own Calcutta trilogy, begun shortly after this film.

  BANDHAN

1969 1’59’ col Hindi
d/s Narendra Bedi pc Sippy Films
dial Rajinder Singh Bedi lyr Anjaan, Indivar c K. Vaikunth m Kalyanji-Anandji
lp Rajesh Khanna, Mumtaz, Anju Mahendru, Jeevan, Kanhaiyalal, Achala Sachdev, Aruna Irani, Sundar, Ratnamala, Sapru, Kamal Kapoor, Meena, Birbal, Rajindernath, Keshav Rana, Roopesh Kumar, Narmada Shankar, Baldev Mehta

Ruralist melodrama featuring Khanna as Dharma who grows up haunted by a thieving, alcoholic, wife-beating father, Jeevanlal (Jeevan), who even steals his own daughter’s jewels on her wedding day. Dharma manages a meagre living tilling his land until his father assigns it to the wicked moneylender Malik Ram (Kanhaiyalal), whose daughter Gauri (Mumtaz) is Dharma’s beloved. Malik Ram takes over Dharma’s field, and when his father is killed Dharma is arrested for the murder until the truth emerges. The film continued the Do Raaste (1969) star combination of Khanna and Mumtaz, with several musical hits including Bina badara ke bijuriya kaise chamke (sung by Mukesh).