BHUVAN SHOME

1969 111’(96’) b&w Hindi
d/p/sc Mrinal Sen pc Mrinal Sen Prod. st Banaphool dial Satyendra Sharat, Badrinath c K.K. Mahajan m Vijay Raghava Rao
lp Suhasini Mulay, Utpal Dutt, Sadhu Meher, Shekhar Chatterjee, Rochak Pandit, Punya Das; voice over by Amitabh Bachchan

Sen’s breakthrough film, a low-budget, FFC- sponsored hit, is sometimes seen as the origin of New Indian Cinema. The story, set in the late 40s just after Independence, was sarcastically summarised by Satyajit Ray as ‘Big Bad Bureaucrat Reformed by Rustic Belle’. It is a satirical comedy about the upright Bengali railway officer Bhuvan Shome (Dutt). He sacks a corrupt ticket collector (Meher) before going off on a duck-shooting expedition in Gujarat. There, in the dunes of Saurashtra, he meets the village belle Gauri (Mulay) who turns out to be the wife of the man he sacked. He has a long, and unstated, sexual/cultural encounter with her, enjoying the attention she lavishes upon him even as he remains anxious about his sudden loss of authority. He returns determined to enjoy life to the full. Sen described his first Hindi feature as Tati-inspired nonsense and suggested that the ending, with the ‘humanised’ bureaucrat boisterously disrupting the office routine, is difficult to grasp ‘unless you grant Mr Shome a certain touch of insanity. As you examine the sequence, you will see that the same can be said about the editing pattern, all erratic and illogical.’ Mulay went on to become a noted maker of radical documentaries while occasionally acting in independent films.

  BUDDHIMANTHUDU

1969 187’ b&w Telugu
d/sc Bapu pc Chitrakalpana Films
p N.S. Murthy st/dial Mullapudi Venkatramana lyr Arudra, Kosaraju, Dasarathi, C. Narayana Reddy c Venkatarathnam m K.V. Mahadevan
lp A. Nageshwara Rao, Nagabhushanam, Krishnamraju, ‘Sakshi’ Rangarao, Vijayanirmala, Sandhyarani, Suryakantam, Shantakumari, Shobhan Babu, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Allu Ramalingaiah

Bapu’s rationalist critique of religion. Madhavacharya (Nageshwara Rao), a temple priest, goes into mystic trances when he encounters the god Krishna. Consequently, he is both believed to have magic powers and ridiculed for his mystic mumbo-jumbo. His brother (Nageshwara Rao again, in a double role), a rationalist, argues that it is not temples but schools that will lead to progress. There is also a love story subplot between the rationalist brother and the virtuous village belle (Vijayanirmala).

  DR BEZBARUA

1969? b&w Assamese
d/s Brojen Barua pc Ranghar Cine Prod. c Sujit Singha m Ramen Barua
lp Nipon Goswami, Brojen Barua, Meghali Devi, Tarun Duara, Ranjana Bordoloi, Protibha Thakur, Junu Barua, Sadhan Hazarika

Romance and crime thriller and major Assamese hit. Although consciously modelled on the Bombay formula, the film was made with local personnal and technical resources, launching the possibility of a self-sustaining film industry in the region.

  DO RAASTE

1969 165’ col Hindi
d/p Raj Khosla pc Raj Khosla Films st Chandrakant Kakodkar’s novel Nilambiri sc G. R. Kamath lyr Anand Bakshi m Laxmikant-Pyarelal
lp Rajesh Khanna, Mumtaz, Balraj Sahni, Prem Chopra, Bindu, Kamini Kaushal, Veena, Mohan Choti, Asit Sen, Randhir, Birbal, Leela Mishra, Shivraj, Shah Agha, Uma Dutt, Ravikant, Anand Tiwari, Kumud Bole, Jayant, Krishnakant

Along with Aradhana (1969), this film, released within weeks of the former title, established Khanna as a major star. Navendu’s (Sahni) stepmother (Veena) treats him like her own son. When his father dies, Navendu has the responsibility of looking after his stepmother and stepbrothers (Khanna and Chopra) which leads to conflict when one of them (Chopra) decides to marry a shrewish ‘modern’ girl (Bindu). Most of the film is a Khanna-Mumtaz romance culminating in the famous Bindiya chamkegi song sung by Lata Mangeshkar.

  ITTEFAQ

1969 104’ col Hindi
d Yash Chopra pc B.R. Films st B.R. Films Story Dept dial Akhtar-Ul-Iman c Kay Gee m Salil Choudhury
lp Rajesh Khanna, Nanda, Sujit Kumar, Bindu, Gajanan Jagirdar, Madan Puri, Iftikhar, Shammi, Jagdish Raj, Alka

Low-budget, songless suspense drama in which the hero Dilip Roy (Khanna), accused of having murdered his wife and pronounced mentally insane, escapes from an asylum and finds refuge in the house of a young but married woman. He sees the corpse of her husband in the bathroom, but it disappears. Shot mainly on sets, the taut editing keeps the whodunit plot enigmatic until the ending resolves the suspense. It is one of Khanna’s pre-Aradhana (1969) hits. Apparently, he appeared unshaven in Raj Khosla’s Do Raaste (1969) because he had to be unshaven for Ittefaq and was shooting the two films simultaneously.

  JANMABHOOMI

aka Motherland
1969 130’ b&w Malayalam
d/s John Shankaramangalam pc Rooparekha lyr P. Bhaskaran c Ashok Kumar
m B.A. Chidambaranath
lp Kottarakkara Sridharan Nair, S.P. Pillai, Madhu, Manavalan Joseph, Janardhanan, T.R. Ramchand, Ushakumari, Shobha, T.R. Omana, Snehalatha, L.V. Sharada Rao, Baby Saroja

A melodrama about acculturation as a poor family of Christian Syrians from Central Travancore resettle on a jungle farm in the wilds of Wynad in North Malabar. After succumbing to social pressures (incarnated by the local zamindar) and to natural ones (some of the family’s children are drowned in a local river, others are trampled by a rogue elephant), the family’s heroic son, Johnny, finally overcomes the rogue elephant and returns in triumph to the village where henceforth he will assume his rightful position in the community.

  KANKU

1969 148’(99’) b&w Gujarati
d/p/sc Kantilal Rathod pc Akar Films st Pannalal Patel c Kumar Jaywant m Dilip Dholakia
lp Pallavi Mehta, Kishore Jariwala, Kishore Bhatt, Arvind Joshi

Reformist Gujarati tale introducing New Indian Cinema to the language. Kanku (Mehta) is a village maiden widowed while she is still pregnant. The rather static and verbose film tells of her relationship with a local grocer, Malakchand (Bhatt). Refusing to remarry, she devotes her life to her son and arranges his marriage with the grocer’s help. Afterwards, she and the grocer make love, which would normally have led to their ostracism, but Kanku struggles to retain her honour.

  KAVAL DAIVAM

aka The Guardian Deity
1969 145’ b&w Tamil
d K. Vijayan pc Ambal Prod. st Jayakanthan’s Kai Vilangu [Handcuffs] lyr Mayavanathan, Thanjai Vanan, Nellai Arulmani c R. Vijayan m S. Devarajan
lp S.V. Subbaiah, Sivaji Ganesan, Nagesh, Sivakumar, M.N. Nambiar, Laxmi, Sowcar Janaki, T.S. Balaiah, R. Muthuraman, V.K. Ramaswamy, S.A. Ashokan, O.A.K. Thevar, V. Gopalakrishnan, Shakti Sukumaran

One of the better-known filmic translations of Jayakantan’s fiction, the noted Tamil novelist and former CPI member who later joined the Congress and who also had a brief film career as scenarist and producer. Mainly an ode to the humanity of a childless jail warden Raghavan (Subbaiah) who treats the prisoners as his children, equating him with Ayyanar, the guardian deity of Tamil villages. The main plot features the farmer Manikam (Sivakumar), a peasant who wounds his brutal rival and becomes a prisoner. There is a second plot, added especially for the film, with a toddy-tapper (Ganesan) who killed the two men who raped his daughter. He is caught and hanged. The film’s highlight was the inclusion of several of Tamil Nadu’s best-known folk forms, the therukoothu (including its famous exponent Purisai Natesathambiran performing The Destruction of Hiranyan), the karagam dance and the villupattu. The film has only two songs and emphasises village life and rural forms of worship, unusual in Tamil cinema.

  KHAMOSHI

1969 127’ b&w Hindi
d Asit Sen pc Geetanjali Pics st Ashutosh Mukherjee dial/lyr Gulzar c Kamal Bose m Hemanta Mukherjee
lp Rajesh Khanna, Waheeda Rehman, Dharmendra, Nasir Hussain, Lalita Pawar, Snehalata, Iftikhar

The first of Sen’s tragic melodramas with Hindi star Khanna (followed by Safar, 1970). The nurse Radha (Rehman) has to pretend to fall in love with her male patients, as part of the therapy in a mental asylum. The first time she does this, she actually falls in love, and is devastated when her cured patient (Dharmendra) merely thanks her and leaves to marry his fiancee. When it threatens to happen once again, with a few variations, with her second patient (Khanna), the nurse goes insane. Hindi remake of Sen’s classic Deep Jweley Jai (1959), rescued like its predecessor mainly by soft-focus b&w photography and classic songs like composer Mukherjee’s Turn pukar lo, tumhara intezar hai and Woh shyam kuch ajeeb thi (sung by Kishore Kumar).

  MATTUKKARA VELAN

1969 173’ col Tamil
d P. Neelakantan pc Jayanthi Films p N. Kanakabai dial A.L. Narayanan lyr Kannadasan, Vali c V. Ramamurthy m K.V. Mahadevan
lp M.G. Ramachandran, Jayalalitha, Laxmi, S. Varalakshmi, S.A. Ashokan, V.K. Ramaswamy

Classic MGR double role where he plays the title role of the cowherd Velan and the urbane lawyer Raghu. Their lovers (Jayalalitha and Lakshmi respectively) mistake the men for each other, providing the cowherd with an opportunity to help locate a murderer in a case that has baffled the lawyer, and also to claim the rich heiress whose father had earlier thrown him out of his house. The MGR political formula, which M.S.S. Pandian (1992) describes as ‘the hero’s use of literacy as a weapon of struggle against oppression [c]ontrasted with its use as a weapon of oppression in the hands of the elite’ (cf. Padakotti, 1964; Enga Veetu Pillai, 1965) is most typically demonstrated in this film. It was remade as cinematographer turned director Ravikant Nagaich’s Jigri Dost (1969) starring Jeetendra.

  MEGH-O-ROUDRA

aka Sun and Showers
1969 116’ b&w Bengali
d/sc/m Arundhati Devi p Ajitesh Bandyopadhyay pc K.L. Kapur Prod.
st Rabindranath Tagore c Bimal Mukherjee
lp Nripati Chatterjee, Hashu Bannerjee, Prahlad Brahmachari, Prasad Mukherjee, Swaroop Datta, Gautam Ghosh, Sushil Chakravarty, Bankim Ghosh, Monojit Lahiri, Bhabharup Bhattacharya, Balai Sen, Satu Majumdar, Samar Nag

Arundhati Devi aka Mukherjee’s 2nd feature after the critically acclaimed Chhuti (1967). Megh-o-Roudra tells of a strong young woman in British-ruled 19th C. Bengal. Struggling to affirm her human dignity in her village, she learns to read and write under the tutorship of a stubborn and impetuous law student who constantly challenges the British colonists and is eventually jailed. By the time he is released, the woman has become a prosperous widow. When they meet, she bows courteously to pay homage to the bedraggled man who helped her achieve self-confidence.

Hashu Bannerjee (right) in Megh-o-Roudra

  NADHI

1969 133’ col Malayalam
d A Vincent pc Supriya Prod. st P.J. Anthony sc Thoppil Bhasi lyr Vyalar Rama Varma c P.N. Sundaram, A. Venkat m P. Devarajan
lp Prem Nazir, Madhu, Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair, P.J. Anthony, Adoor Bhasi, Shankaradi, Nellikode Bhaskaran, Sharada, Ambika, Kaviyoor Ponnamma, Adoor Bhawani

Vincent’s colour debut also represented a more dramatic style of plotting than his Thoppil Bhasi and Vasudevan Nair b&w scripts. The families of Varkey and Thomman rekindle their ancient feud when they happen to hire adjacent boathouses on the Alwaye lake. However, Varkey’s daughter Stella (Sharada) falls in love with Thomman’s son Johnny (Nazir). The dramatic highlight, when the infant daughter of Stella’s sister falls and is drowned, also leads to the reconciliation. Several songs were major hits.

  NAM NAADU

1969 186’ col Tamil
d Jambulingam pc Vijaya International p B. Nagi Reddy, Chakrapani st Mullapudi Venkatramana dial Sornam lyr Vali c B.N. Konda Reddy, T.M. Sundarababu m M.S. Vishwanathan, Swaminathan
lp M.G. Ramachandran, Jayalalitha, S.V. Ranga Rao, K.A. Thangavelu, S.A. Ashokan, Nagesh, Bhagavati, S.V. Ramadas, Manohar, Thanjai Ramaiyadas, Pandharibai, Baby Padmini, Sridevi, S.V.Sahasranamam, K.R. Ramaswamy, Chittor V. Nagaiah, Mukkamala Krishnamurthy

MGR, who would soon be expelled from the DMK, here turned the DMK propaganda discourse against the Party. The philanthropists and pillars of society, a doctor, a builder and a merchant, led by the rich Dharmalingam, are in fact villains dealing in crime and the black market. They are exposed when the nationalist Dorai (MGR) masquerades as a foreign-returned millionaire dealing in contraband. He gets the villains to confess to their deeds before a hidden camera. The film was remade in Hindi with Rajesh Khanna as Apna Desh (1972).

  NANAK NAAM JAHAZ HAI

1969 140’ col Punjabi
d/s Ram Maheshwari p Pannalal Maheshwari c D.K. Prabhakar m S. Mahindra lp Prithviraj Kapoor, Vimi, Nishi, Som Dutt, Suresh, Veena, I.S. Johar

Epic fable with a major cultural impact on Punjabi Sikhs at home and abroad. It is also the last of the great Saint films, although not a biographical of Guru Nanak but a devotional movie addressing his teachings. Made for the 500th anniversary of the saint’s birth and apparently inspired by legends around the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the film tells of Gurmukh Singh (Kapoor) and his equally devout son Gurmeet (Dutt). Gurmukh treats his partner Prem Singh as a younger brother until a business dispute ends their relationship. Prem Singh’s wife Ratan Kaur (Nishi), influenced by the villain Shukha, wants the son Gurmeet to marry her niece Channi (Vimi); however, in an argument she accidentally blinds him. The blind Gurmeet, a repentant Ratan Kaur and Gurmeet’s fiancee Channi (dressed as a man) set out on a pilgrimage of atonement to all the Sikh shrines. The troubled relationship and unconsummated marriage between Gurmeet and Channi is eventually resolved at the Golden Temple where, in answer to Channi’s prayers, a miracle causes Gurmeet’s eyesight to return while destroying that of the original villain Shukha. The classic musical, extensively quoting from the basic Sikh text, the Granth Sahib, is the first big hit in post-Independence Punjabi cinema, badly hit by Partition and the loss of its Lahore base as well as by the Pakistan government’s decision (1953) to ban the import of Indian films. Much of its devotional fervour comes from the region’s troubled political history (references include a documentary opening showing the festival celebrating Nanak’s anniversary in the presence of Abdul Gaffar Khan and the Dalai Lama).

  NATUN PATA

aka The New Leaf
1969 121’ b&w Bengali d/c Dinen Gupta pc Gora Pics st Prativa Bose sc Ajitesh Bannerjee m Bahadur Khan
lp Arati Ganguly, Kajal Gupta, Ajitesh Bannerjee, Samit Bhanja, Indranath Chatterjee, Sombhu Mitra, Sipra Mitra, Geeta De, Jahar Roy, Chinmoy Roy, Sikha Roy Choudhury

Lyrical ruralist melodrama building on e.g. Satyajit Ray’s Samapti episode of Teen Kanya (1961) to tell the story of a mischievous 14-year-old young girl, Savitri, and how she is ‘tamed’ into marriage and conventional behaviour. Forced by her guardian-aunt to marry the son of the stationmaster, she runs away from her marital home but finds herself unwelcome everywhere. Her husband eventually rescues her just before she tries to commit suicide on a railway line (the railway track is used as a recurring symbol through the film). Disturbingly, the film presents this socially sanctioned form of child abuse as a painful but ultimately positive experience as the girl ‘grows up’ to be a woman who accepts her domestic and marital duties. Noted cinematographer Gupta’s debut as director.

  NINDU HRIDAYALU

1969 188’ b&w Telugu
d K. Vishwanath pc S.V.S. Films
p M. Jagannatha Rao st Nagercoil Padmanabhan dial Samudrala Raghavacharya
lyr C. Narayana Reddy, Devulapalli Krishna Sastry c S.S. Lall m T.V. Raju
lp N.T. Rama Rao, Shobhan Babu, Chalam, Satyanarayana, Vanisree, Geetanjali, Relangi Venkatramaiah, Chhaya Devi, Chandrakala, Thyagaraju

Gopi, when a child, witnesses his father’s murder at the hands of Veeraju and vows to take revenge. However, when he grows up, circumstances make it necessary for him to extend his protection to Veeraju’s wife and son, and he also falls in love with Veeraju’s daughter Sharada. The hit film is Vishwanath’s breakthrough work.

  OLAVUM THEERAVUM

aka Waves and Shore
1969 120’ b&w Malayalam
d P.N. Menon p P.A. Backer pc Asha Films, Charuchitra s M.T. Vasudevan Nair lyr P. Bhaskaran c Ravi Varma m Baburaj
lp Madhu, Jose Prakash, Nellikode Bhaskaran, Usha Nandini, Paravoor Bharathan, Kunjava, Philomina, Mala, Nilambur Aisha, Nilambur Balan

Independently produced by future director Backer, this is often considered the first film to have introduced an art-house New Indian Cinema aesthetic to Kerala. Noted mainly for Nair’s classic script and unusual dialogue style evoking local accents, as well as for its extensive use of outdoor locations. The Muslim trader Bapputti (Madhu) loves Nabisa (Usha Nandini), and tries to earn money that would enable them to live in comfort after marriage. However, when the rich stranger Kunjali (Prakash) arrives, Nabisa’s money grabbing mother (Philomina) forces her to marry him. The film ends with Nabisa’s dramatic suicide when Bapputti, rejected by her family, leaves only to find her swollen corpse washed ashore. The ‘tragic’ realism in this art-house movie and commercial hit was later to prove definitive to a whole generation of Malayalam directors including Backer himself, K.G. George (cf. Kolangal 1980), scenarist Vasudevan Nair’s own directions or the work of e.g. Padmarajan.

  SAAT HINDUSTANI

1969 144’ b&w Hindi
d/p/s K.A. Abbas pc Naya Sansar st Madhukar lyr Kaifi Azmi c Ramchandra m J.P. Kaushik
lp Shahnaz, Madhu, Utpal Dutt, Madhukar, Anwar Ali, Amitabh Bachchan, Jalal Agha, Surekha, Sukhdeo, Prakash Thapa, Irshad Panjatan, Dina Pathak, A.K. Hangal, Anjali

Remembered as one of Bachchan’s first feature films, this is a non-violent variation of the Dirty Dozen (1967) with moralistic comments about contemporary India. Six men from different parts of the country join Maria (Shahnaz), a native of Portuguese-occupied Goa, to raise nationalist sentiment in that state by hoisting Indian flags on Portuguese forts and buildings. In the process they find unity and abandon their religious and regional differences. The film begins with a dying Maria who summons her former comrades and ends with the comrades assembling before her and reiterating their faith in nationalism. The film was released together with the controversial short Char Shatter Ek Kahani (1968). Apart from Bachchan, it was also the first Hindi film by Malayalam star Madhu, who played the Bengali commando.

  SARA AKASH

aka The Big Sky aka The Whole Sky
1969 99’(96’) b&w Hindi
d/sc Basu Chatterjee pc Cine Eye Films st Ravindra Yadav c K.K. Mahajan m Salil Choudhury
lp Rakesh Pandey, Madhu Chakravarty, Tarala Mehta, Dina Pathak, A.K. Hangal, Mani Kaul, Jalal Agha, Nandita Thakur

A realist critique of arranged marriages and patriarchy set in North India. The film chronicles the relationship of Samar (Pandey), whose parents (Pathak and Hangal) coveted the dowry his marriage would bring, and his wife Prabha (Chakravarty). Samar shuns his wife because he is afraid her presence might hinder his educational ambitions. She thus has to accept being confined largely to the joint family’s kitchen or to return to her parental home for long visits. She commits the faux pas of washing the vessels with the clay symbolising a deity designed for use only during the religious ceremony of her sister-in-law’s (Thakur) newborn child. Together with Sen’s Bhuvan Shome and Kaul’s Uski Roti, made in the same year, this film set the pattern for what the media described as New Indian Cinema. All three films were shot by cinematographer K.K. Mahajan who had just graduated from the FTII and who received his first national award for Sara Akash.

  SATYAKAM

1969 160’ col Hindi
d Hrishikesh Mukherjee pc Panchi Art sc Bimal Dutt st Narayan Sanyal’s novel dial Rajinder Singh Bedi lyr Kaifi Azmi c Jaywant Pathare m Laxmikant-Pyarelal lp Ashok Kumar, Dharmendra, Sharmila Tagore, Robi Ghosh, David, Sanjeev Kumar, Tarun Bose, Sapru, Rajen Haksar, Baby Sarika, Manmohan, Uma Dutt, Dina Pathak, Paul Mahendra, Kanu Roy, O.P. Kohli, Anand Mama, Abhimanyu Sharma

Nationalist melodrama using the metaphor of illegitimacy. When Satyapriya is born his mother dies (cf. Mukherjee’s Anupama, 1966). His father turns into a sanyasi (ascetic) and he is raised with strong nationalist feelings by his grandfather, a Sanskrit scholar. He grows up (Dharmendra) to become an engineer at the time of India’s independence. Employed by a princely state, he discovers that few of his nationalist-utopian dreams have been realised. The critique of the state of the nation is illustrated by the unfortunate Ranjana (Tagore) who has been raped by the prince and is pregnant. Satyapriya marries her and she gives birth to the child. The rest of the film concerns the aged grandfather’s refusal to accept a child born of sin and refers to a mythological tale from the Upanishads: Gautam accepted Jabala’s son, Satyakam, under similar circumstances.

  TEEN BHUBHANER PAREY

1969 151’ b&w Bengali
d/sc Ajitesh Bannerjee pc Satirtha Prod. st Samaresh Bose co-lyr Pulak Bannerjee co-lyr/m Sudhin Dasgupta c Ramanand Sengupta
lp Soumitra Chatterjee, Tanuja, Kamal Mitra, Tarun Kumar, Sulata Choudhury, Subrata Chatterjee, Padmadevi, Aparna Devi, Robi Ghosh, Sumita Sanyal

Factory clerk Subir, aka Montu (Soumitra Chatterjee) falls in love with schoolteacher Sarasi (Tanuja), transgressing the class barrier between them. She marries him, partly intending to ‘improve’ him through education. Her disapproval of his working-class friends causes problems for the marriage, but the real crisis occurs when the tables are turned. Once educated, Subir becomes a bespectacled and grey-haired professor, and also an opportunist who plans to take up a lucrative post in a new city. Eventually his arguments for conformism, merging with the greyness of his urban environment, become increasingly unreal (underlined by make-up and acting style). Soumitra Chatterjee’s classic performance is supported by Sengupta’s intricate camerawork as Subir moves through different spaces on his socially upward journey. Samaresh Bose’s scathingly critical novel is softened into a typically reformist presentation of education as the solution to all social ills.

  USKI ROTI

aka A Day’s Bread aka Our Daily Bread
1969 110’(95’) b&w Hindi
d/sc Mani Kaul p Rochak Pandit st Mohan Rakesh’s short story c K.K. Mahajan
lp Gurdeep Singh, Garima, Richa Vyas, Lakhanapal, Savita Bajaj

Kaul’s debut is an adaptation of a short story by the noted Hindi author Mohan Rakesh and is perhaps the first consistently formal experiment in Indian cinema. The burly bus driver Sucha Singh (G. Singh) travels through the dusty, flat Punjabi countryside. His wife Balo (Garima) spends long hours waiting for him at the bus-stop with his food packet. One day her younger sister is sexually molested, causing Balo to arrive late at the bus-stop. Sucha Singh is upset by her late arrival, rejects her food and drives away. She remains standing at the roadside until nightfall. The original story uses many stereotypes for both its characters and situations. The film, however, integrates the characters into the landscape, evoking an internalised yet distanced kind of realism reminiscent of Robert Bresson, cf. the shots from within the bus showing the road and the countryside going by while a little sticker on its window intrudes in the corner of the frame. Kaul wanted to discover ‘what was truly cinematic in the filming of a play’ (1974) and he used a minimum of gestures to enact the rigidly notated script. The two registers of Balo’s physical and mental environment are represented by two camera lenses: the 28mm wide-angle deep-focus lens and the 135mm telephoto lens leaving only a minute section of the frame in focus. This schema was gradually reversed through the film, making it Indian cinema’s most controlled achievement in image composition. Its use of spatial volume refers to the large canvases of the modernist painter Amrita Sher-Gil while the soundtrack isolates individual sounds to match the equally fragmented visual details. The film, financed by the FFC, was violently attacked in the popular press for dispensing with familiar cinematic norms and equally strongly defended by India’s aesthetically sensitive intelligentsia.

  UYYALE

aka The Swing
1969 163’ b&w Kannada
d N. Lakshminarayan pc Bharat Ents st Chaduranga c N.G. Rao m Vijayabhaskar
lp Rajkumar, Ashwath, Kalpana, Balkrishna, Rama Devi

Marital melodrama about a professor (Ashwath) who, engaged in his researches, neglects his domestic life. His indifference alienates his wife (Kalpana), especially when their daughter dies. The wife becomes attracted to the professor’s friend Krishna (Rajkumar) who eventually goes away to preserve the marriage of his friend.

  VAA RAJA VAA

1969 152’ b&w Tamil
d/s A.P. Nagarajan pc C.N.V. Prod. c W.R. Subba Rao m Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan
lp Master Prabhakar, Baby Shanti, V.S. Raghavan, Rukmini, Manorama, C.K. Nagesh

Raja (Master Prabhakar), aged 10, is a tourist guide at the Mahabalipuram shrine. His friend and mentor is a sculptor (Raghavan) who keeps a pillar in his yard on which there are sayings affirming the truths of past wisdom. Raja tries to see if these bits of wisdom are valid in today’s world and finds that they are. Neo-traditionalism Nagarajan style.

  ADINA MEGHA

1970 154’ b&w Oriya
d/sc Amit Moitra p Babulal Doshi st Kuntala Kumari Acharya dial Gopal Chatray c Sailaja Chatterjee m Balakrishna Das
lp Prashanta Nanda, Jharana Das, Sandhya, Geeta, Bhanumathi, Niranjan, Dukhiram, Sagar, Janaki

Hit Oriya musical melodrama by Bengali director Moitra. University student Suresh (Nanda) loves Champak (Jharana Das), though his brother and sister-in-law would like him to many Alka. Suresh ends up marrying a third woman, Bina, as an act of chivalry when she is abandoned by her fiance. Champak is heartbroken while Alka marries, becomes a widow almost immediately and ends up educating tribal children. Eventually, she is the one who brings Suresh and Bina together. One of the best-known films by the famous Oriya star duo Nanda and Das, and also known for hit numbers like Ae bhara janha raati and Boulo ki kahibi.

  ANAND

1970 122’col Hindi
d/st/co-sc Hrishikesh Mukherjee pc Rupam Chitra co-sc/dial/co-lyr Gulzar co-sc Bimal Dutt D.N. Mukherjee co-lyr Yogesh c Jaywant Pathare m Salil Choudhury
lp Rajesh Khanna, Amitabh Bachchan, Sumita Sanyal, Ramesh Deo, Seema, Johnny Walker, Dara Singh

The Khanna hit which launched the 70s melodrama formula of endowing the central character with a terminal disease. In this way, a typical emotional highlight of the melodramatic genre, the death of the hero could be spun out across the entire length of the film. Anand (Khanna) zestfully fights intestinal cancer, determined to extract as much pleasure from his remaining lifespan as possible despite the physical pain. The moral of the story is emphasised via the recording of the hero’s voice, replayed minutes after his actual death, enjoining the audience to value a large-hearted life over a merely long one. The film retained a commercial repeat value as one of Bachchan’s early starring roles. He plays the brooding Dr Bhaskar who tends to Anand in his last days and then writes a book on him which wins a literary prize. The award ceremony provides the framing narrative of Anand’s story told in flashback. Choudhury’s music also contributed to the film’s success e.g. Kahin door sung by Mukesh. Mukherjee cast the popular Bengali actress Sanyal (Ashirwad, 1968; Chena Achena and Chiradiner, both 1969; and esp. Guddi, 1971) in her first major Hindi role. He remade the film, with less success, as Mili (1975), featuring a terminally ill heroine, Jaya Bhaduri, opposite a cynical and alcoholic Bachchan.

  APARAJEYA

1970 108’ b&w Assamese
d Chaturanga pc Madhab Films lyr Keshab Mahanta, Phani Talukdar c D.K. Prabhakar m Salil Choudhury
lp Rakhi, Prasanta Hazarika, Parag Chaliha, Punya Das, Prasannalal Chowdhe, Rajen Das

Assamese communal harmony movie set among the region’s marginalised fishermen’s community, consisting mainly of Bengali immigrants. The film is remembered mainly as an unusual collective experiment, directed by Atul Bordoloi, poet-playwright Phani Talukdar, Gauri Burman and Munin Bhuyan, and for its unusual ‘frontier’ cultural primitivism.

  ARANAZHIKANERAM

aka Just Half An Hour
1970 168’ b&w Malayalam
d K.S. Sethumadhavan p M.O. Joseph pc Manjilas s Parappuram, from his novel lyr Vyalar Rama Varma c Mehli Irani m P. Devarajan
lp Kottarakkara Sridharan Nair, Sathyan, Prem Nazir, Adoor Bhasi, Ragini, K.P. Oomer, Sheela, Ambika, Meena, Bahadur, Shankaradi, Bharathan, Muthukulam Raghavan Pillai, Govindan Kutty, Jose Prakash, Santosh Kumar, P.R. Menon

Sethumadhavan’s bizarre portrayals of deviant sex, seen from the ‘tragic’ viewpoint of decaying but good tradition, became increasingly the standard for his ‘middle-of-the-road’ Malayalam cinema (cf. Odeyil Ninnu, 1965; Adimagal, 1969; Chattakkan, 1974). The story features the reminiscences of the good octogenarian Kunjochanam (Nair), whose history is narrated as well as that of his five offspring. Shortly after succumbing to a paralytic stroke, he discovers his ‘bad’ daughter-in-law carrying on with an evil opium dealer. The old man believes death to be ‘half an hour away’, but this does not stop the villain from poisoning him as well. Eventually the daughter-in-law, like her predecessor in Odeyil Ninnu, commits suicide. The film was noted mainly for Kottarakkara’s florid performance accompanied by some unusual make-up.

  DASTAK

1970 140’ b&w Hindi
d/s Rajinder Singh Bedi pc Dachi Films lyr Majrooh Sultanpuri c Kamal Bose m Madan Mohan
lp Sanjeev Kumar, Rehana Sultan, Anju Mahendroo, Shakila Bano Bhopali, Anwar Hussain, Manmohan Krishna, Niranjan Sharma, Kamal Kapoor, Yash Kumar, Jagdev

Author Bedi uses his own outstanding script for his directorial debut financed by the FFC as part of early New Indian Cinema. Hamid (S. Kumar), a clerk in Bombay, and his bride Salma (Sultan) live next to the red-light district in a small apartment formerly inhabited by the famous prostitute Shamshad (Bhopali). Clients still turn up, to the annoyance of the young couple who strive to achieve respectability. In contrast to the abstract commands of ‘respectable’ morality, the grossly materialist economics of prostitution offering more concrete and immediate benefits acquire liberating overtones for the couple. When Hamid refuses a bribe and finds himself unable to buy his own house or to raise money for his sister-in-law’s marriage, he displaces his anger and frustration into sexual exploitation. He rapes his wife and fantasises her as a whore in order to be able to respond to her sexually. For Salma, it is the association between prostitution and classical music which provides the link to her family inheritance. Eventually the two realise that there is no escape from prostitution (in reality or as a metaphor) in the urban world. Commercially, the theme had obvious voyeuristic attractions exploited fully in its publicity: the notorious scene where Salma lies on the floor, naked, features prominently in the advertising campaign. Unfortunately, the script, published as a book (1971) with considerable literary merit, was greatly marred by the screen adaptation. Songs include Bahian na dharo and Hum hain mataye-kuch-o-bazaar ki tarah, both sung by Lata Mangeshkar.

Sanjeev Kumar and Rehana Sultan in Dastak

  ENGAL THANGAM

aka Our Darling
1970 174’ col Tamil
d Krishnan-Panju pc Mekala Pics c S. Maruthi Rao m M.S. Vishwanathan
lp M.G. Ramachandran, Jayalalitha, Cho Ramaswamy, A.V.M. Rajan, Manorama, S.R. Janaki, Pushpalata

MGR film made at the height of his popularity, typical of his own propaganda idiom as he broke from the DMK (1972). A concerned and law-abiding truck driver Thangam (MGR) tracks down Murthy (Rajan), the rapist of his blind sister Sumathi (Pushpalata). Out of loyalty to the man’s mother, he forces Murthy to reform and to marry Sumathi (the blind girl’s feelings about having to marry the man who brutally raped her are glossed over). Thangam himself first rescues Kala (Jayalalitha), daughter of a policeman, from a gang of robbers and marries her, having brought the culprits to justice. MGR was the Deputy Chairman of Small Savings in Tamil Nadu’s State Assembly at the time, reflected in the film’s opening sequence where he is called Vathiar (‘teacher’, a term used by his fans) at the opening of a Savings Bank. The film includes footage of a speech by C.N. Annadurai while MGR literally wraps himself in the colours of the DMK: claiming to be the true inheritor of Annadurai’s mantle, MGR often uses the red and black DMK colours in his wardrobe. He also depicts himself as the protector of the poor while preaching against alcohol and smoking. In a highlight of the film he rises from a coffin to sing ‘I died and came back alive, I laughed at Yama’, the god of death, referring to his ‘rebirth’ when he survived a gunshot wound inflicted by fellow actor M.R. Radha in 1967. The incident was earlier referred to, to enhance his heroic image, in Vivasayee (1967).

  EZHUTHATHA KATHA

aka Unwritten Story
1970 153’ b&w Malayalam
d A.B. Raj p T.E. Vasudevan pc jaimaruthy Pics st E.P. Kurien sc V. Devan dial Jagathi N.K. Achari lyr Harippad Sreekumar Thampi c Ashok Kumar m V. Dakshinamurthy
lp Prem Nazir, Sheela, Oomer, T.R. Omana, Adoor Bhasi, Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair, G.K. Pillai, Shankaradi, Bharathan, Nellikode Bhaskaran, Chandrakala, Muthukulam Raghavan Pillai, T.K. Balachandran, A. Abbas

A story simultaneously exposing venality in the press and corruption among stage stars and politicians. A former prostitute and stage star, Kamalamma, lives on her memories and the income of her daughter Meena, a successful singer. When Prathapan, the editor of a local newspaper, wants to publish Kamalamma’s memoirs, her former clients panic and seek to prevent publication by various means including bribery and violence. Prathapan eventually discovers that his own uncle, a respected political leader, is in fact Meena’s father. A CID agent masquerading as a journalist uncovers an old plot to accuse Kamalamma of a murder committed by politicians and overwhelmed by the pressures, Kamalamma collapses. Meena is taken into Prathapan’s family. Although Kamalamma is presented as a former stage star, her story also evokes the shady past of some film stars.

  GEJJE POOJE

aka The Mock Marriage
1970 154’ b&w Kannada
d/sc S.R. Puttana Kanagal pc Chitra Jyothi st M.K. Indira’s novel c S.V. Srikanth m Vijayabhaskar
lp Kalpana, Gangadhar, Leelavathi, Arathi, Pandharibai

Kanagal’s best-known film outside Karnataka. Aparna (Leelavathi), an orphan raised by a brothel madam, has an affair and bears a daughter whom the madam hopes to make into a prostitute. To prevent this outcome, Aparna brings up her daughter Chandra (Kalpana) in a different city among respectable neighbours Lalita (Arathi) and her brother Somu, who falls in love with Chandra. When Chandra’s father resurfaces, her inability to explain the presence of a stranger becomes the cause of her broken engagement and her return to prostitution. Continuing Kanagal’s fascination with tragic heroines, incarnated until Sharapanjara (1971) by Kalpana and then by Arathi, who makes her debut here, the film has two distinct camera styles which also influence the performances: the style used to portray the ‘normal’ world of middle-class orthodoxy is rendered increasingly brittle in both image and sound by a second aesthetic in which the worlds of Aparna and Chandra are shown through tight close-ups, expressions of terror and low-angle shots of exploitative men. The musical leitmotiv, associated with the violin that Aparna plays when she remembers her father, extends into expressionist sound effects. In Kanagal’s later work (Ranganayaki, 1981; Manasa Sarovara, 1982) he used colour not only to make films about corruption but a cinema that is so to say in itself corrupted. The film’s Telugu remake is Kalyana Mandapam (1971).

  INTERVIEW

1970 101’(78’)(85’) b&w Bengali
d/sc Mrinal Sen pc Mrinal Sen Prod. st Ashish Burman c K.K. Mahajan m Vijay Raghava Rao
lp Ranjit Mullick, Karuna Bannerjee, Shekhar Chatterjee, Mamata Bannerjee, Bulbul Mukherjee, Umanath Bhattacharya, Amal Chakravarty, Tapan Dasgupta, Bimal Bannerjee, Satyen Ghosh

The first of Sen’s Calcutta trilogy (Calcutta ’71, 1972; Padatik, 1973) marking the director’s turn to a more explicitly political address. While the overt symbols of colonial rule are being dismantled, the internalised residues of colonialism still blight the country, as Ranjit (Mullick) finds out when he cannot get a middle-class job because he cannot get hold of his only suit. The narrative structure is humorous and episodic as the mishaps and frustrations accummulate within one dawn-to-dusk period until the protagonist rebels and destroys a genteel, Western-looking mannequin in a shop window, the symbol of aspirations out of touch with actuality. Inspired by Brecht’s approach to the theatre, Sen includes newsreels and an argument between the protagonist and a voice representing the audience, inviting the viewer to adopt the stance of a critical interlocutor. Not to be confused with Sasikumar’s Malayalam titillation melodrama Interview (1973).

  JOHNNY MERA NAAM

1970 159’ col Hindi
d/sc Vijay Anand pc Trimurti Films st K.A. Narayan lyr Rajinder Krishen, Indivar c Fali Mistry m Kalyanji-Anandji
lp Dev Anand, Hema Malini, Premnath, Jeevan, I.S. Johar, Pran, Sajjan, Padma, Randhawa, Iftikhar, Sulochana

The policeman father of Mohan and Sohan is killed by villain Ranjit Singh (Premnath) who later abducts Mohan. Mohan grows up to become Moti (Pran), the lieutenant in Ranjit Singh’s gang, while brother Sohan (Anand) becomes a cop who tries to infiltrate the gang calling himself Johnny. He succeeds with the help of Rekha (Hema Malini), whose father is held hostage by the villain. Eventually the brothers reunite and destroy the gang. Vijay Anand, noted for earlier crime dramas (Jewel Thief, 1967), adopts the dominant Hindi film style (rapid editing and a noisy soundtrack) and several quotes caricaturising the box-office ‘formula’ e.g. a quadruple role for the comedian Johar. The script contains attacks on classical music (the gang exploits the foreign ‘craze’ for Indian music by exporting drugs hidden in musical instruments) and religion (the burglary of a temple with Pran dressed as a holy man and Malini as a jogan). Although the film has several Kishore Kumar hit songs such as Pal bhar ke liye koi hamepyar kar le, Vijay Anand’s famed song-picturising skills are evident only in the opening number, Vaada to nibhaya, sung by Kishore Kumar and Asha Bhosle.

  KAVIYATH THALAIVI

1970 166’ b&w Tamil
d/s K. Balachander p Sowcar Janaki pc Selvi Films lyr Kannadasan c N. Balakrishnan m M.S. Vishwanathan
lp Sowcar Janaki, Gemini Ganesh, Ravichandran, M.R.R. Vasu

The heroine Devi (Janaki, who also produced the film) loves the lawyer Suresh (Ganesh) but circumstances force her to marry the gambler and alcoholic Paranthaman (Vasu). Trying to escape from her evil husband, Devi becomes a dancer in Hyderabad where she gives birth to a daughter. When her husband tries to kidnap the child, she has Suresh adopt her. Later, when her husband’s blackmail threatens her daughter’s marriage, Devi kills him. Remake of Asit Sen’s Bengali classic Uttar Falguni (1963).

  MARO PRAPANCHAM

1970 155’ b&w Telugu
d Adurthi Subba Rao pc Chakravarthi Chitra st B.S. Thapa sc K. Vishwanath dial Modukuri Johnson lyr Sri Sri c K.S. Ramakrishna Rao m K.V. Mahadevan
lp Savitri, A. Nageshwara Rao, K. Jaggaiah, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Padmanabham, Jamuna

Second and last of the ‘experimental’ co-productions featuring Subba Rao, star Nageshwara Rao and scenarist K. Vishwanath (cf. Sudigundalu, 1967). The earlier film had attacked the flaws in the legal system, and had won the state award of best film. Here, a revolutionary group calls for an end to all poverty and the social systems that curtain freedom of thought. The film used Sri Sri’s lyrics to push through their radical message. The commercial failure of this film ended both the experiment and Chakravarthi Chitra.

  MERA NAAM JOKER

aka I Am a Clown 1970 240’ col Hindi
d/p Raj Kapoor pc R.K. Films s K.A. Abbas lyr Shailendra, Hasrat Jaipuri, Neeraj, Prem Dhawan, Shailey Shailendra c Radhu Karmakar m Shankar-Jaikishen
lp Raj Kapoor, Manoj Kumar, Rishi Kapoor, Dharmendra, Dara Singh, Rajendra Kumar, Padmini, Ksiena Rabiankina, Simi Garewal, Achala Sachdev, Om Prakash, members of the Soviet State Circus and of the Gemini Circus

A mammoth film apparently inspired by Chaplin’s Limelight (1951), featuring Raj Kapoor as Raju the circus clown in a sprawling tale often seen as the star’s autobiographical fantasy. Initially conceived as three separate films, the 3-part story abounds with allusions to Kapoor’s own life and work. It starts with the young Raju (Rishi Kapoor), the son of a trapeze artist, falling in love with his schoolteacher Mary (Simi), and dreaming of becoming a famous clown. In Part 2, Raju joins a Russian circus where he falls in love with Marina (Rabiankina). The climax of this part comes when Raju’s mother (Sachdev), seeing him on a trapeze and remembering his father’s fatal fall, collapses, forcing the anguished Raju to finish the routine with a smile. Using the Soviet State Circus and portraying Marina as devoted to the title number of Awara (1951) since childhood, Kapoor intended to signal his gratitude to the USSR for the popularity he had enjoyed there since the 50s. In Part 3, Raju befriends the young Mina (Padmini) who, disguised as a boy, pastes cinema posters while dreaming of becoming a film star. The film’s conclusion shows the three women in his life witnessing, as special guests, Raju’s grand circus finale. Kapoor constantly deploys emphatically symbolic images, like a clown doll abandoned in the hut where Raju and Mina used to meet, a cracked mirror showing a laughing face, etc. If Kapoor’s 50s films projected the attainment of political freedom as a loss of innocence and a yearning for a new world, this film projects an uninhibited infantile narcissism combined with a mother fixation which not only determines his acrobatic demands for affection but also programmes the proliferation of female figures whose approval the leading character craves. Its commercial failure is often cited as the reason for Kapoor’s lapse into a cynical use of sexploitation in his post-70s films, as if the rejection of the film had been translated into a vengeful recourse to demeaning images of women thrown at an unworthy public.

  MUKTI

1970 145’ b&w Kannada
d N. Lakshminarayan pc Navodaya Chitra st V.M. Inamdar’s novel Shapa c Meenakshi Sundaram m Vijayabhaskar
lp Kalpana, Rajasekhar, Udaya Kumar, B. Jayamma

Prostitution melodrama involving the hero Madhava (Rajasekhar) and the heroine Sarojini (Kalpana), who want to marry. He discovers that his recently deceased father had an affair with Sarojini’s mother (Jayamma), a former prostitute. When Sarojini’s mother falls ill, it is discovered she has a venereal disease, which she passed on to her daughter. Madhav thus finds himself in love with his diseased stepsister.

  NINGALENNE COMMUNISTAKI

aka You Made Me a Communist
1970 155’ b&w Malayalam
d/s Thoppil Bhasi p Kunchako pc Udaya Studios (Alleppy) lyr Vyalar Rama Varma m P. Devarajan
lp Sathyan, Prem Nazir, Sheela, Ummar, Jayabharati, Kottyam Chellappan, S.P. Pillai, Thoppil Krishna Pillai, Lalitha, Adoor Pankajam, P. Rajamma, Vijayakumari, Alumoodan, Kundara Bhasi

Bhasi’s version of his own landmark socialist realist play (1952) popularising official CPI ideology in Kerala. Gopalan, after obtaining a college degree, devotes himself to trade union work to the distress of his father, the tradition-bound Paramu Pillai whose family fortune has been eroded. Gopalan and his working-class friend Mathew oppose the evil landlord Kesavan Nair’s schemes to obtain ever more land through fraud and intimidation. They are beaten up by the landlord’s hired thugs and hospitalised. In the end, Paramu Pillai, radicalised by the need to defend himself against the landlord, emerges from his house brandishing a red flag and joining the collective struggle against exploitation. A subplot has Gopalan in love with Kesavan Nair’s daughter although the one who truly loves him is Mala, the daughter of a poor, aged tenant farmer also about to be evicted by the villain. The film, produced by the owner of Udaya Studios, was not as successful as the play. Bhasi went on in the same agit-prop vein, backed by the CPI, with e.g. Enippadikal (1973).

  PENN DAIVAM

1970 164’ b&w Tamil
d M.A. Thirumugham pc Dandayuthapani Films st A. Abdul Muthalif dial Arur Doss lyr Alangudi Somu, Kannadasan c P. Bhaskar Rao m V. Kumar
lp Laxmi, Jaishankar, Padmini, Sundarrajan, S.P. Muthuraman, Nagesh, Thengai Srinivasan, Udayachandrika

Elaborate Padmini melodrama marking her change to mother roles. Ponnamma (Padmini) is the suffering wife of a criminal (Sundarrajan) who leaves her and forces their son (Muthuraman) into a life of violent crime. Their daughter (Lakshmi), placed in a home for destitutes, is adopted and raised by a rich man in whose house Ponnamma becomes a servant. Later, the criminal father tries to kidnap his daughter and is confronted by his wife. The criminal son dies. The film’s love interest is integrated into the crime melodrama when the daughter falls in love with a police inspector (Jaishankar).

  PRATDWANDI

aka The Adversary, aka Siddhartha and the City 1970 110’ 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 Dhritiman Chatterjee, Indira Devi, Debraj Roy, Krishna Bose, Kalyan Choudhury, Jayshree Roy, Shefali, Shoven Lahiri, Pishu Majumdar, Dhara Roy, Mamata Chatterjee

The first of Ray’s Calcutta trilogy, coinciding with Mrinal Sen’s, addresses his native Calcutta’s turbulent politics. The student movement aligned with the Naxalite rebellion is invoked through the younger brother (Debraj Roy) of the film’s protagonist Siddhartha (D. Chatterjee) and informs the plot repeatedly e.g. with the Films Division newsreel about Indira Gandhi’s budget speech and, most importantly, by Siddhartha’s search for self-realisation and a job in Calcutta, an enterprise presented as inherently tragic. Siddhartha fails to get a job by answering that the greatest achievement of mankind in the 60s is the courage of the Vietnamese people rather than the NASA moon landing. In such an atmosphere, defined by the endless waiting for job interviews in stiflingly oppressive and humiliating conditions, he is eventually driven to leave Calcutta and his lover Keya (J. Roy). Ray introduces for him unprecedented narrative devices such as the voice-over of an unseen political activist (Ray’s own voice) who offers advice to Siddhartha, two film clips (the newsreel and a boring European art-house movie shown by the local film society) and the encounter with a prostitute which is shown in negative. Ray also includes, in the background as the lovers part, footage of a big political rally on Calcutta’s Maidan. Unlike Sen, however, whose use of similar devices was accompanied by a more sophisticated understanding of Brecht, Ray’s protagonist leaves only after performing a cathartic act of rebellion: he upsets an office in which yet another set of job interviews are being conducted. The film intercuts these episodes with a relatively more familiar pattern of flashbacks e.g. Siddhartha’s fantasies about his childhood before being disturbed by American hippies, or the flashback which interrupts the argument he has with his sister (K. Bose) about her opportunistic affair with her employer. The 2nd title in the trilogy is Seemabaddha (1971).

  PREM PUJARI

1970 192’ col Hindi
d/s Dev Anand pc Navketan lyr Neeraj c Fali Mistry m S.D. Burman
lp Dev Anand, Waheeda Rehman, Zaheeda, Prem Chopra, Nasir Hussain, Siddhu, Madan Puri, Achala Sachdev, Sajjan, Ulhas, Master Sachin

The first film Dev Anand officially signed as director is a nationalist and militarist pot-pourri of war and international espionage, partly shot in Spain, France and Britain. Ram (Anand), a soldier descending from a long line of famous army men, is a pacificist. Court-martialed for disobeying orders he is jailed but escapes. On the run, he encounters Rita (Zaheeda) whose single-seater plane has crashed and who embroils him in a spy ring he is determined to expose. This involves impersonating a Tibetan and a Portuguese and travelling to many international tourist spots before he destroys the spy ring which was leaking information about India’s military deals. However, he is too late to prevent Pakistan from attacking India in 1965 and, abandoning his pacifism, he rushes back to fight the enemy and to win back his girl (Rehman). The film is mainly notable for its aggressive exoticisation of the West (bullfights in Spain; cabarets, restaurants and boulevards in Paris; the Embankment and Scotland Yard in London).

  PRIYA

1970 152’ b&w Malayalam
d Madhu p N.P. Ali, N.P. Abu pc jammu Pics s C. Radhakrishnan lyr Yusuf Ali Kacheri c U. Rajagopal, Benjamin, Ramchandra, L.C. Kapoor m Baburaj
lp Madhu, Jayabharati, Adoor Bhasi, Bahadur, Lily Chakraborty, Shankaradi, Veeran, Sukumari, Kadhija, Meena

Malayalam star Madhu’s directorial art-house debut, edited by Hrishikesh Mukherjee in his first association with Malayalam cinema. Gopan (Madhu) becomes a sexual debauchee when he gets a job in a Bombay advertising agency. He married his cousin Devi against the objections of her father. Migrating to Bombay, he gets his typist Thulasi pregnant, forcing her into prostitution. Later, he visits a brothel and meets Thulasi again, who has renamed herself Priya, but he does not recognise her. She entices him into her room and kills him, tearing him to pieces with her poisoned nails. She is jailed and Gopan’s disillusioned wife accepts the care of her husband’s illegitimate child. The story is told in flashback as Gopan’s friend (Bhasi) tries to trace Gopan in Bombay. Madhu attempted a change of image in this negative role, also casting Bengali star Lily Chakraborty in her only Malayalam film. The film was critically acclaimed in Kerala for its realism and for confirming the conventional image of Bombay as sin city, where most of the film is shot on location, with numerous dingy night scenes.

Madhu and Lily Chakraborty in Priya

  SACHCHA JHUTHA

1970 143’ col Hindi
d Manmohan Desai pc V.R. Films s J.M. Desai dial Prayag Raj lyr Indivar, Gulshan Bawra, Qamar Jalalabadi c Peter Pereira m Kalyanji-Anandji
lp Rajesh Khanna, Mumtaz, Naaz, Vinod Khanna, Faryal, Prayag Raaj, Kamal Kapoor, Jagdish Raj

Desai’s Khanna hit was, together with e.g. Hum Dono (1961) and many others, an example of the popular ‘double role’ Hindi films. Good guy and village simpleton Bhola (R. Khanna) looks like the gangster Ranjit (also R. Khanna). Ranjit uses the resemblance to deceive the police until Bhola finally gets wise and impersonates Ranjit, leading to the gangster’s downfall. The film includes a highly sentimental subplot about Bhola’s reciprocated love for his disabled sister (Naaz) with the Kishore Kumar number Meri pyari bahenia.

  SAGINA MAHATO

1970 148’(137’) b&w Bengali
d/sc/m Tapan Sinha pc Rupasree International p Ruma Ganguly, Mini Kapur st Rupadarshi (aka Gour Kishore Ghosh) lyr Hemen Ganguly, Shyamal Gupta c Bimal Mukherjee
lp Dilip Kumar, Saira Banu, Sumita Sanyal, Swaroop Datta, Ajitesh Bannerjee, Bhanu Bannerjee, Rudraprasad Sengupta, Chinmoy Roy, Kumar Roy, T.A. Liddell, Romi Choudhury, Anil Chatterjee

Sinha’s anti-Communist tract, set in 1942–3, comments on the controversial years of the Left movement by setting up the larger than life ‘man of the people’ Sagina Mahato (D. Kumar) against both a corrupt colonial industry and a Communist party willing to compromise and manipulate its most committed members. Sagina, a large-hearted, hard drinking guardian of the people as well as of the workers of the British-owned railway factory on the Himalayan foothills, is wooed by an unnamed Left trade union based in Calcutta. He agrees to become a labour welfare officer and to move to Calcutta where he becomes a pawn in a larger power struggle within the union, an allusion to the 1940s differences between the P.C. Joshi and B.T. Ranadive factions of the CPI. The militant ‘fascist fanatic’ Aniruddh (Chatterjee) splits from his leader (A. Bannerjee) to pursue a career based, it would appear, entirely on manipulating Sagina’s charismatic hold over his people. The film’s story is told through a series of flashbacks within a framing narrative that shows Aniruddh and his comrades, dressed in military fatigues, conducting a peoples’ court in a forest. Much of the film depends on Dilip Kumar’s star presence to get its message across. The story followed the Bengali literary tradition of showing charismatic popular leaders being destroyed by an impersonal and exploitative Party machinery (cf. Samaresh Bose’s novel Mahakaler Rather Ghora, 1977, about Naxalite tribal leader Jangal Santhal). The original writer of Sagina Mahato, Ghosh, is a well known anti-Communist writer and the film was offered as an allegory for Bengal in the 70s.

  SAMAJ KO BADAL DALO

1970 162’ col Hindi
d V. Madhusudhana Rao pc Gemini Studio st Thoppil Bhasi dial Mukhram Sharma lyr Sahir Ludhianvi c Thyagaraj Pendharkar m Ravi
lp Sharada, Kanchan, Aruna Irani, Parikshit Sahni, Shammi, Jayashree T., Perveen Paul, Pran, Mehmood

An unusual political film made by the mainstream Gemini Studio, the Telugu commercial director Rao, the Malayalam communist Bhasi and the Telugu/Malayalam star Sharada. Chhaya (Sharada), whose father once owned a textile mill but was swindled by his partner, now finds happiness as the wife of a mill worker. The couple have to contend with trade union blacklegs and the villainous owners who persecute Chhaya’s husband. Songs include Dharti mata ka maan hamara pyara lal nishan, stridently praising the red flag, and the miserabilist beggar song Amma ek roti de which later became popular among real beggars in Bombay. The film is not a remake of Vijay Bhatt’s Samaj Ko Badal Dalo (1947) but of Vincent’s Thulabharam (1968), and was adapted by Madhusudhana Rao in Telugu (Manushulu Marali, 1969) before he made it in Hindi.

  SAMSKARA

aka Funeral Rites
1970 113’ b&w Kannada
d/p Pattabhi Rama Reddy pc Ramamanohara Chitra st U.R. Ananthamurthy’s novel (1966) sc Girish Karnad c Tom Cowan m Rajeev Taranath
lp Girish Karnad, Snehalata Reddy, P. Lankesh, B.R. Jayaram, Dasharathi Dixit, Lakshmi Krishnamurthy

The Telugu director and poet Reddy’s landmark adaptation of an early story written by his family’s friend, the noted Karnataka novelist Ananthamurthy whose work is an important source for many young Kannada film-makers, launching a cinematic version of the literary Navya Movement. Shot on location in the mountains of Mysore by a visiting Australian cameraman, this morality tale set among orthodox Madhava Brahmins tells of a rebellious but charismatic Brahmin who rejects his caste’s religion. Plague erupts in a village claiming as its first victim Naranappa (Lankesh), a Brahmin notorious for eating meat, drinking and for his low-caste mistress Chandri (Snehalata Reddy). None of the Brahmins are willing to cremate him until Chandri appeals to the scholar Praneshacharya (Karnad), who cannot find a solution to the problem in the scriptures. Praneshacharya seduces Chandri and his subsequent guilt induces him to assume responsibility when the entire village becomes plague infested. He is lectured on the reality principle by a talkative commoner (Jayaram) and eventually returns to cremate Naranappa himself, rejecting brahminical bigotry. The film’s backbone is the playwright Karnad’s script (here making his film debut) which adopted the novel’s very localised idiom. A censor ban was averted through the personal intervention of the Information and Broadcasting Minister I.K. Gujral. Ananthamurthy approved of the film but noted that in his story, the corpse is soon buried secretly by Naranappa’s Muslim friend, so that the scholar’s dilemma is purely a matter of brahminical beliefs: by burning the corpse, it becomes an ancestor to be worshipped. The novelist commented that when the scholar ‘realises all he has in common with his rival after making love to the dead man’s mistress, he becomes the other man himself, thus embodying the presence of the other within himself. The scriptwriter and the director felt that the body should be kept for the protagonist to return to after his wanderings, cremating it himself as an act of expiation.’ The film in effect dismisses religious subtleties in favour of simple humanitarian values. Following a year after Sen’s Bhuvan Shome (1969), this film helped New Indian Cinema gain a foothold in the South.

  SHRI KRISHNADEVARAYA

1970 216’ col Kannada
d B.R. Panthulu pc Padmini Pics
s A.N. Krishnarao m T.G. Lingappa
lp Rajkumar, B.R. Panthulu, Narasimhraju, M.V. Rajamma, R. Nagendra Rao, Bharati, Jayanti, Sudarshan

Panthulu’s last big Kannada historical returns to his familiar terrain of the 16th C. Vijayanagara Empire with its best-known king, Krishnadeva Raya (Rajkumar), his canny minister Thimmarasu (Panthulu) and the wise buffoon Tenali Ramakrishna, all famous figures in the Kannada historical genre. While apparently addressing a regional-chauvinist ‘Kannada Nadu’, the film was in fact shot in Rajasthan, and adopted Rajasthani architecture to locate Karnataka’s ‘cultural pinnacle’.

  THURAKATHA VATHIL

aka The Unopened Door
1970 143’ b&w Malayalam d/lyr P. Bhaskaran p A. Raghunath pc Sanjay Prod. s K.T. Mohammed c N. Rajagopal, Benjamin m K. Raghunath
lp Prem Nazir, Madhu, Bahadur, Ragini, Jayabharati, Philomina, K.T. Mohammed, Raghava Menon, Nellikode Bhaskaran, Ramankutty, B.K. Pottekkad, C.A. Balan

One of K.T. Mohammed’s best-known scripts, this sentimental movie was part of a growing trend in 70s Malayalam cinema, showing the infantile hero sacrificing his happiness to fulfil his obligations towards his sister, which involves asking his best friend to live the life he had planned for himself. The simple-minded Bappu (Nazir) leaves for the city to earn money that would allow him to fulfil his two ambitions: to get his sister happily married, and to himself marry Sulekha (Ragini). In the city he meets and befriends Vasu (Madhu). When Bappu is injured and about to die, he asks Vasu to complete the course he had embarked upon. Vasu goes to Bappu’s village, arranges the sister’s marriage, and, in a poignant moment at the end of the film, seeks out Bappu’s girlfriend, who immediately realises what happened and its implications for her future.

  VAZHVE MAYAM

aka World of Illusion
1970 153’ b&w Malayalam
d K.S. Sethumadhavan p M.O. Joseph pc Manjilas Cine Ents s Thoppil Bhasi from P. Ayyaneth’s novel lyr Vyalar Rama Varma c Mehli Irani m P. Devarajan
lp Sathyan, Sheela, Ummar, Kadeeja, Bahadur, K.P.A.C. Lalitha, Adoor Bhasi, Shankaradi, N. Govindankutty, C.A. Balan, Ammini, Kuttan Pillai, Muthukulam Raghavan Pillai, Paravoor Bharathan, Philomina

The team responsible for Adimagal (1969) followed on with this unusual love story featuring three neighbouring couples working in the electricity supply industry: Sudhi who is madly in love with his wife Sharada, Sudhi’s younger colleague and friend Sasidharan and his wife Kamalakshmi, and Kuttappan, the department’s lineman, and his wife Gauri. The insecure and jealous Sudhi suspects his wife of being unfaithful with Sasidharan and he spies on her, causing an indignant Sharada, pregnant with their daughter, to pack her bags and return to her family, where her father makes matters worse and the loving couple end up agreeing to a divorce. Sudhi eventually finds out that it was Sasidharan’s wife who was having an affair, but by that time Sharada has remarried and Sudhi goes mad. Years later, the couple meet again at their daughter’s wedding. After blessing his daughter, Sudhi returns home and dies. Sharada goes to pay her last respects to her former husband and dies as well.

  VIETNAM VEEDU

aka Vietnam House
1970 164’ b&w Tamil d P. Madhavan p Sivaji Ganesan pc Sivaji Prod. s Sundaram, from his play c P.N. Sundaram lyr Kannadasan m K.V. Mahadevan
lp Sivaji Ganesan, Nagesh, Srikanth, K.A. Thangavelu, Padmini, Ramaprabha, VS. Raghavan

Traditionalist melodrama focusing on the traumas of retirement and generational change (a suitable transition towards ‘mature’ roles for the ageing producer and star Ganesan). The dignified old company executive known as Prestige Padmanabha Iyer (Ganesan) is forced to retire and experiences hostility and indifference in his new life at the head of a family including his wife Savitri (Padmini), two sons (Nagesh, Srikanth) and a daughter. He devoted the best years of his life to pay for the children’s upbringing, only to end up in a lonely and complicated retirement. The film’s high points are the subtly erotic relationship between the ageing couple (e.g. the song Pallakattu pakathile, sung by T.M. Soundararajan and P. Susheela), some big dance numbers intended to show the generation gap as college girls prance around in miniskirts, and the montage sequences when the old man is in hospital. Originally a play staged by Ganesan’s troupe, the film opens with the patriarch introducing all the characters. The action is set inside the old man’s ancestral house, named Vietnam Veedu (Vietnam House) because of the constant fighting and arguing in the family.

Sivaji Ganesan and Padmini in Vietnam Veedu

FILMS 1971 – 1980

Kaviyoor Pannamma and Master Babloo in Abbyijathyam

  ABHIJATHYAM

aka False Pride
1971 164’ b&w Malayalam
d A. Vincent p R.S. Prabhu pc Shri Rajesh Films s Thoppil Bhasi lyr P. Bhaskaran c Surya Prakash m A.T. Ummar
lp Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair, Kaviyoor Ponnamma, Veeran, Sharada, Madhu, Raghavan

An adaptation of Anant Mane’s Manini (1961). Malathi (Sharada) is the daughter of a wealthy family. She forces her father Shankara Menon (Nair) to let her marry a poor music teacher, Madhavan (Madhu), claiming to be pregnant by him. The father rejects the couple, who manage to make a meagre living in the husband’s village. The mother dies of grief and her spirit visits the daughter, soon followed by a repenting father. P.K. Nair suggests that the end sequence echoes Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Mouogatari (1953).

  ANDAZ

1971 166’ col Hindi
d Ramesh Sippy pc Sippy Films s Sachin Bhowmick dial Gulzar lyr Hasrat Jaipuri c K. Vaikunth m Shankar-Jaikishen
lp Shammi Kapoor, Hema Malini, Achla Sachdev, Aruna Irani. Simi Garewal, Rajesh Khanna, Roopesh Kumar, Randhawa, Sonia Sahni

Ramesh Sippy’s haltingly meandering debut film bears no resemblance to the classic Andaz (1949). A spendthrift widower (Kapoor) falls in love with a woman (Malini) who, in a long flashback, secretly married her lover (Khanna) but soon became a widow. His villainous, womanising younger brother (Kumar) makes life difficult for all concerned. When the villain rapes a hill woman (Irani) and she commits suicide, his nastiness is at last exposed and the two brothers’ doting mother (Sachdev) sees the light. Rajesh Khanna, then at the peak of his popularity, is billed as a guest star and sings the hit motor-bike number Ziudeigi ek safar bai subctna (sung by his regular playback Kishore Kumar). The vaguely Westernising dimension, necessary to justify a widow falling in love, is provided by the rather ludicrous presence of several Caucasians and by the priest who gives the widow permission to remarry.

  ANUBHAV

1971 139’ b&w Hindi
d/s Basu Bhattacharya pc Arohi Film Makers co-dial Sagar Sarhadi co-dial/co-lyr Kapil Kumar co-lyr Gulzar c Nandu Bhattacharya m Kanu Roy
lp Sanjeev Kumar, Tanuja, Dinesh Thakur, A.K. Hangal

Bhattacharya’s best-known film after Teesri Kasam (1966) began a series of melodramas about the problems of married couples (cf. Avisbkar 1973). The newspaper editor Amar (Kumar) grows distant from his wife Meeta (Tanuja) because his new assistant is her former lover Shashi (Thakur). Amar cannot accept that his wife is no longer enamoured of Shashi. The film is part of the early FFC- sponsored ‘art-house’ cinema. It is shot on location in one of Bombay’s best-known and most expensive high-rise apartment blocks. The soundtrack rather crudely takes its cue from Godard, interrupted by radio advertising jingles, combined with the leitmotiv of a ticking clock in addition to two popular Geeta Dutt songs, Mera dil jo mera bota and Koi chupke se cuike sapne sulake.

  ANUBHAVANGAL PALICHAKAL

aka Shattered Experience
1971 133’ b&w Malayalam
d K.S. Sethumadhavan p M.O. Joseph pc Manjilas st Thakazhy Shivashankar Pillai’s novel sc Thoppil Bhasi lyr Vyalar Rama Varma c Mehli Irani m P. Devarajan lp Sathyan, Prem Nazir, Sheela, Adoor Bhasi. Shankaradi

Following on from Sethumadhavan’s typical formula (cf. Odeyil Ninnu, 1965; Aranazhikaneram, 1970, Cbeitteikkari, 1974) of viewing sexually deviant behaviour as being the consequence of the ‘tragic’ decay in feudal values, he tells a story here of a conscientious worker (Sathyan) who suspects his wife’s (Sheela) fidelity when she wants to go out to work. This becomes the reason for him getting involved in a murder, which forces him to abscond and thus to abandon his family. The wife survives with the help of a friend (Nazir). When the husband reappears, he now discovers his wife apparently living with his friend. Trapped between the decay of the feudal values he upholds and an equally oppressive legal system, he surrenders to the police. Based on a Thakazhy story, the film adheres to some of the detailed realism of the original, but the performances of the male leads remain extreme. Sathyan, in his last film. replays to some extent the tragic condition of being married to an unfaithful wife in Chemmeen (1965). also a Thakazhy story. This was also the last film by the Manjilas production group, responsible for memorable Malayalam films in the 60s (cf. Aranazhikaneram).

  ARANYA

1971 107’ b&w Assamese
d/s Samarendra Narayan Deb pc United Club, Mangaldoi lyr Keshab Mahanta c Ramananda Sengupta m Sudhin Dasgupta
lp Biju Phukan, Vidya Rao, Tasadduf Yusuf, Kashmiri. Beena Barwati. Bijoy Shankar. Punya Das, Deuti Barua, Bishnu Khargaria

Conservationist drama protesting the poaching of the one-horned Assamese rhinoceros. Set in the famed Assamese Kaziranga sanctuary, the film indicts the local elite and exposes the cruelties of the poachers.

  ASHAD KA EK DIN

aka A Monsoon Day
1971 114’ b&w Hindi
d/sc Mani Kaul pc FFC st Mohan Rakesh’s play (1958) c K.K. Mahajan
lp Arun Khopkar, Rekha Sabnis. Om Shivpuri, Pinchoo Kapoor, Anuradha Kapur

Kaul’s 2nd film continued his exploration of cinematic form via this adaptation of Rakesh’s play featuring the legendary Sanskrit playwright Kalidasa (Abbignan Shakumtala Kumarasambhava, Megheloot), a figure tentatively identified as a court poet in the reign of Chandragupta II (3rd C. AD). The play presents the ethical dilemmas of an artist by requiring Kalidasa to choose between his lover Mallika and his duties at the court of Ujjain. The film is set in a small hut on a hillside and concentrates on three characters: Kalidasa (Khopkar), Mallika (Sabnis) and their friend Vilom (Shivpuri). The characters’ lines, mostly monologues, were pre-recorded and played back during shooting, freeing the actors from any vestiges of theatrical conventions. The sparse realism of Uski Roti (1969) is replaced by Mahajan’s sensuously shot landscapes and languid camera movements, minutely registering light changes within the frame, at times by slowly shutting the aperture.

  DO BOOND PANI

1971 141’ col Hindi
d/s/p K.A. Abbas pc Naya Sansar lyr Kaifi Azmi, Balkeshav Bairagi m jaidev
lp Simi Garewal. Jalal Agha. Prakash Thapa. Madhu Chanda, Sajjan, Kiran Kumar. Rashid Khan. Pinchoo Kapoor. Amrit Oberoi

The Rajasthan Ganga Sugar Canal Project, intended to transform the state’s vast barren desert, was one of the Nehru government’s show pieces. Shot on the canal building site, this distant echo of King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread (1934) endorses Indira Gandhi’s slogans while deploying the developmental rhetoric and Nehruite iconography of dams, bridges and industrialisation. Ganga Singh (Agha) lives in a drought-stricken village in Rajasthan and leaves his wife Gauri (Simi), sister Sonki (Chanda) and father Hari Singh (Sajjan) to dedicate himself to the canal project. He learns of the project via a government propaganda newsreel in a touring cinema. The story intercuts Ganga Singh’s struggle for progress at work with the dire pre-industrial conditions at home: his father dies, his sister is raped by the bandit Mangal Singh (Thapa) and Gauri waits for her husband to return. Ganga Singh sacrifices his life to avert a disaster at the site but eventually industrial progress triumphs and the life-giving water arrives.

  DUSHMAN

1971 177’ col Hindi
d Dulal Guha pc Suchitra s Virender Sinha lyr Anand Bakshi c M. Rajaram
m Laxmikant-Pyarelal
lp Meena Kumari, Rajesh Khanna, Mumtaz, Nana Palsikar, Kanhaiyalal, K.N. Singh, Anwar Hussain, Sajjan, Abhi Bhattacharya, Rehman, Bindu

Khanna plays a truck driver who in a drunken accident kills a man. Sentenced to work in his victim’s village and to look after the family that lost its sole breadwinner, he enters a hostile environment. The hero eventually makes himself loved by tackling the real villains (a gang of hoarders and criminals), gets the heroine (Mumtaz) and wins the affection of his implacable foe, the widow (Kumari) of the man he killed. With classic Khanna-Kishore Kumar numbers such as Tumhari zulf hai ya sadak ka mod hai ye, the film was also a musical success. The film was remade in Tamil as Neethi (1972) starring Sivaji Ganesan in Rajesh Khanna’s role.

  EK ADHURI KAHANI

aka An Unfinished Story
1971 115’(110’) b&w Hindi
d/sc Mrinal Sen p Arun Kaul/FFC st Subodh Ghosh’s Gotranta c K.K. Mahajan m Vijay Raghava Rao
lp Utpal Dutt, Shekhar Chatterjee, Arati Bhattacharya, Vivek Chatterjee, Shyam Laha, Sova Sen, Sandhya Roy Choudhury

The novelist Ghosh (filmed earlier by Bimal Roy in Anjangarh, 1948 and Sujata, 1959) provided the story for Sen’s exploration of the ravages wrought by capitalism in a rural economy. Set in 1929 in a Bihar sugar mill, a middle-class outsider becomes the factory’s cashier. When the Depression hits, the apparently benevolent factory owners reveal their true colours as the workers and the peasants desperately try to defend their livelihood by any means at their disposal, including violence. The outcome of the struggle and the ending of the film are left open, suggesting that they have to be provided by real rather than represented struggles. However, the mood of the ‘unfinished story’ is far from triumphant and stresses the soul-destroying aspects of having to battle against overwhelming odds.

  GUDDI

aka Darling Child
1971 121’ col Hindi
d/co-sc Hrishikesh Mukherjee pc Rupam Chitra p N.C. Sippy st/lyr/co-sc/dial Gulzar co-sc D.N. Mukherjee c Jaywant Pathare m Vasant Desai
lp Jaya Bhaduri, Dharmendra, Sumita Sanyal, Vijay Sharma, Utpal Dutt, Samit, A.K. Hangal, Keshto Mukherjee

Teenaged and miniskirted Kusum aka Guddi (Bhaduri) has such a crush on Hindi film star Dharmendra that her family arranges for her to meet the star. A rare Hindi film about film-making, Guddi appears to want to deconstruct the myth of the star and to show not only how films are made but the poverty, the exploitation and the transitory nature of stardom. What it does do, however, is produce a small parade of stars playing ‘themselves’. The film’s tentative critique of stardom involves drawing a comparison between contemporary screen idols and gods: Kusum adores Dharmendra like the legendary saint poet Meerabai was unconditionally devoted to Krishna. The film made Bhaduri into a major 70s star as the bouncy teenager with an ear-splitting laugh, repeated e.g. in Jawani Diwani (1972).

  HARE RAMA HARE KRISHNA

1971 149’ col Hindi
d/s Dev Anand pc Navketan lyr Anand Bakshi c Fali Mistry m R.D. Burman
lp Dev Anand, Mumtaz, Zeenat Aman, Prem Chopra, Kishore Sahu, Achala Sachdev, Iftikhar

Set among Hare Krishna cultists, presented as dope-smoking hippies fronting for drug smugglers, Anand’s call for a return to nationalist Indian values was dominated by Zeenat Aman in her first starring role. She is the hero’s sister, parted from him by an unhappy family life and now in the clutches of long-haired freaks in Nepal. His attempt to rescue her involves encounters with pop ideologies of liberation, crooks and rapists before the final reconciliation. Mumtaz, a sexy local belle, provides the hero’s love interest but she is overshadowed by Aman. The smash hit Dum Maro Dum, sung by Asha Bhosle and blues singer Usha Iyer, remains the film’s main claim to fame.

  JESAL TORAL

1971 137’ col Gujarati
d Ravindra Dave p Kanti R. Dave, T.J. Patel pc Kirti Films st Himmat Dave sc Jitubhai Mehta dial Ramesh Mehta c Pratap Dave lyr/m Avinash Vyas
lp Anupama, Upendra Trivedi, Arvind Trivedi, Ramesh Mehta, Jayant Bhatt, Mulraj Rajda, Mukund Pandya, Laxmi Patel, Sarala Dand, Induben Rajda, Lily Patel, Vandana, Suryakant, Umakant, Veljibhai Gajjar, Jayashree T.

A big Gujarati hit in Eastmancolor renovating the tradition of the adventure folk-tale. It adapts a famous Kutchhi legend (first filmed, with great success, by Chaturbhuji Doshi in 1948) featuring the dreaded bandit Jesal (U. Trivedi) and the devout god-woman Toral (Anupama) who reforms him. Director Dave’s Gujarati debut sees the star Upendra Trivedi in one of his best-known performances.

  MERE APNE

1971 134’ col Hindi
d/sc/lyr Gulzar pc Uttam Chitra st Indramitra c K. Vaikunth m Salil Choudhury
lp Meena Kumari, Vinod Khanna, Shatrughan Sinha, Paintal, Asrani, Danny Denzongpa, Yogesh Chhabda, Dinesh Thakur, Mehmood, Yogita Bali, Deven Verma, Leela Mishra

Story of an old widow (Kumari) who becomes a silent witness to two violent eras in India’s history: the Partition riots and the criminal politics amid gang warfare in the 60s. Persuaded by an acquaintance to move from her tranquil village home to the city to look after their child, the old woman finds herself lost on the streets until she is offered shelter by Shyam (Khanna), a notorious gangster fighting with the leader of a rival gang (Sinha). The widow’s tales, and her maternal concern for Shyam’s criminal friends, make her an oasis of peace amid the prevailing violence. In the end she becomes the unintended victim of their violence, restoring peace in her death. The story is intercut with flashbacks of the widow’s oppressive marriage to a Nautanki performer (Verma) during the Partition riots which led to the death of her husband. Gulzar’s directorial debut adapted Sinha’s controversial Apanjan (1968), relocating the plot from its original Naxalite Bengal into a North Indian milieu. The film is held together mainly by Meena Kumari in what was, together with Pakeezah (1971), one of her last major screen performances.

  MOHAMMED-BIN-TUGHLAQ

1971 136’ b&w Tamil
d/s Cho Ramaswamy pc Prestige Prod. lyr Vali m M.S. Vishwanathan
lp Cho Ramaswamy, Sukumari, Ambi

Best-known satirical film, adapted from his own play, by Ramaswamy, now better known as a civil liberties activist and editor of the anti-DMK journal Tughlaq. The graves of two historical figures are unearthed by the commoner Rangachari (Ambi): Ibn Batuta, a mid-14th C. African Arab who travelled through India and wrote a travelogue, and Mohammed-bin-Tughlaq, a 14th C. king of the Tughlaq dynasty who sought to shift his capital from Delhi to Daulatabad trying to consolidate an all-India empire. To Rangachari’s amazement, the two men are still alive. He brings them to Madras where Tughlaq wins the mid-term elections, eventually becoming Prime Minister. Seduced by power, he breaks his promise to Ibn Batuta and refuses to reveal his true identity. When Ibn Batuta threatens to expose both Tughlaq and himself as cheats impersonating politicians, Tughlaq has Ibn Batuta murdered. As a critique of the DMK (and of its leading politicians), the party tried to get the film banned by the Information & Broadcasting ministry. It was remade the following year by B.V. Prasad in Telugu.

  ORU PENNINTE KATHA

aka Story of a Woman
1971 147’ b&w Malayalam
d K.S. Sethumadhavan p K.S.R. Murthy pc Chitranjali Films st Moses sc/dial S.L. Puram Sadanandan lyr Vyalar Rama Varma c Mehli Irani m P. Devarajan
lp Sathyan, Sheela, Ummar, Jayabharati, Adoor Bhasi, Govindan Kutty Jr, Bharathan, Kaviyoor Ponnamma, T.R. Omana

Sethumadhavan’s formula of the decay of feudalism with a sex motive here yields his most bizarre female lead yet, Gayatri Devi (Sheela), who carries out a remorseless vendetta against a feckless former lover, Madhavan Thambi (Sathyan), as she returns to her native village of Moonnar. She buys Madhavan’s estate and his bungalow and harasses him in various ways until Madhavan’s wife asks for mercy. Then, in flashback, Gayatri reveals the story of her past relationship with Madhavan.

  PAKEEZAH

aka Pure Heart
1971 175’(125’) col/scope Urdu
d/s/p/co-lyr Kamal Amrohi pc Mahal Pics lyr Kaif Bhopali, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Kaifi Azmi c Josef Wirsching m Ghulam Mohammed, Naushad
lp Ashok Kumar, Meena Kumari, Raaj Kumar, Pratima Devi, Altaf, Parveen Paul, Lotan, Chandabai, Meenakshi, Chandramohan, Zebunissa, Nadira, Veena

As shown by the presence of 40s Bombay Talkies cameramen Wirsching and R.D. Mathur as well as the composers Ghulam Mohammed and Naushad, Kumari’s best-known film had been planned by her and her husband Amrohi as their most cherished project since 1958, when Amrohi intended to star in it himself. The film started production in 1964. When the star and her director-husband separated, the filming was postponed indefinitely. After some years, during which Kumari suffered from alcoholism, she agreed to complete the film. The plot is a classic courtesan tale set in Muslim Lucknow at the turn of the century. The dancer and courtesan Nargis (Kumari) dreams of escaping her dishonourable life but she is rejected by the family of her husband Shahabuddin (A. Kumar) and dies, in a graveyard, giving birth to a daughter, Sahibjaan. The daughter grows up to become a dancer and a courtesan as well (Kumari again). Sahibjaan’s guardian, Nawabjaan (Veena), prevents Sahibjaan’s father from seeing her or knowing who she is. Later, Sahibjaan falls in love with a mysterious, noble stranger who turns out to be her father’s nephew, Salim (R. Kumar). Salim’s father forbids his ward to marry a courtesan. The film’s climax occurs when Sahibjaan dances at Salim’s arranged wedding where her own father also discovers her identity and claims her as his child. Finally her desires are fulfilled and she marries Salim, leaving her past behind. The film’s main merit, however, resides in its delirious romanticism enhanced by saturated colour cinematography. Includes the all-time Lata Mangeshkar hit songs Chalte chalte and Inhe logone ne.

  RESHMA AUR SHERA

1971 158’(85’) col/scope Hindi
d/p Sunil Dutt pc Ajanta Arts st/co-sc Ali Raza co-sc Ajanta Arts Story Dept lyr Balkavi Bairagi, Neeraj, Udhav c Ramchandra m jaidev
lp Sunil Dutt, Waheeda Rehman, Raakhee, Jayant, Sulochana, K.N. Singh, Amrish Puri, Amitabh Bachchan, Vinod Khanna, Padma Khanna

Sunil Dutt’s best-known film as director, shot in the desert at Jaisalmer, retells the Rajasthani legend about the love of Reshma (Rehman) and Shera (Dutt) amid violent feudal conflict between their clans. Also remembered as an early Bachchan appearance in the role of Chotu, Shera’s sharpshooting ‘kid brother’ who, ordered by their vengeful father, shoots Reshma’s father and her recently married brother. Unable to bear the grief of the widowed bride, Shera kills his own father believing he actually pulled the trigger. Trying to save Shera from grief and destructive madness, Reshma marries Chotu. In the end, Shera tries to redeem his patricidal act and commits suicide. Reshma also dies, rolling down a sand-dune towards his dead body. A sandstorm comes to cover their bodies, united in death. The film’s sweeping desert shots dwarf the actors among the enormous dunes. Thematically, the film was unusual in its refusal to sanction the traditional, macho values of bloody revenge: Reshma refuses revenge and, prompted by the goddess Durga, finds a way out of the dilemma while remaining true to her lover. The man, however, chooses to avenge the bride turned widow and rejects love in favour of keeping his word.

  SEEMABADOHA

aka Company Limited
1971 110’ b&w Bengali
d/sc/m Satyajit Ray p Jung Bahadur Rana pc Chitranjali st Shankar’s novel c Soumendu Roy
lp Barun Chanda, Sharmila Tagore, Paromita Choudhuiy, Harindranath Chattopadhyay, Haradhan Bannerjee, Indira Roy, Promod

Ray’s follow-up to Pratidwandi (1970) sees contemporary Calcutta through the eyes of a dull sales manager in a fan factory. Shyamalendu Chatterjee (Chanda), whose life story is briefly narrated in a voice-over in the beginning, leads a well-off life among Calcutta’s newly rich, apparently untouched by the political turmoil around him. He gets involved in a deal with his corrupt personnel manager, to the disappointment of his sexy sister-in-law (Tagore), but the company rewards him with a promotion. The film’s moral points about the corrosive effects of a social system based on greed are made mainly through a series of markedly symbolic shots, such as the zoom into the telephone wire through which the corrupt deal is being hatched and, at the end, the high-angle shot from above the ceiling fan. The final film in Ray’s Calcutta trilogy would be Jana Aranya (1975).

  SHANTATA! COURT CHALU AAHE

aka Silence! The Court is in Session
1971 138’(118’) b&w Marathi
d/co-p Satyadev Dubey pc Satyadev-Govind Prod, s Vijay Tendulkar from his Marathi play based on Friedrich Durrenmatt’s Die Panne (1956) aka A Dangerous Game c/co-p Govind Nihalani m Jeetendra Abhishekhi
lp Sulabha Deshpande, Arvind Deshpande, Eknath Hattangadi, Saroj Telang, Amol Palekar, Narayan Pai, Arvind Karkhanis, Arun Kakde, Vinod Doshi, Amrish Puri, Savant

Marathi cinema’s first explicitly avant-garde film. It is based on one of Tendulkar’s best-known plays first staged by the well-known experimental theatre collective Rangayan. Stranded in a village, the members of a low-brow theatre group decide to pass the time by mounting a mock trial. One member of the group, Leela Benare (S. Deshpande), is expected to defend herself against a series of charges. These so disconcert the woman that the game gradually turns more serious, revealing the false veneer and the propensity to violence of the middle-class performers. The film features several of the Rangayan cast, including Sulabha Deshpande in the central role. Noted avant-garde stage director Dubey shot it using extensive jump-cuts, repeatedly fragmenting the action and the sound into a series of isolated units. Although the film depicts some of the fictional accusations, it follows the play’s strategy of not revealing to the audience whether the charges are in fact true or false. It was the debut of several noted film personalities, including Tendulkar himself, Amol Palekar, Amrish Puri and director/cinematographer Govind Nihalani who co-produced the film in addition to shooting it. The film was apparently admired by Ritwik Ghatak.

  SHARAPANJARA

1971 180’ col Kannada
d/sc/co-dial S.R. Puttana Kanagal pc Vardini Arts, K.C.N. Movies st/co-dial Triveni, based on her novel c D.V. Rajaram m Vijayabhaskar
lp Kalpana, Gangadhar, Chindodi Leela, Narasimhraju, Ashwath, Shivaram, M.N. Lakshmidevi, Leelavathi, Rama, Kala, Jayamma, Malathamma, K.S. Ashwath, Srinath

The culmination of Kalpana’s long association with Kanagal (cf. Bellimoda, 1967; Gejje Pooje, 1970). The happily married Kaveri (Kalpana) becomes pregnant and suffers an attack of hysteria in which she recalls having gone to Nanjangud on a picnic with an unnamed man. She returns to the picnic spot and frantically searches for something she believes she ‘lost’ there. Her husband (Gangadhar) has her interned in an asylum and starts an affair with an office colleague (Leela). Released from the asylum, Kaveri finds that everyone keeps reminding her of her ‘insanity’, including the new cook (Shivaram), the neighbours, her father (Ashwath) and her mother-in-law. She eventually has to return to the hospital for the rest of her life. Kalpana’s spectacular performance and the film’s blatant but unacknowledged psychoanalytic dimension holds the story together. The conflict between virtue and unconscious desire is given a mythological dimension in the song Hadi nalaku varusha comparing Kaveri to Seeta returning from exile in the Ramayana. Kanagal’s neo-expressionist idiom is most in evidence in the scenes of Kaveri’s hysteric episode, the mysterious boyfriend’s presence being confined to the soundtrack only.

  SINDOORACHEPPU

aka Sindoor Box

1971 150’ b&w Malayalam

d Madhu p/s/lyr Yusuf Ali Kacheri c Benjamin, Master Aloysius, Vasant B.N. m P. Devarajan

lp Madhu, Shankaradi, Jayabharati, Bahadur, Philomina, Radhamani, Shobha

Directed by Malayalam star Madhu, the film was dominated by its producer and writer, the poet Kacheri. It used the rich Kerala landscape and folklore as a backdrop for his love songs in a story humanising elephants and poking fun at soothsayers and simple village folk. The star of the sometimes violent film is the elephant Gopi who behaves a little like a golem, rebelling against being maltreated and blindly enacting a code of social justice. A soothsayer claims that the beloved elephant will kill three people and the mahout’s daughter, Ammalu, fills her sindoor box with ants which she then puts into Gopi’s trunk to kill him. Years later, the village has been modernised but the prediction has not been forgotten. When the mahout Shankaran Nair drunkenly annoys Gopi, the elephant kills a man and is to be destroyed. A wandering mahout, Keshavan, saves Gopi’s life and becomes Ammalu’s lover. When Keshavan is about to marry Ammalu, Gopi goes mad with anger and Ammalu again puts ants in his trunk. Gopi kills her and Keshavan leaves the village as the police come to shoot the elephant. Kacheri went on to make another animistic film, Maram (1972).

  SONGADYA

1971 142’ b&w Marathi

d Govind Kulkarni p/co-lyr Dada Kondke pc Sadiccha Chitra s/co-lyr Vasant Sabnis co-lyr Jagdish Khebudkar c Arvind Laad m Ram Kadam

lp Usha Chavan, Dada Kondke, Ratnamala, Nilu Phule, Ganpat Patil, Gulab Mokashi, Sampat Nikam

Marathi comedian Kondke’s first independent production inaugurates his particular style: a vaguely Tamasha-derived ribald comedy featuring an innocent bumbling hero, a sexy heroine and dialogues replete with sexual puns and innuendo. The script is by Sabnis, whose Tamasha-derived stage hit Vichcha Majhi Puri Kara (1965) saw Kondke’s breakthrough performance. The innocent Namya (Kondke), the son of the tough Shitabai, is taken by his friends to see a Tamasha performance. He gets so excited by the Mahabharata scene of Draupadi’s vastraharan (in which the enemy Kauravas try forcibly to disrobe her) that he jumps on stage disrupting the performance. He goes to the next village to see the performance again, where (as the actor who is to play the monkey-god Hanuman gets drunk) he is invited to understudy the part. Namya’s distraught mother kicks him out of the house, but the dancer Kalavati (Chavan, Kondke’s usual female lead) offers him shelter. The clutch of hit songs includes the duet Malyachya malya madhi kon ga ubhi.

  TERE MERE SAPNE

1971 175’ col Hindi

d/sc/p Vijay Anand pc Navketan, Vijay Anand Prod, st Kaushal Bharti’s story based on A.J. Cronin’s The Citadel lyr Neeraj c V. Ratra m S.D Burman

lp Dev Anand, Mumtaz, Mahesh Kaul, Vijay Anand, Agha, Hema Malini, Tabassum, Premnath

Dev Anand is the young, idealistic doctor who moves to the village with his wife, a rural schoolteacher (Mumtaz). When his pregnant wife meets with an accident caused by a rich car driver who then bribes the authorities, the hero loses faith in his idealism and returns to the city. There he becomes rich and falls in love with the film star Malatimala (Hema Malini). He is reconciled with his wife when their long-awaited son is born. Shot mainly in studios (except for the picturisation of the hit song Maine kasam li), the film resembles a TV drama. Notable mainly for Burman’s music.

  VAMSHA VRIKSHA

1971 166’ b&w Kannada
co-d B.V. Karanth co-d/dial Girish Karnad p G.V. Iyer st S.L. Bhairappa’s novel c U.M.N. Sharief m Bhaskar Chandavarkar

lp Venkata Rao Talegiri, L.V. Sharada Rao, B.V. Karanth, Girish Karnad, Chandrasekhar, Uma Sivakumar, G.V. Iyer

The debut feature of directors Karnad and Karanth, in the wake of Samskara (1970), interrogates the legitimacy of tradition: a proud Brahmin scholar (Talegiri) looks after his widowed daughter-in-law (Sharada) and grandson until she falls in love with her English lecturer (Karnad) and remarries. She loses custody of her son, and her guilt feelings are aggravated by her son (Chandrasekhar) who becomes her student but refuses to acknowledge her as his mother. Eventually the old partiarch discovers that he himself was illegitimate and he foregoes his wealth to prove to the heroine, on her deathbed, that she was right to insist on inventing her own notion of tradition.

  UMMACHU

1971 162’ b&w Malayalam

d/lyr P. Bhaskaran pc Rajshri Prod. s Uroob m Raghunath

lp Sheela, Madhu, Nellikode Bhaskaran, Shankaradi, Bahadur, Vidhubala

Convoluted drama adapting a famous Uroob novel. The Muslim girl Ummachu (Sheela in a major role) has two suitors, Mayan (Madhu) and Beeran (Bhaskaran). She marries the rich Beeran, who ill-treats her. In retaliation Mayan kills Beeran and marries Ummachu, even as an innocent man is arrested for the crime. Many years later the truth comes out, after which Mayan commits suicide and his son by Ummachu marries the daughter of the man accused of Mayan’s crime.

  VIDARTHIKALE ITHILE ITHILE

aka This Way Students aka Students Today

1971 174’ b&w Malayalam

d John Abraham p Minnal pc Mehboob Prod. s M. Azad lyr Vyalar Rama Varma c Ramchandra m M.B. Srinivasan

lp Adoor Bhasi, Manorama, S.V. Ranga Rao, Jayabharati, S.P. Pillai, M.R.R. Vasu, T.K. Balachandran, Paravoor Bharathan, Kuthiravattom Pappu, Philomina, Santha Devi

Abraham’s first feature is a politically pessimistic but ethically optimistic story advocating practical forms of solidarity with victimised or threatened colleagues. While playing football, some schoolboys break the statue of the school’s founder and the culprit, Raju, must pay for the damage or face expulsion. The boys get together and earn the money polishing boots, selling lottery tickets and so on. The school’s principal (Ranga Rao) is so impressed that he gets the management to repair the statue and spends the money paid by the boys on a school trip for them. Shortly afterwards, during another game of football, the ball hits and breaks the statue again. Apparently inspired by Louis Daquin’s Nous les gosses (1941).

  ANTA MANA MANCHIKE

aka All for the Best

1972 176’ b&w Telugu

d/s/co-m P. Bhanumathi pc Bharani Pics

dial D.V. Narasaraju lyr Dasarathi, Arudra, Devulapalli Krishna Sastry c Laxman Gore co-m Sathyam

lp P. Bhanumathi, Krishna, Nagabhushanam, Krishnamraju, Chittor V. Nagaiah, T. Padmini, Suryakantam, Rushyendramani, Chhaya Devi, Sandhyarani, K. Mukkamala

Bhanumathi’s return to direction (cf. Chandirani, 1953) is a melodrama with nine songs. A young widow, Savitri, raises her sister, Seeta. When Seeta grows up she gets a job with the villain Phanibhushana Rao, not knowing that he was the cause of her parents’ poverty and death. She also falls in love with the man’s son. The villain tries to trap Savitri into prostitution and has her imprisoned when she attacks his associate. Eventually Savitri is freed and Seeta marries her beloved.

  BANGARADA MANUSHYA

1972 180’ col Kannada

d/sc Siddalingaiah pc Rajkamal Arts st T.K. Ramarao’s novel dial/co-lyr Hunsur Krishnamurthy co-lyr R.N. Jayagopal, Vijayanarasimha c D.V. Rajaram m G.K. Venkatesh

lp Rajkumar, Bharati, Balkrishna, Arathi, M.P. Shankar, B.V. Radha, Srinath, Dwarkeesh, Vajramuni, Loknath, Lakshmidevi

Ruralist frontier melodrama in which hero Rajiv (Rajkumar) abandons his urban career to help his widowed sister and her impoverished family reestablish themselves. Overcoming the ingratitude of his elder brother (Loknath) and the self-serving opposition of several villagers, he builds a garish home symbolising his family’s success. However, his wife (Bharati), wearing her red wedding sari, is chased by a bull, falls into a well and drowns. His two nephews, Sethuram and Chakrapani (introduced as a comedy duo), accuse him of bigamy with the woman (Arathi) who later is revealed to be the illegitimate daughter of his late brother-in-law whom Rajiv secretly protected. In the end, Rajiv leaves and renounces all his worldly possessions. The film recalls the upwardly-mobile and gaudy neo-traditionalism associated with Rajkumar as well as Rajesh Khanna (cf Bandhan, 1969, and Dushman, 1971). From the opening, as Rajkumar steps out of the train dressed in red and black singing the homecoming song Nagunaguta nali nali to the bizarre sequence showing his decision to abandon his family (camera tilting down to his uneaten meal), the film constructs a fantasy village as the authentic underpinning of urban values, echoing the formally more sophisticated ruralist realism of the contemporary New Indian Cinema. Rajkumar’s biggest 70s hit and one of the top grossers of Kannada cinema.

  BILET PHERAT

1972 145’ b&w Bengali

d/p/s/m Chidananda Das Gupta pc C. Das Gupta Prod. lyr Jaidev c Dhrubajyoti Basu, Kamal Nayak

lp Nirmal Kumar, Anil Chatterjee. Soumitra Chatterjee, Aparna Sen. Dulal Ghosh, Shyamal Ghosh. Sohag Sen. Anuradha Lahiri, Neeta Ghosh, Ashok Mitra, Krishna Kundu, Sonali Sen, Neela Khan

Noted critic Das Gupta’s critically acclaimed solo feature reworks the theme of one of the first Bengali films. Dhiren Ganguly’s Bilet Pherat (1921) satirising colonial India’s foreign-returned’ youth. The film tells three separate short stories, all written by the director and featuring young men who prove unsuccessful in getting their idealism to work in present-day India. The best known of the three. Rakta, was later re-issued as a separate film. In it, a young man (S. Chatterjee) who returns to Calcutta from Oxford University is forced by the conservatism of his family to quit his job as lecturer and then his job as executive in a British firm. He rebels and starts his own business, converting animal blood into fertiliser, but loses that as well when it is taken over by multinational interests. The film combined fiction with documentary sequences, which continued Das Gupta’s fascination with Calcutta first in evidence in his b&w documentary Portrait of a City (1961) using the remarkable camerawork of Barin Saha.

Snigdha Majumdar (left, rear), Sandhya Roy Choudhury (centre) and Satya Bannerjee (right) in Calcutta 71

  CALCUTTA ’71

1972 132’ b&w/col Bengali

d/sc Mrinal Sen pc DS Pics p D.S. Sultania st Manik Bandyopadhyay’s Atmahatyar Adbikar, Prabodh Sanyal’s Akal Samaresh Bose’s lismalgbar. Ajitesh Bannerjee’s Calcutta ‘71, Mrinal Sen’s Interviewer Pare c K.K. Mahajan m Ananda Shankar

lp Ranjit Mullick, Utpal Dutt, Geeta Sen. Madhabi Mukherjee, Sandhya Roy Choudhury, Satya Bannerjee. Snigdha Majumdar. Ajitesh Bannerjee, Debraj Ray, Robi Ghosh. Raju, Suhasini Mulay, Binota Ray

Sen set out the aims of his 2nd film in the Calcutta trilogy (Interview, 1970; Padatik, 1973): ‘As long as you present poverty as something dignified, the establishment will not be disturbed. We wanted to define history and put poverty in its right perspective.’ Extending his anti-naturalist approach in order to explore more freely and with greater complexity the way history shapes the texture of people’s lives, the film recounts three famous Bengali stories by three Bengali authors together with two contemporary episodes, each presenting an aspect of poverty and exploitation: an angry young man (Mullick) on trial in 1971, a rainstorm in a slum in 1933. a lower-middle-class family during the 1943 famine, teenage smugglers in 1953 and. back again in 1971. a middle-class group in a posh hotel. The events are linked by an imaginary figure who, by 1971, has gained an insight into the dynamics of history and urges action for change. Often described as ‘propagandistic’, the film is more didactic in the Brechtian sense, encouraging audiences to learn from the representations rather than telling people what to think. The film became a major cultural rallying point for student radicals, its screenings at the Metro Theatre in Chowringhee, Calcutta, being placed constantly under police surveillance.

  CHEMPARATHI

1972 142’ b&w Malayalam

d P.N. Menon p S.K. Nair pc New India Films s Malayattoor Ramakrishnan lyr Vyalar Rama Varma c Ashok Kumar m P. Devarajan

lp Madhu, Raghavan, Sudhir, Balan K. Nair, Bharathan, Adoor Bhasi, Bahadur, Kottarakkara Sridharan Nair, Shobhana, Adoor Bhawani, Rani Chandra, Radhamani

Menon followed up his critically acclaimed realist drama Olavum Theeravum (1969) with this love tragedy and murder mystery. The beautiful teenager Shantha (Shobhana), daughter of a gatekeeper, loves the student Dinesh who lives in the main lodge along with Prof. Balachandran. However, the rich villain Rajappan rapes and then kills Shantha. Dinesh, who witnesses the murder and is haunted by Shantha’s ghost, kills the villain in turn. Shot largely in close-up and mid-shot, the film includes several suspense-inducing sequences like Shantha’s corpse floating in a well, or Dinesh being haunted by what he saw, to shift an otherwise conventional Malayalam storyline into a new genre.

  DHAKAM

aka Thirst

1972 144’ b&w Tamil

d/s Babu Nanthancode pc Kavya Chitra sc K.K. Raman st/c T. Vaiyadurai lyr Bharati, Poovai Senguttuvan m M.B. Srinivasan

lp R. Muthuraman, Nandita Bose, Sundarrajan, Pandharibai, Rajakokila, Renuka Parvathi, Jayaseelam

The blind Sekhar (Muthuraman) lives with other orphans in a Gandhian ashram, where he forms a special bond with little Sharada (Bose). They eventually get married and she tries to make a living as a saleswoman in Madras, but city life is too much for them and they return to the ashram. Sharada dies, having donated her eyes to a blind person. Nanthancode and Vaiyadurai devised this film while on the staff at the Madras Film Institute and shot it in Gandhigram against the beautiful Sirumalai hills. An influential effort to establish a Tamil art cinema, paving the way for later films like Aval Appadithan (1978). Composer Srinivasan’s speciality of the group song is evident in the hits Vanam namadhu thanthai and Bharata samudayam.

  GNANA OLI

aka The Light of Wisdom

1972 158’ b&w Tamil

d P. Madhavan pc Jayaar Movies p P.K.V. Shankaran, Arumugham s Vietnam Veedu Sundaram lyr Kannadasan c P.N. Sundaram m M.S. Vishwanathan

lp Sivaji Ganesan, Sharada, Major Sundarrajan, M.R.R. Vasu, Srikanth, Jaya Kausalya, V.K. Ramaswamy, Seetalakshmi, Vijayanirmala, Manorama, Gokulnath

The golden-hearted ex-criminal Anthony (Ganesan) works with the Rev. Adaikalam (Gokulnath) who has raised him. When his daughter Mary (Sharada) is impregnated and abandoned by her lover Bhaskar (Srikanth), Anthony kills Bhaskar and gets a life sentence. He escapes, with the priest’s assistance, and becomes the millionaire philanthropist Arun, wearing a black eyepatch and white gloves as a disguise. Inspector Lawrence, who has pursued his former schoolfriend Anthony for years, eventually arrests his prey at the wedding of Anthony’s granddaughter (Jaya Kausalya) with the cop’s son. Loosely based on Victor Hugo’s Les Miserahles (cf. Ezhai Padum Padu, 1950), the film was shot around the Church of the Immaculate Lady at Poondi near Thanjavur and was released on the anniversary of St Thomas’s arrival in India, an important Christian festival in India. Anthony’s song, Devene Ennai parungal, sung by T.M. Soundararajan, was the hit of the year.

  GRAHAN

1972 121’ b&w Hindi

d/p/c Arvind Kumar Sinha st Bimal Kumar m Vasant Desai

lp Nutan, Suhhash Ghai, Suhasini Mulay, Basanta Choudhury

Art-house melodrama with a complicated plot. The notoriously principled scientist marries a young woman. His assistant falls in love with his superior’s wife. The assistant’s wife causes further problems when she reveals a past affair that the scientist once had with her sister. Financed by the FFC, the film was for a while exhibited as an instance of the ‘parallel’ or ‘new-wave’ cinema of the 70s (cf. New Indian Cinema).

  INNER EYE, THE

1972 20’ col English/Bengali

d/sc/m Satyajit Ray c Soumendu Roy

After an unfortunate experience with the documentary Sikkim (1971), produced by the Chogyal of Sikkim (whose widow, Hope Cooke, may possess a copy) but banned by the Indian Government, Ray made this documentary on the noted Bengali painter and muralist Binode Behari Mukherjee. Extensive footage of the artist as a (blind) old man is intercut with shots of paintings and stock footage of Shantiniketan where he worked. The best moments in the film are the shooting of Mukherjee’s best-known work, the Medieval Hindi Saints mural on the walls of the Hindi Bhavan, Shantiniketan.

  KOSHISH

1972 125’col Hindi

d/st/co-sc/lyr Gulzar co-sc P. Romu N. Sippy, Raj N. Sippy, Mohini N. Sippy c K. Vaikunth m Madan Mohan

lp Sanjeev Kumar, Jaya Bhaduri. Om Shivpuri, Dina Pathak, Asrani, Nitin Sethi, Seema, Urmila Bhatt, Atam Prakash

Melodrama about a deaf and dumb couple who, with the aid of a blind man, overcome the odds of living in a hostile and uncaring society. Haricharan (Kumar) and Aarti (Bhaduri) are plagued by Aarti’s evil brother (Asrani) as they struggle to bring up their son notwithstanding their disabilities. When their son refuses to marry a disabled girl, Haricharan forces a happy ending. Probably Gulzar’s most heavy-handed drama, further weighed down by an emphatic score.

  MARAM

aka Tree

1972 131’ b&w Malayalam

d/p/co-lyr Yusuf Ali Kacheri pc Anjana s N.P. Mohammed co-lyr Sateeshan c U. Rajagopal m P. Devarajan

lp Prem Nazir. K.P. Ummar, Jayabharati. Nellikode Bhaskaran, K.P.A.C. Lalitha, T.S. Muthaiah, Adoor Bhasi. Bahadur, Philomina

Melodrama in which a young Muslim woman, Ameena (Jayabharati), believes her husband Ibrahim (Nazir) to have been killed at the front. She consents to marry a coarse but rich mill owner. When her first husband returns, she has a problem, resolved when she rejoins her true love. The film was a musical hit with songs by Yesudas, P. Susheela et al., one of which, Pathinalam ravudichathu, was a hit.

  MAYA DARPAN

aka Mirror of Illusion

1972 107’ col Hindi

d/p/sc Kumar Shahani pc FFC st Nirmal Varma c K.K. Mahajan m Bhaskar Chandavarkar

lp Aditi, Anil Pandya, Kanta Vyas, Iqbalnath Kaul

Shahani’s extraordinary but controversial debut feature marks both the culmination and the end of the brief NFDC-sponsored renewal of Indian cinema. With great formal rigour and beauty, the film extends Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960; quoted on two occasions on the soundtrack), making female sexuality and the very textures of living the focus of a conflict between oppressive feudal norms and a changing industrialised landscape. Taran (Aditi), the younger unmarried daughter of the zamindar (Kaul) in a Rajasthani mansion, violates the social codes dictating class and gender segregation by her sexual encounter with an engineer (Pandya). Shahani, who later evolved a theory of epic cinema, develops a uniquely cinematic orchestration of time and space through e.g. the rigid cyclical rhythms of lyric poetry: cf. the tracking shots through the ancient house while Vani Jayaram sings the lullaby Lal bichhona or the repeated reading of her brother’s letter about fertile Assam as she walks through the arid industrial landscape around her home. In the end, the circular form is broken as the Chhou dancers, dressed in black and red, are shot with gigantic tilt-down camera movements and the film closes with a linear flight-line (fantasy escape) towards a green shore, but filmed through the constricting portholes of a boat. Taran moves through a landscape that mirrors her state of mind: a barren desert that was once owned by a warrior caste now reduced to effete rituals of self-purification, and handed over without protest to a new era of technological colonisers. The effects of capitalist modernisation are presented as both ruthless and incomprehensible, reducing an articulate cultural landscape into a mere natural resource. Taran’s fantasies of Assam are contrasted with the engineer’s radical notion of change as he quotes Engels’s famous line ‘freedom is the recognition of necessity’. Images and soundtrack are at times punctuated by violent eruptions of anger at the suffocation of desire: e.g. gunfire, war (in an explosion of yellow), the hushed reference to working-class agitations. Taran’s own rebellion is prefigured by a breathtaking shot of herself annointed with the ultramarine blue of Kali against an urban skyline. Her recognition of ‘necessity’ is followed by her absorption into the Chhou performance as the dancers invoke fertility on the desert sand. The film also constitutes the only successful colour experiment of New Indian Cinema.

  NAGARA HAAVU

1972, 184’ col Kannada

d/sc S.R. Puttana Kanagal pc Shri Eswari Prod. st T.R. Subba Rao co-dial/co-lyr Chi. Udayashankar co-dial Vijayanarasimha co-lyr R.K. Jayagopal c R. Chittibabu m Vijayabhaskar

lp Vishnuvardhan, Arathi, Shobha, K.S. Ashwath. Shivaram, Ambareesh, M.P. Shankar. Leelavathi, Loknath. H.R. Sastry, B. Raghavendra Rao

Kanagal’s colour debut continues his neo-expressionist psychodramas. Ramachari (Vishnuvardhan). Kanagal’s first male protagonist, is a cobra’, i.e. a hunched, unpredictable, phallocentric creature, disinterested in his studies and dreaded by his teachers and neighbours. He falls in love with Alamelu (Arathi), but the relationship is discouraged by his teacher, the only man able to influence him. The cobra then falls in love with Margaret (Shobha). Alamelu marries another man and Ramachari discovers, in the lobby of a hotel with a gaudy fountain, that she has become a prostitute. Eventually. Ramachari pushes his teacher off a cliff and commits suicide along with his Christian girlfriend. Characteristically, Kanagal uses the skeletal plot to elaborate a long drama, set in the mountainous wilds of the Chitradurga region. Its major constituent is the stylised, reptilian performance of Vishnuvardhan, making his film debut. It extends into several fantasy sequences of women running in slow motion in a rocky landscape, the rebellious Nanna rosha number set to a marching beat, and the climactic hotel sequence as Alamelu bursts into song to explain her condition. Subba Rao, aka Ta.Ra.Su., wrote the original story but later disowned the film, causing furious supporters of Kanagal to attack him for not having understood his own story. It was remade by Kanagal in Hindi as Zebreela Insaan (1974), starring Rishi Kapoor.

  NINE MONTHS TO FREEDOM: THE STORY OF BANGLADESH

1972 72’ col English

d S. Sukhdev pc Films Division collaboration by Sohrab Boga, Tapan Bose, Jag Mohan, Gopal Maharesh. Bina Puri, Abdullah Khan, B.I. Maisuriya, Subrata Bannerjee, Harisadhan Dasgupta, Pratap Sharma, N.V.K. Murthy, Pyare Shivpuri

Sukhdev’s biggest documentary is a partisan chronicle of the history of Pakistan to the point where Bangladesh, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, demanded its freedom. Then it narrates the events after 25 March 1971, when Yahya Khan sent in the raping and rampaging Pakistani army, the heroic struggle of Bangladesh’s Mukti Bahini and finally the Indian Army’s defeat of Pakistan and the liberation of Bangladesh. The highlights of the film are its refutation of a clip from Pakistan TV with a strong voice-over, and the interview with an enraged Andre Malraux saying he wants to pick up a rifle and join the war against Yahya Khan’s army. Large parts of the story are told using a montage of stills, including newspaper headlines. In addition to footage from BBC TV and Pakistan TV, the film uses sequences of the massacre in Bangladesh (including the opening shot of a dog ripping apart a human corpse).

  PADI PISHIR BARMI BAKSHA

aka Aunt Padi’s Burmese Box

1972 118’ b&w/col Bengali

d/sc/m Arundhati Devi pc Anindiya Chitra st Leela Majumdar lyr Kazi Nazrul Islam c Bimal Mukherjee

lp Chhaya Devi, Tapan Bhattacharya, Chinmoy Roy, Ajitesh Bannerjee. Robi Ghosh, Jahar Roy, Haridhan Mukherjee. Ketaki Dutta, Nirmal Kumar, Padmadevi, Rudraprasad Sengupta

Enjoyable though uneven adaptation of Leela Majumdar’s classic children’s novel. Young hero Khokha, on the way to his uncle’s house, is told the tale of his famed Aunt Padipishi (Chhaya Devi). A formidable widow, she once tamed a bandit uncle (Bannerjee) of hers who passed himself off as a saint, extracting a precious Burmese box in return for her silence. Back in the present, a private detective (Ghosh) follows the young hero as the entire family searches for the missing treasure. Eventually the box is found in the attic, where it had been hidden by Padipishi’s no-good son Gaja. The film’s flashbacks, showing the exploits of the aunt, are in colour. The zany shooting and acting styles mix naturalism with a stylised, operatic direct address.

  PANDANTI KAPURAM

1972 178’ col Telugu
d/sc P. Laxmi Deepak pc Jayaprada Pics p G. Hanumantha Rao st Prabhakara Reddy dial Madipatla Suri lyr Dasarathi, C. Narayana Reddy. Kosaraju, Gopi. Appalacharya c V.S.R. Swamy m S.P. Kodandapani

lp Krishna, Vijayanirmala, S.V. Ranga Rao, Devika, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Jamuna, Prabhakara Reddy, B. Saroja Devi, Rajababu, Sandhyarani. Ram Mohan, Pandharibai, Mikkilineni, Sujatha, Allu Ramalingaiah, Radhakumari, ‘Sakshi’ Rangarao

Traditionalist joint family tale by a star better known for his indigenous adaptations of James Bond thrillers. Four brothers, who love each other dearly, get married and find their wives less than inclined to share their notions of family collectivity.

  PARICHAY

1972 145’ col Hindi

d/co-sc/dial/lyr Gulzar pc Tirupati Pics st R.K Mitra co-sc D.S. Mukherjee c K. Yaikunth m R.D. Burman

lp Jeetendra, Java Bhaduri, Pran, Sanjeev Kumar, Vinod Khanna, A.K. Hangal, Veena, Leela Mishra, Keshto Mukherjee, Asrani, Master Ravi, Master Kishore, Baby Pinky, Master Raju

Sound of Music (1965) adaptation turning the tutor into a man (Jeetendra) who arrives at Rai Saheb’s (Pran) regimental household to ‘civilise’ the orphaned grandchildren: a brat pack and their elder sister Rama (Bhaduri). The children’s father was the talented singer Nilesh (Kumar) who had been told to leave the house when he married against his father’s wishes, and the brood hold their rich grandfather responsible for their father’s penury and death from tuberculosis. The tutor eventually befriends the children and changes their attitude towards their grandfather. Rama falls in love with him and Rai Saheb blesses their wedding. The Hindi version of the Do re mi number was Sa-re ke sa-re ga-ma, sung by Asha Bhosle and Kishore Kumar

  PINJRA

1972 175’[Mar]/186’[H] col Marathi Hindi

d/p V. Shantaram pc V. Shantaram Prod. s Anant Mane dial Shankar Patil lyr Jagdish Khebudkar c Shivaji Sawant m Ram Kadam

lp Sandhya, Shriram Lagoo, Nilu Phule. Vatsala Deshmukh, Govind Kulkarni, Manikraj, Krishnakant Dalvi, Sarla Yevlekar

Shantaram’s remake of Sternberg’s Der blaue Engel (1930) is a belated homage to his German neo-expressionist influences. He set the story in the popular (esp. in scenarist Mane’s own films) Marathi genre of the Tamasha musical. The upright teacher (Shriram Lagoo), vehemently opposed to what he considers degenerate entertainment, is seduced by a Tamasha actress (Sandhya). The two fall in love, forcing the teacher to change his identity. In his new guise he ends up being accused, and sentenced to death, for having murdered the teacher, i.e. himself. Known mainly for its numerous hit songs, the film uninhibitedly rehearses the emphatic symbologies of Shantaram’s early days. Ironically, the film also chronicles Shantaram’s own dissolution as a film-maker closely linked to the formal misery of contemporary Marathi cinema, performing lok-natya music to garish colour and Sandhya’s actorial contortions. This is the film debut of Dr Lagoo, who was making a big impact at the time on the Marathi stage with his highly charged naturalist style.

  SHAYAR-E-KASHMIR MAHJOOR

1972 153’ col Hindi

d/p/sc Prabhat Mukherjee pc Tas Films, Govt, of Jammu and Kashmir dial Balraj Sahni, Pran Kaul lyr Prem Dhawan, Kaifi Azmi c Ajoy m Prem Dhawan

lp Balraj Sahni, Parikshit (aka Ajay) Sahni, Miss Kaul, Kalpana Sahni, Pran Kishore Kaul, Badgami, Raja Hamid, Kishori Kaul, Rajni Gupta, Geetanjali Desai, Sajda Zameer Ahmed, Gulam Mohammed Pandit

Although regarded as a Kashmiri production, this Hindi film is a biographical of Ghulam Ahmed Mahjoor (1885–1952), the Kashmiri poet often presented as the greatest writer in the language after Habba Khatoon’s 16th-C. romantic lyrics, which strongly marked the writer’s early work. In the 40s, influenced by the radical literary movements of the PWA, he wrote poems addressing contemporary Kashmir and his death triggered state-wide mourning rituals. In 1953 he was declared the official national poet of Kashmir. The film presents Mahjoor’s (Sahni) chequered early life until he switches from writing in Persian and Urdu to Kashmiri, after which his image becomes fused with the official iconography of the Jammu and Kashmir government. However, under Sahni’s influence, the film also offers a nationalist critique of the regime of Sheikh Abdullah, jailed by the Delhi government in 1953 shortly after Kashmir officially joined the Republic.

  SWAYAMVARAM

aka One’s own Choice aka Betrothal by Choice

1972 131’ b&w Malayalam

d/co-sc/st Adoor Gopalakrishnan p Kulathoor Bhaskaran Nair pc Chitralekha Film Co-op co-sc K.P. Kumaran c Ravi Varma m M.B. Srinivasan

lp Sharada, Madhu, Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair, Adoor Bhawani, Lalitha, Gopi, P.K. Venukuttan Nair, Janardhan Nair, B.K. Nair, Vaikom Chandrasekharan Nair, G. Shankara Pillai

In Gopalakrishnan’s debut feature, Viswam (Madhu) and Seeta (Sharada) come to the city as eloped lovers, but although the social pressures to conform may be less stifling, the economic pressures make their survival increasingly precarious. They move from their expensive hotel to a cheaper one, and eventually to a slum, with a smuggler, a rice seller and a prostitute for neighbours. Viswam, who is also a writer, has his novel turned down, and then loses his job as a lecturer. Eventually he dies in poverty, leaving Seeta a destitute widow with a small baby. In the end, as she puts the child to sleep, she hears a knock at the door and looks up into camera. This shot is held for a while, raising the question of the viewers’ implication in the conditions portrayed in the film. A bitter drama redeemed by the passion the lovers bear for each other, represented by the child which deserves a better deal out of life than the parents received. The immiseration of the couple is not presented as a punishment for infringing some repressive moral code, which is a refreshing change in this type of melodrama in Kerala; instead, Gopalakrishnan raises the issue of collective responsibility in an impressively cinematic manner.

  TATA MANAVADU

1972 177 b&w Telugu

d/st/sc/dial Dasari Narayana Rao pc Pratap Art Prod. p K. Raghava lyr C. Narayana Reddy, Kosaraju, Sunkara c Kannappa m Ramesh Naidu

lp S.V. Ranga Rao, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Rajababu, Satyanarayana, Anjali Devi, Vijayanirmala, Rajasulochana, Renuka, Allu Ramalingaiah, Manjula

Dasari Narayana Rao’s debut is a melodrama featuring three generations of a rural family. A villager educates his son who then moves to the city, forgetting all about his responsibilities to his parents until his own son resumes a relationship with the grandfather.

  THIRUNEELAKANTAR

1972 145’ b&w Tamil

d Jambulingam p K. Selvaraj co-s/lyr Kannadasan co-sc Panchu Arunachalam c T.K. Venkat m C.N. Pandurangam

lp T.R. Mahalingam, Sowcar Janaki, R.S. Manohar, Bhanumathi (jr), Kanthimathi, Surulirajan, A. Veerappan

A melodrama propagandising for religion. Set in Thillai, tells of the proud potter Ambalavaanar (Mahalingam) who, on his wife Leelavathi’s (Janaki) prompting, becomes a devotee and, hearing the Vishalakshi Ammayar Harikatha, dedicates himself totally to the temple, neglecting the girl next door, Saraswathi (Bhanumathi), who had become attached to the couple. Saraswathi falls ill, but is saved through a prayer to Nataraja. When Ambalavanar becomes enamoured of the temple devadasi Kalavathy, his wife refuses any further contact with her husband, but Nataraja again intervenes and reconciles the couple who emerge rejuvenated from the experience thanks to their Lord’s blessings.

  TRISANDHYA

1972 133’ b&w/col Hindi

d/p Raj Marbros st Uroob c Sudarshan Nag m Bahadur Khan

lp Waheeda Rehman, Bhaskar, Lata Menon, P.K. Abraham

Art-house movie adapting an Uroob novel and set in Kerala. Bhaskar (Bhaskar) falls in love with Indu (Rehman), but she marries his elder brother and business partner. The elder brother dies and Bhaskar has a paralytic attack. He is attended to by his former lover, who has now become a professional nurse. The only significant feature of an otherwise unremarkable film was that John Abraham was employed, early in his career, to assist Marbros.

  ZER TO PIDHAN JANI JANI

1972 127’ b&w Gujarati

d/sc Upendra Trivedi pc Rangbhoomi Prod. st Manubhai Pancholi ‘Darshak’ lyr/m Avinash Vyas c Pratap Dave

lp Anupama, Upendra Trivedi, Arvind Trivedi, Vishnukumar Vyas, Narharijani

Trivedi, the main star of Gujarati cinema, directed this version of Pancholi’s novel after first adapting it to the stage. A man retires to rural life and becomes a benevolent agriculturist. His daughter and her childhood boyfriend, a city-bred son of a barrister, fall into a complex family drama against the backdrop of India’s freedom struggle.

  ABACHURINA POST OFFICE

1973 114’ b&w Kannada

d/sc N. Lakshminarayan pc Chitra Shilpi st Purnachandra Tejasvi dial Navarathna Ram c N.G. Rao m Vijayabhaskar

lp B.N. Narayanan, Girija Lokesh, Jayaram, Shanta, Katte Ramchandra, Ramesh Bhatt

Bobanna works on a coffee plantation and doubles up as the village postman. He becomes involved with the lives of the illiterate villagers who ask him to write or read out their letters. Although he scrupulously respects people’s privacy, his evil mother-in-law leaks the contents of an anonymous letter and causes a scandal. The village turns against Bobanna, who has to leave.

  ANKUR

aka The Seedling

1973 136’ col Hindi

d/s Shyam Benegal p Lalit M. Bijlani pc Blaze Film dial Satyadev Dubey c Govind Nihalani m Vanraj Bhatia

lp Anant Nag, Shabana Azmi, Sadhu Meher, Priya Tendulkar, Mirza Qadir Ali Baig, Agha Mohammed Hussain, Hemant Jeshwantrao, Shesham Raju, Aslam Akhtar, Syed Yakub, Jagat Jeevan

Benegal’s successful feature debut is set in feudal AP and consolidated the New Indian Cinema movement. The politically inflected melodrama tells of a newly married urban youth, Surya (Nag, in his Hindi film debut), who is sent alone to his rural home to look after his ancestral property. Finding himself in the role of the traditional landlord, he has an affair with Lakshmi (Azmi, in her extremely powerful film debut), the young wife of a deaf-mute labourer (Meher), and she becomes pregnant. Her husband, believing the child to be his, goes to tell the landlord the good news but Surya, consumed by his guilt and afraid of being exposed, beats the man almost to death. Lakshmi then turns on her former lover with a passionate speech calling for a revolutionary overthrow of feudal rule. In the last shot, a young boy throws a stone at Surya’s house and then the screen turns red. Azmi and Nag launched a new style of naturalist acting deploying regionalised Hindi accents (here Hindi inflected by a Hyderabadi accent) that came to be associated with Benegal’s subsequent work. It also helped define a ‘middle-of-the-road’ cinema which adapted psychological realism and regionalism (emphasised in the fluid camera style) to the conventions of the mainstream Hindi movie. Having cherished the project to make this film for a long time, Benegal eventually found a producer, a distributor of advertising films for whom he had previously made commercials. The producer also backed Benegal’s next films.

Shabana Azmi (left, in crowd) in Ankur

  ASHANI SANKET

aka Distant Thunder

1973 101’col Bengali

d/sc/m Satyajit Ray p Sarbani Bhattacharya pc Balaka Movies st Bibhutibhushan Bannerjee’s novel c Soumendu Roy

lp Soumitra Chatterjee, Babita, Ramesh Mukherjee, Chitra Bannerjee, Govinda Chakravarty, Sandhya Roy, Noni Ganguly, Seli Pal, Suchita Roy, Anil Ganguly, Debatosh Ghosh

Ray returns to the village setting of his early films, but in lush colour, with this Bibhutibhushan novel set in 1942 in the run-up to the catastrophic 1943 Bengal famine (evoked in many films, cf. Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta ‘71, 1972). A Brahmin, Gangacharan (Chatterjee), and his beautiful wife Ananga (Bangladesh actress Babita) find their village, despite a successful harvest, overrun by famine. The rice shop of Gangacharan’s former benefactor, Biswas (Mukherjee), is attacked by starving villagers, while strangers who have profited from WW2 try to subjugate the local women. Chutki (Sandhya Roy), who had earlier protected Ananga from a sexual assault, has to resort to prostitution in return for rice. The famine forces Gangacharan to abandon his priestly identity and the film ends with his family, including his pregnant wife, sharing what little food they have with a large family of refugees. Footage of starving people in silhouette, with a caption reminding viewers that over five million died in the famine, closes the film. In sharp contrast to Ray’s 50s ruralism based on Bibhutibhushan stories, this film is closer to Benegal’s Ankur (also 1973) in its use of realist plotting and performance within a melodramatic structure. Several critics had problems with the use of colour e.g. the lush green environments and blazing sunsets. Although defended by Ray himself as an appropriate device to emphasise the artificial nature of the man-made tragedy, it could also be due to laboratory processing in India which tends towards highly saturated effects in line with the demands of the commercial mainstream and advertising film.

  BANARIA PHOOL

1973 165’ b&w Assamese

d/sc/dial Atul Bordoloi pc Goti Chitra p Keshab Sharma st Bireshwar Barua lyr Bhupen Hazarika, Nirmal Prova Bordoloi c Dinen Gupta m Jayanta Hazarika

lp Biju Phukan, Ela Kakoti, Chandra Narayan Barua, Makham Khaund, Naemuddin Ahmed, Golap Datta

Romance movie featuring rivals in love. The hero is a young geologist, Abanish, the heroine a tribal woman, Sibila. The problem they face is presented by a villain and vamp. The film was known mainly for its music, being the film debut of noted musician Hazarika, and its competent direction (in a state where film was still a nascent industry).

  BOBBY

1973 168’ col Hindi
pc R.K. Films d/p Raj Kapoor st/co-sc K.A. Abbas co-sc V.P. Sathe dial Jainendra Jain lyr Anand Bakshi, Vithalbhai Patel, Inderjit Singh Tulsi c Radhu Karmakar m Laxmikant-Pyarelal

lp Rishi Kapoor, Dimple Kapadia, Pran, Premnath, Sonia Sahni, Durga Khote, Shashi Kiran, Pinchoo Kapoor, Jagdish Raj, Prem Chopra, Aruna Irani, Farida Jalal

Very successful kitschy teenage love story deploying the urban ‘pop’ iconography of mid-60s middle-class teenage fashions and Annette Funicello beach movies (including the display of a variety of bathing suits). The 18-year-old Raj Nath (Rishi Kapoor), son of a wealthy businessman (Pran) and a rough but prosperous Goan fisherman’s (Premnath) 16-year-old daughter, Bobby Braganza (Kapadia), have a romance despite their respective fathers feuding over class status. The numerous love songs include the famous Hum turn ek kamre mein band ho (sung by Shailendra Singh and Lata Mangeshkar). Although the original script required a tragic ending confirming its Romeo and Juliet model, the distributors insisted on a happy one. Their wishes were met by a manifestly fake conclusion in which celebrated screen villain Chopra appears as himself, and kidnaps the heroine so that the hero may rescue her and unite the two families through his heroism. Raj Kapoor includes many references to his own famous love scenes with Nargis, casting his son Rishi (fresh from his appearance in Mera Naam Joker, 1970) in the lead opposite the debuting Dimple. Apparently Dimple was chosen because of her resemblance to Nargis. The couple’s first meeting in the film recreates Kapoor’s often-recounted first meeting with Nargis: Dimple comes through the kitchen door with dough on her hands which she absentmindedly rubs into her hair. Hit songs by the new singer Shailendra Singh include Main shayar to nahin and his duets with Lata Mangeshkar, Mujhe kuch kehna hai and Jhoot bole kauva kaate. Rishi Kapoor and Dimple, who had been absent from the screen for a while, starred together again in Ramesh Sippy’s Sagar (1985).

  BON PALASHIR PADABALI

1973 224’ b&w Bengali

d/sc Uttam Kumar pc Silpi Sangsad st Ramapada Choudhury dial Jayadeb Basu lyr Gouriprasanna Majumdar, Ruby Bagchi c Madhu Bhattacharya, Kanai Dey m Nachiketa Ghosh, Satinath Mukherjee, Dwijen Mukherjee, Adhir Bagchi, Shyamal Mitra

lp Uttam Kumar, Supriya Choudhury, Basabi Nandi, Bikash Roy, Molina Devi, Anil Chatterjee, Jahar Roy, Nirmal Kumar, Kalipada Chakravarty, Madhabi Chakraborty

The Bengali matinee idol Uttam Kumar’s massive melodrama about passion, violence and politics in the small village of Bon Palashi. The film is narrated through two sets of characters whose stories are intercut and eventually merged. The first is the family of Girijaprasad, a retired and now impoverished school principal. His inability to invest in the progress of the village has the natives looking for a new leader in his former schoolmate, the businessman Abani. A long flashback, featuring the tragic history of Abani’s old aunt (Molina Devi), serves to frame Girijaprasad’s present crisis: his scheming brother offers the fiance of Girijaprasad’s daughter Bimala a larger dowry to marry his own daughter instead. The second protagonist is the peasant Udas (Uttam Kumar), who loves the good Padma (Choudhury) but is forced to marry the neurotic Laxmi (Nandi) in order to be allowed to learn to drive a bus. Laxmi kills Padma’s father and then commits suicide. Udas tries to get Padma to elope with him but he ends up trying to rape her and, eventually, he kills Padma. Plans to develop the village loom large in the melodrama but the film impresses mainly through its scale (the title means The Songs of Bon Palashi) and its recourse to several acting idioms, including folk theatre.

  DAAG

aka The Stain aka Stigma

1973 146’ col Hindi

d/p/co-sc Yash Chopra pc Yash Raj Films st/co-sc Gulshan Nanda dial Akhtar-ul-Iman lyr Sahir Ludhianvi c Kay Gee m Laxmikant Pyarelal

lp Sharmila Tagore, Rajesh Khanna, Raakhee, Baby Pinky, Raju, Manmohan Krishna, Madan Puri, Iftikhar, Karan Dewan, Prem Chopra, Padma Khanna, Achala Sachdev, Surendranath

A convoluted melodrama about Sunil (Khanna) who is charged with murder. He kills his boss’s villainous son (Chopra) in self-defence when the latter attacks his wife Sonia (Tagore). On his way to jail the hero has an accident and is believed dead while Sonia bears his child. Later, after she loses her job as a schoolteacher, Sonia and her child are given refuge by Chandni (Raakhee). Chandni is married to Sonia’s husband, Sunil, who did not die and now lives under an assumed name. Sunil is elected mayor but a policeman discovers his real identity and a trial ensues. Sunil and Sonia are eventually united again.

  DHUND

aka Fog

1973 130’ col Hindi

d/p B.R. Chopra pc B.R. Films sc B.R. Films Story Dept dial Akhtar-ul-Iman lyr Sahir Ludhianvi c Dharam Chopra m Ravi, Gyan Varma

lp Sanjay Khan, Zeenat Aman, Danny Denzongpa, Urmila Bhatt, Madan Puri, Jagdish Raj, Nana Palsikar, Padma Khanna, Ashok Kumar, Navin Nischol

A love-triangle suspense film. The heroine (Aman) is married to a vicious, crippled tyrant (Denzongpa) who is killed in the beginning of the film (shot from the killer’s subjective point of view). The heroine and her secret lover (Khan) are the prime suspects. Their story is shown in flashbacks alternating with the progress of the police investigation. In the end, another man (Nischol) confesses to the crime: the old tyrant had raped the man’s wife and she became a nun.

  DUVIDHA

aka In Two Minds aka Two Roads

1973 83’ col Hindi

d/p/sc Mani Kaul pc Mani Kaul Prod. st Vijaydan Detha’s short story c Navroze Contractor m Ramzan, Hammu, Saki Khan, Latif

lp Ravi Menon, Raisa Padamsee, Hardan, Shambhudan, the villagers of Barunda

Kaul’s third film, financed by the FFC and an independent multi-arts co-op led by the noted painter Akbar Padamsee. Derived from a Rajasthani folk-tale, it tells of a merchant’s son (Menon) who returns home with his new bride (Padamsee), only to be sent away again on family business. A ghost witnesses the bride’s arrival and falls in love with her. He takes on the absent husband’s form and lives with her. She has his child, which poses a problem when the real husband returns home. A shepherd traps the ghost in a bag. The film focuses on the wife’s life and dispenses with almost any dialogue, developing the characters through parallel, historically uneven and even contradictory narratives. The classical styles of the Kangra and Basohli miniature paintings inform the colour schemes, the framing and the editing, as well as the somewhat melancholic atmosphere of the film. This is contrasted by the full-blooded folk-music score. Kaul skilfully orchestrates the way classical and folk forms (apparently) contradict each other in the way they present each other’s fantasy worlds, an opposition with many ramifications in the realm of everyday behaviour. It is one of Kaul’s best-known films and was widely shown in Europe. It was also sharply attacked by Satyajit Ray who preferred what he took to be the ‘realism’ of Benegal and M.S. Sathyu’s work.

  ENIPPADIKAL

aka Staircases

1973 164’ b&w Malayalam

d/sc Thoppil Bhasi p Kambiseri Karunakaran pc K.P.A.C. st Thakazhy Shivashankar Pillai lyr Vyalar Rama Varma, Iraiyamman Thampi c P. Ramaswamy m P. Devarajan

lp Madhu, Sharada, Jayabharati, Shankaradi, Kaviyoor Ponnama, K.P.A.C. Lalitha, Adoor Bhasi, Kottarakkara Sridharan Nair

Classic Thoppil Bhasi socialist realism backed by the official CPI, continuing his agit-prop stage and screen work starting from Ningalenne Communistaki (You Made Me A Communist, 1970). The film adapts a Thakazhy story set in the oppressive pre-Independence bureaucracy of the diwan C.P. Ramaswamy Aiyer. Erstwhile farmer Kesava Pillai (Madhu) gets a clerical job in the government secretariat advocating and administering the savage repression of the popular CPI uprising. Although married in his village to Karthiyani, in the city he has an affair with Thankamma (Sharada), the daughter of an influential bureaucrat. Thankamma eventually discovers his selfish hypocrisy and becomes a sanyasini. The strength of the people’s movement forces his voluntary retirement when his family, personal and professional relationships are all in ruins.

Kottarakkara Sridharan Nair (2nd from left, foreground), Jayabharati (centre) and Madhu (2nd from right) in Enippadikal

  GARAM HAWA

aka Hot Winds

1973 146’ col Urdu

d/co-p M.S. Sathyu co-p Abu Siwani co-p/c Ishan Arya pc Unit 3 MM. st Ismat Chughtai’s short story co-sc/dial/lyr Kaifi Azmi co-sc Shama Zaidi m Bahadur Khan

lp Balraj Sahni, Dinanath Zutshi, Badar Begum, Geeta Siddharth, Shaukat Kaifi, Abu Siwani, Farouque Shaikh, Jamal Hashmi, Yunus Pervez, Jalal Agha, Kalpana Sahni, Shanta Agarwal, A.K. Hangal

The FFC-sponsored film debut of the IPTA stage director Sathyu is one of the last titles by the generation of 50s Marxist cultural activists (Sahni, Azmi and Chughtai) and chronicles the plight of the minority Muslims in North India. Set in Agra after the first major Partition exodus, the film tells of an elderly Muslim shoe manufacturer, Salim Mirza (Sahni) and his family who must decide whether to continue the ancestral business or to migrate to the newly formed state of Pakistan. Salim’s brother Halim (Zutshi) migrates but Halim’s son Kazim (Hashmi) returns illegally across a sealed border to marry Salim Mirza’s daughter, Amina (Siddharth). He is arrested and sent back. The family loses its ancestral property which under new laws is allocated to a Sindhi businessman; refugees from Pakistan start competing with Salim’s business while moneylenders refuse to invest in someone who might emigrate; Amina commits suicide after yet another lover leaves her to go to Pakistan. These adversities persuade the old patriarch to leave as well, leading to a poignant scene where his ancient mother (Badar Begum) hides herself to try to stay in her ‘home’. On the way to the station, the family comes across a communist rally proclaiming the unity of all the dispossessed, regardless of religion or caste. Salim’s son Sikandar (Shaikh) abandons his emigration plan and joins the rally, determined to stay in India. The film, with its lovingly re-created portrait of Agra’s Muslim milieu, is dominated by Sahni’s remarkable performance in his last major role.

  KAADU

1973 141’ b&w Kannada

d/sc Girish Karnad p G.N. Lakshmipathi, K.N. Narayan pc L.N. Combines st/dial Shrikrishna Alanahalli c Govind Nihalani m B.V. Karanth

lp Amrish Puri, Nandini, Lokesh, G.K. Govinda Rao, G.S. Nataraj, B. Sudha Belwadi, Kalpana Sirur, Uma Shivakumar, T.S. Nagabharana, Sunderraj

Girish Karnad’s first solo direction is a violent rural drama about rivalry between two villages as seen through the eyes of a young boy, Kitti (Nataraj). The boy, who is temporarily staying with his uncle Chandre Gowda (Puri) and aunt Kamali (Nandini), notices his uncle’s secret visits to his mistress in the next village. This affair escalates into a larger confrontation between Chandre Gowda and his rival Shivaganga (Lokesh), which eventually leads to violence, the death of Aunt Kamali and the arrival of the police. The boy cannot distinguish the specifically man-made violence that surrounds him from the more primeval threats presented by the dense forest which, according to legend, contains a killer bird that calls out its victims by name. In a fantasy ending, the boy imagines the bird calling him and he follows the call, ignoring the frantic voices of his parents who want to take him home. Shot by Nihalani and starring Amrish Puri, both key figures in Shyam Benegal’s cinema, the film anticipates many conventions later associated with Benegal-style ruralism. Karanth did the art direction as well as the music while T.S. Nagabharana designed the costumes.

  MANZILEIN AUR BHI HAIN

aka Jail is still Ahead

1973 112’ col Hindi

d/st Mahesh Bhatt p Johnny Bakshi, R.H. Jain pc Cine Guild sc Rakesh Sharma dial Satyadev Dubey lyr Yogesh c Pravin Bhatt m Bhupinder Soni

lp Prema Narayan, Kabir Bedi, Gulshan Arora, Purnima, Sudhir, Shah Aga, Mukesh Bhatt, Soni, Ranvir Raj, Viju Khote, Kirti Kumar, Uma Dutt

Bhatt described his first feature as revolving around ‘an unusual sexual relationship between a prostitute (Narayan) and two criminals on the run. The film was a box-office disaster.’ The fast paced thriller proclaims its violation of morality codes, as noted theatre personality Dubey’s aggressive dialogues sometimes evoke the Abbas or Sukhdev-type rhetoric attacking corruption. It was banned for 14 months by the censors for mocking the ‘sacred institution of marriage’.

  NAMAK HARAM

aka Traitor aka The Ungrateful

1973 146’ col Hindi

d/st Hrishikesh Mukherjee p Raja Ram, Satish Wagle, Jayendra Pandya pc RSJ Prod. co-sc/dial Gulzar co-sc D.N. Mukherjee lyr Anand Bakshi c Jaywant Pathare m R.D. Burman

lp Rajesh Khanna, Amitabh Bachchan, Rekha, Simi Garewal, Asrani, A.K. Hangal, Jayashree T, Om Shivpuri, Durga Khote, Raza Murad

Mukherjee repeats his successful pairing of Khanna and Bachchan in Anand (1970) with this buddy melodrama in an industrial working-class setting. When his father (Shivpuri) falls ill, the rich playboy Vikram (Bachchan) has to manage the Bombay factory. He insults a union leader (Hangal) and triggers a strike which he can end only by publicly apologising. Vikram asks his friend Somu (Khanna) to help avenge this humiliation and Somu joins the workforce. Somu becomes involved with a female union activist (Rekha) and changes his views about the conflict and sides with the workers. Vikram’s father exposes him as a management stooge and Somu is killed. Vikram takes the blame, is jailed and, when released, decides to champion workers’ rights to honour Somu’s memory. Based loosely on Peter Glenville’s Becket (1964) with a contemporary plot, it attempted a hard-edged realism in its dialogue, with several references to debates and political action from the Left in the late 60s.

  NATHAYIL MUTHU

1973 189’ b&w Tamil

d/p/sc K.S. Gopalakrishnan c P. Ramaswamy lyr Vali m Shankar-Ganesh

lp K.R. Vijaya, R. Muthuraman, S.V. Subbaiah, M.R.R.Vasu, V.S. Raghavan, Chandrakantha, S. Varalakshmi

A melodrama about the perils of cross-class marriage. Madhu (Muthuraman), the foreign-educated son of the orthodox brahmin lawyer Varadhachari (Subbaiah) and his wife (Varalakshmi), falls in love with the poor Chelakannu (Vijaya) who looks after their cows. While bathing, Chelakannu’s sari is washed away and Madhu lends her his clothes. The slumdwellers misconstrue the situation and force Madhu to marry the girl right away, which he gladly does, going to live with her in the slums. However, Chelakannu realises the unfairness of inflicting such discomfort on her husband while the boy’s mother schemes to break up the marriage by suggesting Chelakannu is unfaithful to him. Events culminate in a Panchayat which judges in Chelakannu’s favour, but when the Panchayat leaders try to abuse Madhu’s sister, Chelakannu saves her and this act of generosity persuades Madhu’s family that their son’s wife is a worthy member of the group.

  NIRMALAYAM

aka The Offering aka The Blessed Offering

1973 134’ b&w Malayalam

d/p/s M.T. Vasudevan Nair pc Novel Films lyr Edassery c K. Ramachandra Babu m K. Raghavan

lp P.J. Anthony, Kaviyoor Ponnamma, Ravi Menon, Sukumaran, Sumitra, Shankaradi, Devidasan, K.R. Sumithra, Shanta Devi, S.P. Pillai, Kottarakkara Sridharan Nair

The directorial debut of noted novelist and screenwriter Vasudevan Nair is an art-house movie about Kerala at the crossroads of modernisation. The ancient temple is neglected and in ruins, tended only by the old oracle, Velichapad (Anthony) and the man who picked flowers for its garden, Variyar (Kottarakkara). When the priest leaves to start a teashop, one of the trustees sends his cook’s son (Sukumaran) as the new priest, but the young man is not really interested in the job and forms a relationship with the oracle’s teenage daughter, Ammini. The oracle’s son is caught trying to sell the sacred sword and has to leave the village. When smallpox breaks out, the villagers return to the temple and prepare a big festival to appease the goddess, to Velichapad’s delight. But on the festive day, he discovers that his daughter has been seduced by the young priest and that his wife (Ponnamma) sells herself to a moneylender to feed the family. The film ends on an expressionist scene of the oracle performing the final ceremony of the temple, as he dances before the goddess, spitting at her for letting him down and striking his forehead with the sacred sword until he draws blood. He finally collapses, dead. Stage and film actor Anthony creates with great conviction a larger-than-life character made anachronistic by a changing world.

  PADATIK

aka The Guerrilla Fighter aka The Rank And File

1973 98’(93’) b&w Bengali
d/p/s/co-st Mrinal Sen p Mrinal Sen Prod. cost Ashish Burman c K.K. Mahajan m Ananda Shankar

lp Simi Garewal, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Bijon Bhattacharya, Jochan Dastidar, Dhruba Mitra, Ashima Sinha, Kamal Kidwai, Farida Kidwai, Tapan Das

Completing his Calcutta trilogy (Interview, 1970; Calcutta ’71, 1972) with a story more conventionally coherent than its predecessors, Sen presents the lessons adumbrated in the two previous instalments in a reflection on practical politics and party organisation after the Moscow-Beijing split of the early 60s and the Naxalite rising. An urban political activist (Chatterjee) escapes from police custody and is sheltered by an upper-class woman (Simi) who also defies the constraints of ‘traditional’ oppression: she left her husband and lives alone in a comfortable flat. The two are visited by a prudish and dogmatic party official (Mitra). The activist, though loyal to the movement for political liberation, uses his enforced isolation to reassess the political situation in Bengal. Eventually the activist leaves the flat to visit his ailing mother and learns that his father (Bhattacharya) refuses to be coerced into signing a no-strike agreement at his factory. Sen’s lucid if at times naive assessment of party politics and leadership questions caused considerable controversy at the time, partly because, via the figure of the activist’s father’s admonition that the ‘Naxalite movement should learn its lessons from the freedom struggle’ (referring thereby to Tagore’s Char Adhyay), Sen suggests that the Naxalite rising against the Indian State could also be viewed as an extension of the Independence movement.

  SHARADA

1973 166’ b&w Telugu

d K. Vishwanath pc Annapurna Cine Ents dial Bollimunta lyr C. Narayana Reddy, Dasarathi, Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy, Arudra c G.K. Ramu, V.K. Gopal m K. Chakravarty

lp Shobhan Babu, Sharada, Jayanthi, Satyanarayana, Rajababu, Allu Ramalingaiah, Ravu Gopala Rao, Sarathi, Baby Dolly, Shanta Devi

Vishwanath’s psychodrama in the Annapurna tradition (cf. Adurthi Subba Rao’s work). A woman (Sharada) goes insane after her husband’s (Shobhan Babu) death on their wedding night. A doctor who resembles the husband (Shobhan Babu again) pretends to be the husband as part of the therapy. The treatment eventually fails when she realises the truth and, upholding what the film presents as the glorious Indian tradition of female virtue, dies in a boat on a river at the very place where the husband died. The music enhanced the film’s popularity and launched Vishwanath towards an art-house cinema.

  TITASH EKTI NADIR NAAM

aka A River Named Titash

1973 159’ b&w Bengali

d/sc Ritwik Ghatak pc Purba Pran Katha Chitra (Bangladesh) st Advaita Malla Burman’s novel c Baby Islam m Bahadur Khan, Ahid-ul-Haq

lp Rosy Samad, Kaberi Choudhury, Roshan Jamil, Rani Sircar, Sufia Rustam, Banani Choudhury, Prabir Mitra, Chand

Ghatak’s film, considered by some to be his masterpiece, is a Bangladesh production made shortly after its independence. The tale is set among Malo fishermen living by the Titash river. Kishore’s (Mitra) bride (K. Choudhury) is abducted by river bandits. She escapes and is rescued by the fisherfolk, with whom she lives and raises her child. Kishore becomes a madman and is offered shelter by his wife but they recognise each other only before they die. The child is raised by Basanti (Samad) while the river starts silting up and urban traders drive out the fisherfolk. Kumar Shahani devoted an essay to the film, ‘The Passion of a Resurrected Spring’ (1985), suggesting that the tightly cut beginning of the abduction sequence has the closed structure of a myth which the film gradually opens out into history, especially through the archetypally constructed male and female spaces. Kishore represents an unprecedented amalgamation of Christ and Shiva, usually regarded as contradictory figures, while the thrice-born female figure, associated with the motif of the nurturing river, constitutes a movement of both historical displacement and deliverance. For Shahani the only precedent for such a construction is classical Indian sculpture’s use of volume: the film works entirely through planar rather than perspectival depth while condensing opposites such as ‘natural’ and highly evolved cultural forms into the same image. The film, which works according to an iconographic rather than a narrative logic, places those hybrid images at the end of a civilisation (the drying up of the river), anticipating a future overshadowed by industrial encroachments on nature. The film exists in two versions, the second being c.30’ shorter and apparently cut by Ghatak himself.

  27 DOWN

aka Sattawis Down aka The Train to Benares aka 27 Down Bombay-Varanasi Express

1973 123’(115’) b&w Hindi

d/p/sc Avtar Krishna Kaul pc Avtar Kaul Prod. st/dial Ramesh Bakshi lyr Nand Kishore Mittal c Apurba Kishore Bir m Bhuban Hari

lp M.K. Raina, Raakhee, Rekha Sabnis, Om Shivpuri, Madhvi, Manjula, Nilesh Velani

The promising young Kaul’s only feature, financed by the NFDC and finished shortly before he died trying to save someone from drowning. An engine driver (Shivpuri), incapacitated after an accident, forces his son Sanjay (Raina) to join the railways and to stifle his artistic ambitions beneath a conductor’s uniform. Sanjay befriends the commuting typist Shalini (Raakhee) but his father pressures Sanjay to many a village belle (Sabnis) who resembles the buffaloes she brings as her dowry. Sanjay escapes in yet another train journey (the Bombay-Benares train that provides the film’s title as well as the framing scene for the flashback narrative). When Sanjay meets Shalini again, he finds they have nothing in common any more. The train motif dominates the film’s highly contrasted imagery and generated one classic high-angle shot of an empty platform filled within seconds by thousands of commuting travellers.

  ULAGAM SUTRUM VALIBAN

1973 184’col Tamil

d/p M.G. Ramachandran pc Emgeeyar Pics st R.M. Veerappan, S.K.T. Samy, Vidwan V.E. Lakshmanan sc Emgeeyar Pics Story Dept dial K. Sornam lyr Kannadasan, Vali, Pulamai Pithan, Pulavar Veda c V. Ramamurthy m M.S. Vishwanathan

lp M.G. Ramachandran, M.N. Nambiar, S.A. Ashokan, R.S. Manohar, Nagesh, Thengai Srinivasan, V. Gopalakrishnan, San Chai, Selvi, Chandrakala, Manjula, Lata, Meta Rungrat

MGR’s last major self-produced film is a James Bond-style drama shot in Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Thailand. The scientist Murugan (MGR) invents a way of harnessing the energy of lightning. The crooked Prof. Bhairavan (Ashokan) offers him a fortune but Murugan donates the secret to a villainous Buddhist monk in Japan. Murugan is believed to be murdered, after which his brother, a Central Bureau of Investigation official (MGR again), unmasks the international gang of villains. Shot partly also at the Expo 70 in Tokyo, the film’s claim to support scientific investigation is further underlined by documentary footage of Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Annadurai speaking on the subject. It was a major hit with continuous 50-day runs at all centres where it was first released.

  YAADON KI BARAAT

aka Procession of Memories

1973 164’ col Hindi

d/p/dial Nasir Hussain pc Nasir Hussain Films s Salim-Javed lyr Majrooh Sultanpuri c Munir Khan m R.D. Burman

lp Dharmendra, Zeenat Aman, Vijay Arora, Tariq, Ajit, Anamika, Imtiaz, Ravinder Kapoor, Nasir Khan, Shyam Kumar, Neetu Singh, Jalal Agha, Shetty, Satyendra

Vendetta movie and teenage love story inaugurating the influence of Western rock music in Hindi cinema associated with the Americanised persona of Zeenat Aman. While escaping from the murderers of their parents, three brothers get separated. The eldest, Shankar (Dharmendra), a professional thief for whom the traumatic murder remains associated with the motif of a train, pursues the killer (Ajit). The second brother (Arora) has a love affair with a rich woman (Aman), while the youngest (Tariq) becomes a rock star. The ‘lost and found’ fairy-tale formula, often deployed in Indian cinema (cf. the films of Desai) is adapted here to allow for various encounters between the brothers before they all recognise each other when the rock star sings the film’s title refrain, a song they learned from their mother as children. An interestingly fetishistic aspect is that the villain is recognised by his shoes. Although the film recalls Hussain’s own earlier musicals with Shammi Kapoor and Dev Anand, its main ‘merit’ is Aman’s guitar-strumming introduction of the disco era. Hits include Burman’s Chura liya hai tumne jo dil ko, sung by Asha Bhosle and Mohammed Rafi.

  ZANJEER

aka The Chain

1973 145’ col Hindi-Urdu

d/p/co-lyr Prakash Mehra pc Prakash Mehra Prod, s Salim-Javed co-lyr Gulshan Bawra c N. Satyen m Kalyanji-Anandji

lp Amitabh Bachchan, Jaya Bhaduri, Ajit, Bindu, Pran, Om Prakash, Iftikhar, Ram Mohan, Yunus Pervez, Purnima, Gulshan Bawra, Keshto Mukherjee

First of many films to cast Bachchan as an angiy young man, although this still seems a transitional movie: the hero evolves from a cop into a vigilante, the latter being closer to the star’s subsequent persona. As a child, Vijay witnesses the murder of his parents by a faceless killer wearing a chain around his wrist. Haunted by the image of the chain, the adult Vijay (Bachchan) becomes a cop determined to clean up Bombay. He befriends the Pathan gambler Sher Khan (Pran) who becomes his ally. Although romantically involved with Mala (Bhaduri), Vijay singlemindedly roots out evildoers and finally identifies his parents’ killer: Teja (Ajit). Taking the law into his own hands, he avenges the murders. The film, which introduced the Salim-Javed style, the real authors behind the Bachchan persona, was a great success and set the trend for later revenge and vigilante movies to which the director, the scenarists and the stars of this film would continue to contribute throughout the 70s. Mehra continued the theme in Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (1978).

  ALLURI SEETARAMARAJU

1974 187’ col/scope Telugu

d V. Ramachandra Rao p G. Hanumantha Rao pc Padmalaya Pics dial Maharathi lyr C. Narayana Reddy, Arudra, Kosaraju, Sri Sri c V.S.R. Swamy m Adi Narayana Rao

lp Krishna, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Kantha Rao, Chandramohan, K. Jaggaiah, M. Prabhakara Reddy, Jagga Rao, Vijayanirmala, Jayanthi, Manjula, Allu Ramalingaiah, Mikkilineni, Ravu Gopala Rao, Pandharibai

Telugu star Krishna produces this big-budget film which introduces CinemaScope to Telugu cinema. He stars as the famous revolutionary Alluri Seetaramaraju, an anti-imperialist tribal leader who founded the early peasant movements in the state before he was sentenced to death by the British. Remembered for the lyrics by radical poet Sri Sri, the film’s success spawned a wave of biopics of historical as well as mythological figures, usually presented as major challenges to the star actors.

  AMANUSH

1974 165’[B]/153’[H] col Bengali/Hindi

d/p/co-sc Shakti Samanta pc Shakti Films st/co-sc Shaktipada Rajguru dial Prabhat Roy[B], Kamleshwar[H] lyr Gouriprasanna Majumdar[B], Indivar[H] c Aloke Dasgupta m Shyamal Mitra

lp Uttam Kumar, Sharmila Tagore, Utpal Dutt, Abhi Bhattacharya, Anil Chatterjee, Prema Narayan, Manmohan, Asit Sen

Samanta’s hit with an all-Bengali star cast reconnects with the Bengali-Hindi bilinguals and signifies to some extent the powerful Bombay production sector’s cultural takeover of the Bengali cinema. In the village of Dhaniakhali, the new police chief Bhuvan Sen finds corruption and decay personified by the dissolute Madhusudhan Roy Choudhury (Kumar), the zamindar’s son. However, the cause of the rot is not the persistence feudalism in the village but the presence of the sophisticated and mild-mannered Mahim Babu, cast as the villain who turns the head of Madhusudhan’s girlfriend Lekha (Tagore). The policeman eventually restores the old feudal power relations, rehabilitates the hero and restores Lekha to him. This reactionary parable was celebrated for the performance of Bengali megastar Uttam Kumar. The Hindi version has the hit song Dil aisa kisine mera toda, sung by Kishore Kumar.

  AVALUM PENN THAANE

aka She Too Is A Woman

1974 164’ b&w Tamil

d/s Durai pc Shri Panduranga Prod. p P.R. Ramarao, Pandharibai Ramarao lyr Vali c V. Manohar m V. Kumar

lp R. Muthuraman, M.R.R. Vasu, Thengai Srinivasan, S.A. Ashokan, S.V. Sahasranamam, Sumithra, Manorama, M.N. Rajam, Pandharibai, Kutti Padmini, V.K. Ramaswamy, S.V. Ramadas, Adithan, Dasarathan, Ambathur Mani

Durai’s first film tells of Seeta (Sumithra), a prostitute, and her attempt to quit the trade. Muthu (Muthuraman), a young businessman from a mofussil town finds her in a Madras brothel and proposes marriage but her pimp (Vasu) ruins her chances and she commits suicide. A strident camera and editing, heavy symbolism, two songs and a comic subplot help maintain the narrative momentum of the melodrama. In contrast to Tamil cinema’s archetypes, the film offers some well-drawn characters with distinct caste identities, speaking with pronounced regional accents: the Chettiar money lender and his young wife interested in pornography, Kanagu the vegetable vendor and Sambandham the bicycle mechanic.

  BEHIND THE BREADLINE

1974 29’ col English

d/p S. Sukhdev s Tanvier Farouqe, Tapan Bose c Govind Maharesh m Vanraj Bhatia

Propaganda film with emphatic graphics (e.g. a large question mark cut out of newspaper) for Indira Gandhi’s ‘Garibi Hatao’ (Away with Poverty) agricultural policies. Opening with shots of demonstrators led by the Mumbai Mazdoor Sabha being confronted by police, the film cuts to paddy-fields and suggests that the main political and economic problem facing the country is the presence of Sukhdev’s favourite enemy: black marketeers and hoarders. Shots of peasants at work are juxtaposed with food-laden plates at tourist resorts, and the mechanical sieving of wheat in Punjab is accompanied by bhangra folk-dance music. The film ends with a governmental raid on black marketeers staged for the film.

  BHOOMIKOSAM

1974 176’ col Telugu

d/co-s K.B. Tilak pc Anupama Films co-s/dial/co-lyr Shankara co-s/co-lyr Sri Sri co-lyr Arudra, Rimjhim, Srikanth c Ramakrishna m Pendyala Nageshwara Rao

lp Chalam, K. Jaggaiah, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Thyagaraj, Ashok Kumar, Ramana Reddy, Prabhakar Reddy, Prabha, Jamuna, Vijaya

The film propagates a CPI(ML) (cf. Naxalite) ideology and is dedicated to the director’s brother, Narasimha Rao, a member of the party. Set in rural post-Independence AP, it presents the struggle of the peasantry against the rich zamindar, continued at the end by the son of a martyred peasant. Shot on location in Telangana, it included several of Sri Sri’s radical lyrics e.g. the title song Bhoomikosam buktikosam saage raitula poratam and Evaro vastharani edo chestarani eduruchoosi mosapokuma.

  BOOTHAYYANA MAGA AYYU

1974 155’ col Kannada

d/co-p/sc Siddalingaiah pc Jain Combines co-p M. Veeraswamy, S.P. Varadaraj, G. Chandulal Jain st Gorur Ramaswamy Iyengar dial Hunsur Krishnamurthy lyr Udayashankar, R.N. Jayagopal, Vijayanarasimha c D.V. Rajaram m G.K. Venkatesh

lp Vishnuvardhan, Lokesh, MP. Shankar, Balkrishna, L.V. Sharada, Bhawani, Rushyendramani, Vaishali, Susheela Naidu

Based on Gorur Ramaswamy Iyengar’s story about a village feud that brings two families to the brink of annihilation. Ayyu (Lokesh), son of the cruel and miserly landlord Boothayya (Shankar), goes to court against Gulla (Vishnuvardhan). In the prolonged court case, Gulla’s family is reduced to penury and he becomes Ayyu’s servant in order to repay debts. Ayyu has a sudden change of heart, but Gulla plots his revenge and mobilises the village to ransack Ayyu’s house. Ayyu, however, saves the villagers from the police, and Gulla, in his turn, saves Ayyu’s family from flood waters. The film successfully combined a realism-effect, reminiscent of the Kannada New Cinema, with the conventions of rural melodrama. The reform thrust is embodied by the buffalo sacrifice which Gulla defends but Ayyu tries to prevent and which becomes a symbol for the village’s caste antagonisms. Also remembered for the tremendously popular performance of Shankar as the evil Boothayya.

  BRISTI

1974 122’ b&w Assamese

d/s Deuti Barua pc Jayashree Prod. lyr Bhupen Hazarika m Jayanta Hazarika

lp Biju Phukan, Bishnu Khargaria, Ela Kakoti, Deuti Barua, Rudra Goswami

Unusual film by noted playwright Deuti Barua. The middle-class hero’s diffidence for the girl he loves is contrasted with the lofty idealism of a friend, and the more humane promise of marriage another friend makes to a lonely, elderly woman. The film, accused of upholding the very middle-class conservatism it seeks to critique, was acclaimed for its unusual scripting style.

  CHORUS

1974 124’ b&w Bengali

d/p/co-st/co-sc Mrinal Sen pc Mrinal Sen Prod. co-st/co-sc/lyr Mohit Chattopadhyay co-st Golam Khuddus c K.K. Mahajan m Ananda Shankar

lp Utpal Dutt, Subhendu Chatterjee, Asit Bannerjee, Haradan Bannerjee, Shekhar Chatterjee, Satya Bannerjee, Snighda Majumdar, Robi Ghosh, Rasaraj Chakraborty, Geeta Sen, Dilip Roy, Moon Moon Sen, Nirmal Ghosh

Starting out as a fantasy mythological with the gods, entrenched in their fortress, deciding to create 100 jobs, the film becomes an exemplary fairy tale when 30,000 applicants start queuing up for work. The faiiy tale then becomes a didactic tragedy with realist sequences (media men interviewing individuals in the crowd of applicants) when the people realise the job scheme is grossly inadequate and popular discontent grows into a desire to storm the citadel. Freely mixing different styles and modes of storytelling including direct address to the camera, with the chorus both as narrator and as political agitator (R. Ghosh, who also plays god and the sutradhard), Sen continues exploring the possibilities of a cinematic narrative that would be both enlightening and emotionally involving without descending into authoritarian sloganising. Having gone as far in this direction as he could, Sen deploys the lessons of his experiments with complex and stylistically diverse cinematic idioms in his next feature, Mrigaya (1976).

Utpal Dutt in Chorus

  JADU BANSHA

1974 167’ b&w/col Bengali

d/sc/co-st/co-dial/m Partha Prathim Choudhury pc Montage Films co-st/co-dial Bimal Kar lyr Atulprasad Sen, Rabindranath Tagore c Krishna Chakraborty, Kanai Das

lp Sharmila Tagore, Uttam Kumar, Aparna Sen, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Santosh Dutta, Siddhartha Dutta, Dulal Ghosh, Mihir Pal, Robi Ghosh

Modernist critique of decadent rationalism by the former critic and film society organiser Choudhury. A group of young people live in an unnamed, culturally insecure town where they interact with a series of characters e.g. an old shopkeeper (Uttam Kumar) whom they torture and humiliate but who remains their staunchest ally until his death. The self-indulgent style is occasionally interrupted by lively scenes such as the encounter with a deaf politician, the ransacking of a shop and the number picturised on an Atulprasad Sen lyric, Ar kata kal thakbo basey. Aparna Sen played a double role in the film.

  JUKTI TAKKO AAR GAPPO

aka Reason, Debate and a Story aka Argument and a Story

1974 119’ b&w Bengali

d/p/s/m Ritwik Ghatak pc Rit Chitra c Baby Islam

lp Ritwik Ghatak, Tripti Mitra, Shaonli Mitra, Bijon Bhattacharya, Saugata Burman, Gyanesh Mukherjee, Utpal Dutt, Ananya Ray, Shyamal Ghoshal

Ghatak’s last film featured himself as the drunken and spent intellectual Neelkantha who goes on a picaresque journey through Bengal to reconcile himself with his wife. He is accompanied by Nachiketa (Burman) and Bangabala (S. Mitra), a young refugee from Bangladesh. On the way they are joined by a Sanskrit teacher, Jagannath (Bhattacharya). The episodic narrative also includes encounters with Shatrujit (Dutt) who was once a noted writer but who now writes pornography (apparently a reference to novelist Samaresh Bose); a ranting trade union leader and Panchanan Ustad (Mukherjee) who makes masks for Chhou dancers (a sequence is devoted to showing the famous dance). Jagannath is shot by a landlord when the group stumbles upon a land-grab action. The film ends with Neelkantha meeting a group of Naxalite students wanted by the police: he argues politics with them and is shot in a police ambush the next morning. Filmed while Ghatak was ill and suffering from alcoholism shortly before his death, Jukti is an inventive and lucid though pessimistic testament film, acted with elegance and irony by the director. With an astonishing sense of freedom Ghatak weaves together different styles and images ranging from gross calendar art (the courtship of his wife) to an almost abstract dance of death; from the elaborate Chhou performance where the goddess Durga slays the demon to lyrical depictions of nature; from inserted bits of leader footage to a Baul song. The encounters with the pornographer and the Naxalites add up to a devastating critique of contemporary politics. In the end, Ghatak offers a disabused but stubborn politics of the everyday: Neelkantha dies with a quote from the Manik Bandyopadhyay story Shilpi about a weaver who wove an empty loom because ‘one must do something’. Geeta Kapur’s essay ‘Articulating the Self into History’ (1989) is the most extended study on the film.

  RAJANIGANDHA

aka Tube Rose

1974 110’ col Hindi

d/sc/dial Basu Chatterjee pc Devki Chitra st Manu Bhandari’s short story Yeh Sach Hai lyr Yogesh c K.K. Mahajan m Salil Choudhury

lp Vidya Sinha, Amol Palekar, Dinesh Thakur, Rajita Thakur, Master Chikkoo, Rajprakash, Gopal Dutia, Naresh Suri

The novelist Manu Bhandari (Mahabhoj, Aapka Banti) was also associated with the 50s literary Nai Kahani movement in Hindi. Her story chronicles the life of a working woman, Deepa (Sinha) torn between two lovers: her intended husband, the gregarious bank clerk Sanjay (Palekar) and Navin (Thakur) whom she meets in Bombay when applying for a teaching job. Palekar’s debut performance in Hindi established his best-known screen image as a bumbling common-man hero. The film’s claim to represent realistically the middle class through Sanjay’s persona is belied by an extensive use of glamourous soft-focus imagery. It was Basu Chatterjee’s breakthrough into mainstream Hindi cinema, encouraging the notion that low-budget art-house films can be commercially successful.

  SHRI RAMANJANEYA YUDDHAM

1974 166’ col Telugu

d Bapu pc Shri Lakshminarayana Films s Gabbita Venkatarao lyr Arudra, C. Narayana Reddy, Dasarathi, Kosaraju c K.S. Prasad m K.V. Mahadevan lp N.T. Rama Rao, Arja Janardana Rao, Kantarao, Dhulipala, B. Saroja Devi, Jayanthi, Rajashri, Hemalatha, Jaikumari, K. Mukkamala, Kashinath Tata, Sridhar, Nagaraju, Ramesh, P.J. Sharma, Ch. Krishnamurthy, Ashok Kumar

Costumed mythological featuring a contest between Shiva and Parvati to ascertain whether Shakti (physical prowess) is stronger than Bhakti (devotion). The issue will be decided through a test of Hanuman’s devotion to Rama. The film, which includes the Paduka Pattabhishekham and the Yayati episodes from the Ramayana, offers an important example of NTR’s god-on-earth political image, here playing Rama.

  SONAR KELLA

aka The Golden Fortress

1974 120’ col Bengali

d/s/m Satyajit Ray pc West Bengal Govt. c Soumendu Roy

lp Soumitra Chatterjee, Santosh Dutta, Siddhartha Chatterjee, Kushal Chakraborty, Sailen Mukherjee, Ajoy Bannerjee, Kamu Mukherjee, Santanu Bagchi, Harindranath Chattopadhyay, Sunil Sarkar, Suili Mukherjee, Haradhan Bannerjee, Rekha Chatterjee, Ashok Mukherjee, Bimal Chatterjee

The first film featuring the detective Feluda from the Sherlock Holmes pastiches which Ray had published and illustrated since 1965 in his magazine Sandesh. The 6-year-old Mukul (Chakraborty) is obsessed with memories of a previous life in a golden fortress with pigeons, peacocks and camels. Parapsychologist Dr Hazra (Sailen Mukherjee) guesses that the location of Mukul’s past life is in Rajasthan and takes the child there to find it. Two crooks, Burman (Ajoy Bannerjee) and Bose (Kamu Mukherjee), read about the expedition in a local paper and, sensing there is a fortune to be made, try to kidnap Mukul. This brings the famed detective Feluda (Soumitra Chatterjee) and his sidekick Topse (Siddhartha Chatterjee) into the case. In an extended chase through Rajasthan, the detective is joined by the thriller writer Jatayu (S. Dutta) as the action, energetically orchestrated via parallel cutting, moves from cars to camels and a train. The film is dominated by the remarkable performance of Kushal Chakraborty as the boy, as well as Santanu Bagchi’s extraordinary cameo as the boy who gets kidnapped by mistake and then explains what happened to the detective. Ray made another Feluda story, Joi Baba Felunath (1978)

  UTTARAYANAM

aka Throne of Capricorn

1974 117’ b&w Malayalam d/co-sc G. Aravindan p Karunakaran pc Ganesh Movie Makers st/co-sc Thikkodiyan c Ravi Varma m Raghavan, M.B. Srinivasan

lp Mohandas, Kunju, Balan K. Nair, Adoor Bhasi, Sukumaran, Mallika, Radhamani, Shanta Devi

Aravindan’s debut extended a 60s Calicut modernism into cinema, drawing on the work of the writer Pattathiruvila Karunakaran, who produced the film, and the satirical playwright Thikkodiyan, who co-scripted it. The plot is about a disabused young man, Ravi, who has a series of ironic encounters while looking for a job. One of his mentors, Kumaran Master, and his now critically ill friend Setu had participated in the 1942 Quit India agitations with Ravi’s father (shown in flashback). The lawyer Gopalan Muthalaly, also a participant in those events, has become a rich contractor and an example of the corrupt post-Independence bourgeoisie. Ravi abandons the city and, in a mystical ending, is initiated into ‘eternal truths’ by a godman meditating on a mountain. The figures of the father and the ailing friend form a composite portrait of Sanjayan, a political activist, spiritualist and satirist, and major influence on the Calicut artists who participated in the film. Aravindan’s approach to his lead characters and his framing evoke the cartoon characters Ramu and Guruji from his Small Man and Big World series.

  AANDHI

1975 133’ col Hindi

d/sc/lyr Gulzar pc Filmyug, Om Prakash st Kamleshwar’s novel c K. Vaikunth m R.D. Burman

lp Suchitra Sen, Sanjeev Kumar, Om Shivpuri, Manmohan, A.K Hangal, Om Prakash, Rehman

A combination of marital romance and political intrigue. A woman politician, Aarti Devi (Sen), fights an election against the powerful Chandersen. Her headquarters are in a hotel owned and managed by her estranged husband J.K. (Kumar). Their memories of life together are intercut with the election campaign, the opposition turning her nightly meetings with her ex-husband into a scandal. She eventually wins the election following an impassioned speech from Chandersen’s platform in which she proclaims the man to be her husband and insists on her right to marital privacy. The Bengali musical superstar Suchitra Sen’s last Hindi film role is controversial because of her character’s obvious references, during the Emergency, to Indira Gandhi (e.g. the streak of white hair; the reference to an ambitious father who caused her marriage to break up), producing some mild censorship problems. There were some popular Kishore Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar duets such as Is mod se jaate hain, Tere bina zindagi and Tum aa gaye ho noor aa gaya hai.

  APOORVA RAGANGAL

1975 144’ b&w Tamil

d/s K. Balachander pc Kalakendra Films lyr Kannadasan c B.S. Lokanathan m M.S. Vishwanathan

lp Kamalahasan, Sundarrajan, Nagesh, Rajnikant, Srividya, Jayasudha, Kanaga Durka, Kannadasan

Melodrama in which the lovers end up exchanging parents. The rebellious Prasanna (Kamalahasan) leaves his home after quarrelling with his father (Sundarrajan) and finds shelter with the singer Bhairavi (Srividya) whose illegitimate daughter Ranjini (Jayasudha) also leaves home and finds shelter at Prasanna’s father’s house. The problem becomes acute when the newly formed couples want to marry: leading to the famous line ‘My son has become my father-in-law, your daughter has become your mother-in-law’. The film uses several avant garde conventions fashionable at the time incl. freeze frames and unconventional camera angles, although one unusual scene is the spontaneous jugalbandi in the bathroom between Prasanna and Bhairavi. Rajnikant’s debut film also re-launched Kamalahasan. Lyric writer Kannadasan plays himself.

  CHAMELI MEMSAAB

1975 144’ b&w Assamese

d/p/s Abdul Majid pc Seuj Bolchhabi Santha st Nirode Choudhury lyr/m Bhupen Hazarika c Bijoy De

lp George Baker, Binita Gohain, Hadi Alam Bora, Saleha Parveen, Abdul Majid, Master Rajib

Tragic love story featuring an English manager of a tea estate (Baker) and a labourer in his employ. The manaher is held responsible for the death of his Indian wife, who had committed suicide after giving birth to a handicapped child. The film established its director, a former actor and playwright, as a leading Assamese filmmaker, and was also known for Hazarika’s award-winning compositions.

  CHARANDAS CHOR

aka Charandas the Thief

1975 156’ b&w Hindi

d Shyam Senegal pc CFS s Shama Zaidi, Habib Tanvir lyr/m Nandkishore Mittal, Gangaram, Swarnakumar c Govind Nihalani

lp Lalu Ram, Madanlal, Bhakla Ram, Ramnath, Thakur Ram, Malabai, Fidabai, Ram Ratan, Hira Ram, Habib Tanvir, Smita Patil, Anjali Paingankar, Sadhu Meher

Benegal’s adaptation of the classic Chattisgarhi dialect folk play by the noted stage director Habib Tanvir. Remembered mainly for celebrated folk theatre actors Fidabai and Madanlal and as Smita Patil’s film debut (in the role of a princess). The crazy comedy is about petty thieves in a village who keep eluding the bumbling police until the central character, Charandas (Lalu Ram), is executed for being honest rather than for being a criminal.

  CHHOTISI BAAT

aka A Little Affair

1975 123’ col Hindi

d/s Basu Chatterjee pc B.R. Films lyr Yogesh c K.K. Mahajan m Salil Choudhury

lp Amol Palekar, Vidya Sinha, Ashok Kumar, Asrani, Nandita Thakur, Rajen Haksar, Rajendranath, Komilla Wirk

Chatterjee’s sequel to Rajanigandha (1974) continues his middle-class love stories. This is a comic tale about a lovesick clerk, Arun Pradeep (Palekar), who is too shy to declare his love to Prabha (Sinha). He is coached in assertiveness by a bluff ex-officer (Kumar) and then succeeds, besting his cocky rival and winning the woman. The film intercuts this story with Arun’s fantasies and boasts one hit song, Jaaneman jaaneman tere do nayan, sung by Yesudas and Asha Bhosle.

  CHOMANA DUDI

aka Choma’s Drum

1975 140’(120’) b&w Kannada

d/m B.V. Karanth pc Praja Films s K. Shivrama Karanth from his novel (1933) c S. Ramchandra

lp M.V. Vasudeva Rao, Jayaran, Honnaiah, Padma Kumtha, Sunderraj, Nagaraja, Nagendra, Shankar Bhat, Lakshmibai, Sarojini, Venkatesh, Mahalakshmi, Govind Bhatt

A relentlessly miserabilist but well-scored and acted story set among the mari holeya, a caste of Untouchables in Southern Karnataka who are forbidden from owning or tilling their own land. This rigid law prevents old Choma (Vasudeva Rao) repaying a long-standing debt to the landlord despite owning two buffaloes he found in the forest. The film chronicles the disintegration of Choma’s family: two of his three sons die (one drowns because Brahmins refuse to touch him), the third seeks to escape his social status by converting to Christianity. The daughter is seduced by the landlord’s secretary and then submits to the landlord himself hoping to settle the debt. Choma’s only way of transcending his grim situation is by playing his little drum nightly, sometimes accompanied by his daughter. When Choma discovers his daughter’s relationship with the landlord, he goes to the forest, releases his precious buffaloes, breaks his plough and dies a lonely old man madly playing his drum. Brilliantly carried by the performance of Vasudeva Rao, the film is one of the most successful examples of a ruralist New Indian Cinema, elevating the post-Satyajit Ray invocation of primitivist authenticity into something like a productive principle.

  DEEWAR

aka The Wall aka I’ll Die for Mama

1975 174’ col Hindi

d Yash Chopra p Gulshan Rai pc Trimurti Films s Salim-Javed lyr Sahir Ludhianvi c Kay Gee m R.D. Burman

lp Amitabh Bachchan, Shashi Kapoor, Nirupa Roy, Neetu Singh, Parveen Babi, Manmohan Krishna, Madan Puri, Iftikhar, Sudhir, Rajpal, Jagdish Raj, Kuljit Singh, Rajkishore, A.K. Hangal

Boasting one of the best-known Salim-Javed scripts, Bachchan’s hit crime film, told in flashback, relies on the familiar plot of two brothers, one of which is an exemplary cop, Ravi (Kapoor), the other a criminal, Vijay (Bachchan). The bridge between them is the mother they both adore, Sumitra (Roy) but whom Vijay cannot later visit for fear of being arrested. Vijay is the focus of the narrative as he works hard at menial jobs and suffers many humiliations to pay for his younger brother’s education. Embittered by the prevailing social iniquities, Vijay is recruited by a dockyard gang of smugglers and rises to become their leader. Ravi has to arrest him. Vijay decides to marry his pregnant lover, the dancer Anita (Babi), and go straight but she is murdered, causing him to become a ruthless vigilante while his mother gives Ravi permission to hunt down his wayward brother. Eventually a dying Vijay, shot by his brother, keeps his tryst at a temple with his mother. A phenomenal hit, the film repeats the ‘traditional’ proposition that kinship laws must prevail over legality at a very sensitive political and cultural moment: the year the Emergency was declared. Salim-Javed apparently modelled Bachchan’s character on the notorious smuggler Haji Mastan Mirza (a media celebrity as public enemy number one jailed during the Emergency and making a dramatic self-criticism afterwards). Although his fight scenes seem calibrated on those in Hong Kong action films, Bachchan’s sultry performance in the discursive scenes humanises the gangster, thus also humanising the contemporary nationalist law and order rhetoric used to legitimise dictatorial oppression. The mother-as-nation cliche, an extension of the nation-as-family cliche, both often deployed in Hindi films (cf. Mehboob’s emblematic Mother India, 1957), was mobilised here for a more ambiguous purpose: although the audience’s sympathies are directed towards the working-class rebel, the mother-nation reluctantly sanctions the legalised persecution of her well-meaning but misguided son, an action with obvious parallels in the political situation of the time.

  GANGA CHILONER PANKHI

1975 105’ b&w Assamese

d/co-sc/m Padum Barua pc Rupjyoti Films st Laxmi Nandan Bora co-sc Mohammed Sadulla lyr Shankara Deb c Indukalpa Hazarika

lp Beena Barwati, Basanta Saikia, Basanta Duara, Mohini Rajkumari, Asaideo Handige, Bipul Barua, Beena Das Manna, Bhola Kakoti

Landmark Assamese political melodrama set shortly after Independence. A petty trader refuses to let his sister marry the man she loves because he has supported a rival candidate in a local election. Instead, he forces her to marry another man, who dies tragically when he learns of his wife’s past. The bulk of the film addresses the young widow’s difficult life as she defies her family only to be rejected by the man she loves. A decade in the making, this remains the director’s only film to date.

  HAMSA GEETHE

aka The Swan Song

1975 150’ col Kannada

d/sc G.V. Iyer pc Ananthalakshmi Films st T.R. Subba Rao lyr Muthuswamy Dikshitar, Shama Sastry, Sadasiva Brahmendra, Uthukadu Venkatasubbaiah Iyer, Jayadeva c Nemai Ghosh m B.V. Karanth, Balamurali Krishna

lp Anant Nag, Rekha Rao, Narayana Rao, Mysore Mutt, G.S. Rama Rao, B.V. Karanth, Chandrasekhar, Balasubramanyam, Girimaji, Prema Karanth, Jayalakshmi Eswaran, Meenakshi, Saroja, Ramkumar

Veteran director Iyer’s first art-house film is a musical version of the legendary tale of the 19th C. Carnatic singer Bhairavi Venkata Subbaiah (Nag, in his first major screen role), who received the patronage of Chitradurga royalty and at one time defied Tipu Sultan. The singer apparently cut out his tongue to prove that ‘music is nobody’s slave’. The film presents the singer according to the conventional Romantic model of the artist: a musician who rebels against his teacher, wanders aimlessly and asks a beggar to become his new guru, attains glory, falls in love and ‘sells’ two of his compositions to survive. With less than 15’ of dialogue, the film’s sequence shots emphasise the barren, rocky outback of Chitradurga as an analogy for the musician’s quest for aesthetic rigour. One of Iyer’s first attempts to fulfil the old Mysore royalty’s search for a brahminical classicism to legitimate their British-backed rule. In this respect, Iyer’s film is at the opposite pole, in contemporary Karnataka politics, of anti-brahminical films such as Samskara (1970). Iyer’s revivalist project, which led him later to make Saint films, is repeated by K. Vishwanath’s Telugu films after Shankarabharanam (1979)

Rekha Rao in Hamsa Geethe

  JAI SANTOSHI MAA

aka In Praise of Mother Santoshi

1975 145’ col Hindi

d Vijay Sharma pc Bhagyalakshmi Chitra Mandir s R. Priyadarshini lyr Pradeep c Sudhendu Roy m C. Arjun

lp Anita Guha, Ashish Kumar, Kanan Kaushal, Trilok Kapoor, Mahipal, Manhar Desai, B.M. Vyas, Bharat Bhushan, Anant Marathe, Rajen Haksar, Dilip Dutt, Johnny Whisky, Shri Bhagwan, Leela Mishra, Asha Poddar, Lata Arora, Neelam, Surendra Mishra

Starting life as a routine B picture, the film made history by becoming one of the biggest hits of the year (with Sholay and Deewar), and made a little-known mother goddess into one of the most popular icons esp. among the urban working-class women who started observing the goddess’s ritual fast on 12 consecutive Fridays and made offerings of chick-peas. The foremost earthly disciple of the deity Santoshi (Guha) is Satyavati (Kaushal). When Satyavati marries the itinerant Birju, the wives of the celestial trio Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva feel envious and create a series of problems intended to test Satyavati’s devotion. After Santoshi has made the heavens literally rock with her rage, Satyavati emerges from her trials with her faith untarnished and so allows Santoshi to be accepted into the cosmic pantheon. The movie was lucidly analysed by the anthropologist Veena Das in her essay ‘The Mythological Film and its Framework of Meaning’ (1980). I. Masud noted some revealing differences between this mythological and its classic predecessors, showing this film to be far closer to ‘daily preoccupations’ than its generic models (e.g. gods also engage in frenetic quarrels).

  JANA ARANYA

aka The Middleman

1975 131’ b&w Bengali

d/sc/m Satyajit Ray p Subir Guha pc Indus Films st Shankar’s novel c Soumendu Roy

lp Pradip Mukherjee, Satya Bannerjee, Dipankar Dey, Lily Chakraborty, Aparna Sen, Gautam Chakraborty, Sudeshna Das, Utpal Dutt, Robi Ghosh, Bimal Chatterjee, Arati Bhattacharya, Padmadevi, Soven Lahiri, Santosh Dutta, Bimal Deb, Ajeya Mukherjee, Kalyan Sen, Alokendu Dey

The final film in Ray’s Calcutta trilogy (cf. Pratidwandi, 1970; Seemabaddha, 1971) is also his most disaffected melodrama. Further elaborating the theme of corruption which runs through the entire trilogy and would return later in e.g. Shakha Proshakha (1990), the film features the young Somnath Bannerjee (P. Mukherjee) who, unfairly assessed in his graduate examination, cannot get a job. He goes into partnership with Bishuda (Dutt) and becomes a corporate ‘middleman’ or dalal (also the term for a pimp) buying and selling. Since the purchasing officer of a mill, Goenka (Lahiri), requires a call-girl as a bribe, Somnath and his new mentor, Mitter (Ghosh), explore Calcutta’s underworld. Several comic failures later, he finally meets the prostitute Juthika (Das), the sister of a former classmate Sukumar, (G. Chakraborty), although she is too ashamed to admit to this. The film is contextualised by the Emergency situation through e.g. the references to power shortages and the then-Chief Minister Siddhartha Shankar Ray’s hostility to the film. With this grimly comical tale Ray abandoned the gentle humanism with which he chronicled the follies of his well-meaning but sometimes ill-equipped liberal intelligentsia. Even the mild sympathy he felt for the radical movements reflected in Pratidwandi now disappear before a hero willing to be led unquestioningly through life by mentors like Bishuda or Mitter. The ‘upright’ father-figure (Satya Bannerjee) now belongs to a different world from this new generation. For the next decade, Ray concentrated on children’s stories and period melodramas, turning away from the contemporary.

  JULIE

1975 145’ col Hindi

d K.S. Sethumadhavan pc Vijaya st Pamman’s novel Chattakari dial Inder Raj Anand lyr Anand Bakshi, Harindranath Chattopadhyay m Rajesh Roshan

lp Laxmi, Om Prakash, Utpal Dutt, Vikram, Jalal Agha, Sulochana, Sridevi

Sethumadhavan and Tamil star Laxmi’s best-known Hindi film is a remake of the director’s Malayalam hit Chattakkari (1974). The Anglo-Indian Julie (Laxmi) abandons her boyfriend to have an affair with Shashi (Vikram) and becomes pregnant, providing an excuse for several shots detailing the star’s body. She tries to contain the scandal by sending her son to a far-away place. The film claimed to address the attitudes of India’s Anglo-Indians but its major attraction, apart from the voyeurism, is Harindranath Chattopadhyay’s English song, My heart is beating, sung by Preeti Sagar.

  KABANI NADI CHUVANNAPPOL

aka When the Kabani River Turned Red

1975 87’ b&w Malayalam d/s P. A. Backer pc Saga Movie Makers p Pavithran c Vipin Das m P. Devarajan

lp T.V. Chandran, Raveendran, J. Siddiqui, Salam, Pailunni, Shalini, Dawn

Backer’s debut telling the love story between a young woman (Shalini) and a radical political activist (Chandran). The relationship ‘humanises’ the idealist who is declared to be a criminal. The featurette ends with police killing the hero, a tragedy the woman learns about through the newspapers. Several young Malayalam directors were strongly influenced by the film, notably TV. Chandran (Alicinte Anveshanam, 1989), who plays the lead, and Raveendran, who worked on it. The film was repeatedly censored, and even pulled out of theatres during the Emergency, apparently on Indira Gandhi’s instructions.

  KATHA SANGAMA

1975 144’ b&w Kannada

d/sc S.R. Puttana Kanagal pc Vardhini Art Pics st Giraddi Govindaraj, Veena Yelburgi, Eshwar Chandra dial Yoganarasimha lyr Vijayanarasimha c B.N, Haridas m Vijayabhaskar

lp G.K. Govinda Rao, B. Saroja Devi, Arathi, Loknath, Manjula Rao, Kalyana Kumar, Leelavathi, Gangadhar, Rajnikant

Portmanteau film based on three short stories. Hangu is about a poor university professor presented with a bribe just when his son is ill and requires expensive medical treatment. The second episode, Atithi, tells of an old spinster who once refused to marry the man who loved her and now sees him marrying her student. The third, Munithayi, has a wealthy man marrying a blind girl (Arathi) out of pity, but in his absence she is raped by an adolescent youth and later blackmailed. The husband eventually ‘forgives’ her for having been raped.

  MAMATA

1975 124’ b&w Oriya

d/sc Byomkesh Tripathi pc Peekay Prod. st Prashanta Nanda co-lyr Madhusudhana Rao, Sibabrata Das, Gopal Krishna Das co-lyr/m Prafulla Kar c Deojibhai

lp Prashanta Nanda, Suresh, Asima, Dhira Biswal, Dinabandhu, Bhanumathi, Radha Panda

Melodrama celebrating the love between a woman and her brother-in-law. Mohan goes to the city and marries Chitra. They become parent figures for Mohan’s younger brother, the rustic Ramu. When Mohan dies, gossip about an affair between Chitra and Ramu forces her to leave but she returns to take care of Ramu. This Oriya hit, largely for Prafulla Kar’s music, is regarded as having revived the region’s film industry.

  MAUSAM

1975 156’ col Hindi

d/co-sc/lyr/ Gulzar pc Sunandini Pics, P. Mallikarjuna Rao st Kamleshwar co-sc Bhushan Banmali c K. Vaikunth m Madan Mohan

lp Sharmila Tagore, Sanjeev Kumar, Om Shivpuri, Agha, Satyen Kappu, Dina Pathak, Lily Chakraborty

The successful doctor Amarnath Gill (Kumar) returns to a hill resort where 20 years ago he had an affair with the local beauty Chanda (Tagore). He learns that she had gone crazy waiting for him, married unhappily and died shortly after giving birth to a daughter. He now encounters the fiery prostitute Kajli (Tagore again) who turns out to be the daughter. Without revealing his identity, he tries to make her a socially respectable woman in several comic and, to him, embarrassing situations recalling Shaw’s Pygmalion. Kajli, who hates the man who jilted her mother and caused her death, eventually relents and leaves with the hero. Tagore’s lively performance is the highlight of the film.

  MUTHYALA MUGGU

1975 165’ col Telugu

d/sc Bapu pc Shri Rama Chitra st/dial Mullapudi Venkatramana lyr Arudra, C. Narayana Reddy, Guntur Sheshendra Sharma c Ishan Arya m K.V. Mahadevan

lp Sridhar, Sangeetha, T.L. Kantha Rao, Ravu Gopala Rao, K. Mukkamala, Suresh, Allu Ramalingaiah, Varaprasad, Suryakantam, Purnima, Jaya Malini, Kalpana, Baby Radha, Master Murali, Arja Janardana Rao, ‘Sakshi’ Rangarao, Halam

Although the author of mythologicals (cf. Shri Ramanjaneya Yuddham, 1974; Seeta Kalyanam, 1976), Bapu is better known for his updating of the genre as a critique of modernity (cf. Hum Paanch, 1980). This is a contemporary version of the Rama legend. Sridhar (Sridhar), the son of Raja Ramadas, marries Laxmi (Sangeetha) who is earlier seen with a pet monkey (evoking the monkey god Hanuman). The villain (Mukkamala) and his daughter (Malini) seek out a modern Ravana (Gopala Rao), who hides a person in the wife’s bedroom so that her husband will suspect an affair. Eventually the couple’s twins bring their parents together and wreak revenge on the Ravana figure. Gopala Rao’s stylised performance together with the twins’ ‘cute’ pranks assured the film’s entertainment value.

  NISHANT

aka Night’s End

1975 144’ col Hindi

d Shyam Benegal p Freni M. Variava, Mohan J. Bijlani pc Blaze Film Ents s Vijay Tendulkar dial Satyadev Dubey lyr Mohammed Quli Qutb Shah c Govind Nihalani m Vanraj Bhatia

lp Girish Karnad, Shabana Azmi, Anant Nag, Amrish Puri, Smita Patil, Satyadev Dubey, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Mohan Agashe, Naseeruddin Shah, Savita Bajaj, Sadhu Meher

Based on Tendulkar’s original play, apparently inspired by an actual event and written for Utpal Dutt, the film extends the Ankur (1973) theme of rural oppression in AP. A poor schoolmaster (Karnad) and his young wife (Azmi) come to a village dominated by a villainous family of zamindars, consisting of four brothers who abduct and rape his wife. The distraught schoolteacher, helped by an old priest (Dubey), finally succeeds in mobilising the villagers and they slaughter their oppressors. Although not as big a success as Ankur, the film enabled many of the actors to trade on their naturalist authenticity to become mainstream Hindi stars including the debuting Naseeruddin Shah and Amrish Puri, who plays the eldest and nastiest brother and is now the highest-priced screen villain in Hindi cinema.

  PALANKA

1975 128’ b&w/col Bengali

d/dial Rajen Tarafdar pc Film Arts, Anis Film Corp [Bangladesh] st Narendranath Mitra c Sailaja Chattopadhyay m Sudhin Dasgupta

lp Utpal Dutt, Sandhya Roy, Anwar Hussain

This Indo-Bangladesh co-production sees the return to prominence of Tarafdar (Ganga, 1960). In East Bengal during Partition, the Hindu patriarch Rajmohan (Dutt), aka White Boss because of his fair complexion, stays behind when his family emigrates to Calcutta. His only companion, the poor Maqbool (Hussain), ridicules him for staying in what is now Pakistan. Rajmohan’s daughter-in-law, facing poverty in Calcutta, asks him to sell a giant four-poster bed that had once been her dowry, and to send her the money. The opulent bed, renowned throughout the village for its size and elaborate craftsmanship, is bought by Maqbool (who dreams of making love to his wife on it). This sparks a major controversy among the Muslim gentry in the village as Maqbool is accused of trying to transcend his class position. The quarrel is eventually resolved and Rajmohan imagines Maqbool’s two children sleeping on the bed in the manner of the infant Krishna. With fluent dialogue and memorable acting, esp. by Dutt and Hussain, the recourse to the bed as a metaphor within a realist idiom allows the film to address the fantasy dimensions inherent in questions of class and religion.

Anwar Hussain (left) and Utpal Dutt (right) in Palanka

  PANDU HAVALDAR

1975 143’ b&w Marathi

d/co-lyr Dada Kondke pc Sadiccha Chitra s/co-lyr Rajesh Majumdar co-lyr Jagdish Khebudkar c Arvind Laad m Ram-Lakshman

lp Dada Kondke, Usha Chavan, Ashok Saraf, Lata Arun, Ratnamala, Gulab Mokashi, Mohan Kothivan

Kondke’s ribald crazy comedy hit, a change from his usual rural Tamasha-derived formula, continues the director-star’s fondness for sexual puns, as in the song Aho havaldar majhya kulupachi chavi haravli (‘I lost the key to my lock’). Pandu Havaldar (Kondke) is a corrupt cop, a comical figure whose costume undermines any effort to appear authoritative, and an ally of Paru Kelewali, a fruitseller with links to a smuggling ring. The gang is smashed and the cop humanised through the unashamedly sentimental use of a deaf-and-dumb woman he rescues.

  SAAMNA

aka Samna aka Confrontation

1975 151’ b&w Marathi

d/co-lyr Jabbar Patel pc Giriraj Pics s Vijay Tendulkar lyr Aarti Prabhu [aka C.T. Khanolkar], Jagdish Khebudkar c Suryakant Lavande m Bhaskar Chandavarkar

lp Shriram Lagoo, Nilu Phule, Vilas Rakate, Mohan Agashe, Lalan Sarang, Usha Naik, Sanjeevani Bidkar, Smita Patil, Asha Patil, Rajani Chavan

Tendulkar’s first independent Marathi script and Jabbar Patel’s debut is set in Maharashtra’s notorious sugar co-operatives, the power base of the state’s Congress Party. In his best-known screen role the noted Marathi stage and film actor Phule plays Hindurao Dhonde Patil with the familiar body language of the arrogantly corrupt politician secure in his power. He covers up an incident involving the military officer Maruti Kamble (Agashe) until a mystic hobo, a former schoolteacher, amateur magician and drunkard (Lagoo) challenges the politician’s might. The film’s high points are the actorial duel between the two biggest names of the Marathi theatre, Lagoo and Phule, and characters which a literary critic would describe as rounded. The film continues directly from Tendulkar’s 70s theatre (cf. Sakharam Binder, 1971) but glorifies cinema’s ability to show actual locations. Lagoo sang the hit song Kuni tari ashi phataphat.

  SANSAR SIMANTEY

1975 126’ b&w Bengali

d/co-lyr Tarun Majumdar pc Samakalin Pics st Premendra Mitra s Rajen Tarafdar co-lyr Pulak Bannerjee, Hridayesh Pandeya, Himansu Sekhar Sen c K.A. Reza m Hemanta Mukherjee

lp Sandhya Roy, Soumitra Chatterjee, Shekhar Chatterjee, Robi Ghosh, Sulata Choudhury, Samita Biswas, Utpal Dutt, Kali Bannerjee

Endearingly realist love story between a prostitute and a thief. Rajani (Roy), a streetwalker, shelters the thief Aghor (So. Chatterjee) but he steals her money. She has him beaten up by a mob and then nurses him back to health. Aghor gives her a stolen necklace and is then chased by his own gang for failing to share the booty. Eventually Rajani agrees to marry Aghor and he promises to buy her from her pimp, but he gets caught by the police. Major scenes include Aghor taking Rajani on a tour of Calcutta, the hand-held shot showing the police searching the corpse of Rajani’s friend Manada, and cameraman Reza’s controlled bounce-lighting technique. The love story does not, except at the end, interfere with the film’s intention of showing sentimentalised life in the red-light area through a series of characters like the madam, the doctor, the vendors, the hoodlums, the landlord’s agent who comes for his weekly rent, and the ‘respectable’ neighbours.

  SHOLAY

aka Flames of the Sun aka Embers

1975 199’ col Hindi

d Ramesh Sippy p G.P. Sippy pc Sippy Films s Salim-Javed lyr Anand Bakshi c Dwarka Divecha m R.D. Burman

lp Dharmendra, Sanjeev Kumar, Amitabh Bachchan, Hema Malini, Jaya Bhaduri, Amjad Khan, Iftikhar, A.K. Hangal, Leela Mishra, Macmohan, Sachin, Asrani, Helen, Keshto Mukherjee

Massively popular adventure film shot in 70mm. India’s best-known ‘curry’ western patterned on Italian westerns with admixtures of romance, comedy, feudal costume drama and musicals. In addition, it is peppered with elements from e.g. Burt Kennedy, Sam Peckinpah, Chaplin and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). The revenge plot has two adventurous crooks, Veeru (Dharmendra) and Jaidev (Bachchan) who are hired by ex-cop Thakur Baldev Singh (Kumar) to hunt down the dreaded dacoit Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan) who massacred Thakur’s family. The film tells its story in three long flashbacks, the first showing the meeting between Thakur and the crooks followed by a long sequence of bandits attacking a train; the second shows Thakur arresting Gabbar Singh, who retaliates by wiping out Thakur’s entire family, except for his younger daughter-in-law Radha (Jaya Bhaduri). This episode introduces the third and final encounter when Thakur, whose two arms have been cut off, kicks the bandit into submission. In keeping with his romantic screen image, Jaidev/Bachchan is also killed (which also allowed the film to adhere to the Hindi cinema’s norm that the widowed Radha may not remarry). A technically accomplished film, it uses its spectacular cinematography panning and craning over rocky heights and barren quarries, often under menacing clouds, mainly to build up its major legend, the evil Gabbar Singh. Amjad Khan’s best-known screen role includes dialogues that became famous throughout the country (an edited soundtrack of the film was released as an LP). The kaleidoscopic approach to the plot structure allowed the film-maker to anthologise the highlights of various genre narratives (e.g. How the West Was Won, 1962) and to combine them into a single film, a privilege usually reserved for crazy comedies but here held together by its intensely emotional current, sustained not only by the high-energy shooting styles but also by the music and savoury dialogues. The end result resembles a skilfully designed shopping mall with the viewer being propelled past successive window displays, each exhibiting an eye-catching presentation of some aspect of the popular cinema’s history. W. Dissanayake and Malti Sahai (1992) published a book-length commentary on the film.

  SWAPNADANAM

aka Journey through a Dream aka Somnambulism

1975 121’ b&w Malayalam

d/co-sc K.G. George pc K.R. Films Int st E. Mohammed co-sc Pamman c K. Ramchandra Babu m Bhaskar Chandavarkar

lp Mohandas, M.G. Soman, P.K. Abraham, Isaac Thomas, Venukuttan Nair, Rani Chandra, T.R. Omana, Prema, Mallika, Sonia

George’s commercially successful art-house debut is a marital psychodrama without the usual songs and dances. Hero Gopi (Mohandas, a medical practitioner as well as an actor) is unhappily married to Sumitra (Rani Chandra), his cousin and traditional bride. The problem is complicated by his indebtedness to her father (Nair) who sponsored his education. The film works through extensive use of flashbacks (George’s favourite storytelling device) as the hero is treated by a psychiatrist (Thomas), haunted by memories of the woman he loved at university. He ends up in a mental asylum.

  TANARIRI

1975 120’ col Gujarati

d/sc Chandrakant Sangani pc Geeta Chitra st/dial Harin Mehta lyr Kanti Ashok c Vishnukumar Joshi m Mahesh-Naresh Ip Sohrab Modi, Kanan Kaushal, Bindu, Nareshkumar, Urmila Bhatt, Vishnukumar Vyas, Naran Rajgor, Leela Jariwala

A version of the often-filmed legend associated with the 16th C. musician Tansen (cf. Tansen, 1943) at Mughal Emperor Akbar’s (Modi) court and one of the founding figures of North Indian classical music. After singing the raga Deepak (associated with light), Tansen himself burns from within and can be saved only by an equally competent singer performing the Malhar (a raga associated with the monsoon). The two women, Tana and Riri, daughters of the head of the Nagar community and victims of Akbar’s imperialism, can do so but they turn down the invitation from Akbar. This leads to royal retribution and eventually forces the two women to commit suicide.

  WAVES OF REVOLUTION

aka Kranti Ki Tarangein

1975 30’ b&w English

d/co-c Anand Patwardhan co-p Pradip Krishen, Ved Prakash

Patwardhan’s first full documentary, made on Super-8, inaugurated the independent documentary movement in India. It chronicles the Navnirman students’ movement in Gujarat (1974) which eventually led to the mass movement of Jayaprakash Narayan in Bihar, culminating in the Emergency being declared (26 June 1975). The film interprets the JP agitation as a latter-day and more radicalised version of Gandhi’s call for non-violent land reform, this time directed against Indira Gandhi’s rule. It includes several speeches by Narayan himself, and one direct interview, and shows the rallies he led in Patna (1974) and New Delhi (1975). Completed before the declaration of the Emergency, it has an epilogue on the early days of the state crackdown in the months of June and July. Extensively screened by underground groups during the Emergency, the film inaugurates several of the director’s typical documentary strategies, including the use of his own voice and his interviews while holding the camera. Along with its sequel, Prisoners of Conscience (1978), the film represents definitive coverage of the political conflicts, as well as the rhetoric, characterising those turbulent years.

  ANNAKKILI

aka Annam the Parrot

1976 134’ b&w Tamil

d Devaraj-Mohan pc SPT Films st R. Selvaraj sc/dial/lyr Panchu Arunachalam c A. Somasundaram m Ilaiyaraja

lp Sivakumar, S.V. Subbaiah, Srikanth, Thengai Srinivasan, Sujatha, Fatafat Jayalakshmi, Vennira Adai Murthy, Senthamarai, M.N. Rajam, Manimala, S.N. Lakshmi

Eternal-triangle story set and shot on location in the picturesque village of Thengumarada in a valley near Sathyamangalam. The young village midwife Annam (Sujatha) falls for the new schoolteacher (Sivakumar), but he marries her friend Sumathi (Jayalakshmi), the rich landlord’s daughter. The owner of the local cinema, Azhagappan (Srinivasan), is the villain: he abducts the teacher’s son to blackmail Annam into marrying him. She sets fire to his cinema and rescues the infant but dies in the process. Silent Tamil film shows often had live attractions on the programme and this aspect was later incorporated into the films e.g. as a special dance drama. Here, two long extracts from other films were worked into the plot by having the heroine go to her local cinema and watch Padmini dancing as Andal, the mythical devotee offering flowers to her god, and intercut with the climax - Kannamba playing the title part in Kannagi (1942) where she burns the city of Madurai after proving the innocence of her husband. The film also launched Ilaiyaraja’s phenomenal career as a music director with the songs Annakkili unnai thedudhu and Machanai partheengala, two extremely popular and long-lasting hits in TN.

  BHADRAKALI

1976 139’ b&w Tamil/Telugu

d/sc A.C. Trilogchander p Cine Bharath st Maharishi dial Arur Das lyr Vali c Vishwanath Roy m Ilaiyaraja

lp Rani Chandra, Sivakumar, Major Sundarrajan, Bhawani, Sukumari, Sivagami, Thengai Srinivasan, Manorama, Rajasekharan

Adapted from a popular novel narrating how a peaceful woman changes into a fury, the film’s climax remained unfinished due to the death of Rani Chandra, but was an immense success anyway. She plays Gayathri, whose happy middle-class marriage was ruined when a ‘chandalan’ Kandeepan raped her. Divorced and mentally disturbed, she still imagines herself to be married. Her ex-husband marries Jayanthi (Bhawani), but the evil Kandeepan lusts after Jayanthi as well and kidnaps her stepson to force her to sleep with him. Gayathri recovers her sanity long enough to hunt down the villain with a trishul and dies while killing him.

  BHUMIKA

aka The Role

1976 142’ col Hindi

d/co-sc Shyam Benegal p Lalit M. Bijlani, Freni M. Variava pc Blaze Film Ents st Hansa Wadkar’s Sangtye Aika (1970) co-sc Girish Karnad dial Satyadev Dubey lyr Majrooh Sultanpuri, Vasant Dev c Govind Nihalani m Vanraj Bhatia

lp Smita Patil, Anant Nag, Amrish Puri, Naseeruddin Shah, Sulabha Deshpande, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Baby Rukhsana, Amol Palekar, B.V. Karanth

Benegal abandons his rural settings for this cinephile fantasy based on the autobiography of the Marathi/Hindi actress Hansa Wadkar. Usha (Patil, in the role of Wadkar) is taught music by her grandmother. She tries to become a film actress as a child and eventually becomes a star in adulthood, a trajectory inflected by the four men she meets at various points in her life: husband Keshav (Palekar), narcissistic male co-star Rajan (Nag), effete film-maker Sunil Verma (Shah) with whom she makes an unsuccessful suicide pact, and the landowner Kale (Puri) whose second wife she becomes. Many aspects of the story allow the question of women’s oppression to be raised although, tragically, Usha seems to end up identifying herself with the romantic cliche of the self-sacrificing heroine, defeated by the patriarchal mores that have weighed on her since early childhood (shown in sepia flashbacks). The film opens with scenes alluding to the making of Wadkar’s best-known title, Lokshahir Ramjoshi (1947). The music test which Govindrao Tembe and Baburao Painter gave the young Wadkar at Shalini Cinetone is reconstructed, a rather poignant moment since Wadkar hates the very music which elevates her to stardom. However, film history is treated with poetic licence as the story roams through some pre-WW2 genres: Bombay Talkies is evoked through Sunila Pradhan who is made up to look like Devika Rani; this is followed by quotes from Kismet (1943) and allusions to Wadia’s masked stunt films. The soundtrack uses radio broadcasts about Pearl Harbor and other events to provide historical markers.

  CHHATRABHANG

aka The Divine Plan

1976 80’ col Hindi

d/co-p/s Nina Shivdasani co-p Asha Sheth, Vashketu Foundation c Apurba Kishore Bir m Edgar Varese

lp Amrish Puri

An allusive documentary shot in 1975 with a commentary written by Vinay Shukla and narrated by Puri, India’s notorious screen villain. The film uses an aestheticised, painterly shooting style to meditate on the iniquities of the caste system esp. in rural areas. The focus of the story is the fictional reconstruction of a real-life episode in which Harijans confront Brahmin elites and eventually the police, when their well dries up. It ends with some documentary interviews with real people involved in the original struggle. Born in Bombay (1946), Shivdasani was trained as a painter and a photographer in New York and Los Angeles. She is probably the first Indian woman director of experimental films. After four short films, this is her first feature-length work.

  CHUVANNA VITHUKAL

aka Red Seedling

1976 96’ b&w Malayalam

d/s P.A. Backer p Salam Karasheri pc Navadhara Movie Makers c Vipin Das m P. Devarajan

lp Shantakumari, Rehman, Zeenat, Nilambur Aisha, V.V. Anthony, Siddiqui, Nilambur Balan, Sethu

Melodrama about two sisters. Bharati (Shantakumari) works as a prostitute for Madam Rudrama and tries to secure a better life for her younger sister Lekha, but the prostitute is caught in a police raid and jailed while Lekha disappears with a dubious young man. After she is released, Bharati plies her trade on the streets. A truck driver, Keshavan, is kind to her and a new life seems possible when a haggard Lekha suddenly arrives on Bharati’s doorstep, holding a baby and explaining that her lover has left her. The older sister sees their chance of a better life vanish as new burdens are placed on them.

Chuvanna Vithukal

  GALPA HELEBI SATA

1976 148’ col Oriya

d Nagen Ray pc Swati Films st/dial Basanta Mahapatra sc/c P.D. Shenoy lyr Gurukrishna Goswami c Surendra Sahu m Bhubhan, Hari

lp Banaja, Sudharani, Harish, Suresh, Soudamini, Tanuja

Wealthy hero meets local belle while touring the famous temples of Konarak, Orissa. He marries her and then goes home, promising to return. When he fails to do so, the woman traces him to his home. After first rejecting her he eventually accepts her as his wife. Oriya cinema’s first colour film is better known for its music, composed by Hari, i.e. the noted flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia, and Bhubhan. Hit song hits include E banara chai and E mora dost, sung by Kishore Kumar’s son Amit Kumar, and Sathi re jaa kahi, sung by Suman Kalyanpur.

  GHASHIRAM KOTWAL

1976 108’(98’) col Marathi

d K. Hariharan, Mani Kaul, Kamal Swaroop, Saeed Mirza pc Yukt Film Co-op s/lyr Vijay Tendulkar from his play c Binod Pradhan, Rajesh Joshi, Manmohan Singh, Virendra Saini m Bhaskar Chandavarkar

lp Mohan Agashe, Rajani Chavan, Om Puri, Vandana Pandit, Shriram Ranade, Ravindra Sathe

This remarkable avant-garde experiment in collective film-making is based on one of the most celebrated plays in contemporary Indian theatre, staged in 1972 by the Theatre Academy, Pune (members of which participate in the film’s cast). The play used Marathi folk forms like the Gondhal and the Keertan in an elaborately choreographed musical featuring the legendary Nanasaheb Phadnavis, the prime minister of Peshwa Madhavrao II and the real power behind Maharashtra’s Peshwa throne (1773–97). The original play, a transparent allegory referring to Indira Gandhi’s reign, was adapted in order to comment on Maratha and Indian history, starting from the enthronement of the child Peshwa Madhavrao II, until the final decline of the empire and the arrival of the British (cf. Ramshastri, 1944). It presents the decadent Nanasaheb (Agashe) and his lieutenant Ghashiram (Puri), a Brahmin from Kanauj, whom he uses to mount a reign of terror in the capital city of Pune. The main plot concerns Nana’s spy network, the rout of the British at Wadgaon (1779), Ghashiram’s rise and his fall when Nana sacrifices him, and the popular revolt against Nana’s henchman leaving the prime minister (and true culprit) unscathed. The film’s main significance resides in the way it adapts theatre to investigate cinema itself, a point underlined by the chorus at the beginning of the movie and, at the end, the quote from Glauber Rocha’s Antonio das Mortes (1969) as the sutradhara (chorus) suddenly enters into the present when a truck leaves the quarry. The collective of former FTII students made one more film, Saeed Mirza’s debut Arvind Desai Ki Ajeeb Dastaan (1978) before folding. Ghashiram Kotwal itself was subject to a court order from the bank which loaned the production finance, delaying its general screening after the premiere in Madras in January 1977.

  HUNGRY AUTUMN

1976 75’ b&w English

d/c Gautam Ghose pc Cine 74

Ghose’s first major film is a documentary about the 1974 Bengal famine, analysing how famines come about and chronicling their impact in the cities and the villages of India. Made on a Paillard Bolex by a group calling itself the ‘Joris Ivens collective’, it was one of the first Indian documentaries to face censorship under the Emergency. Much of the footage reflects Ghose’s preoccupation, later developed in his features, with people surviving on the margins of society.

  KABHI KABHIE

1976 177’ col Hindi-Urdu

d/co-sc Yash Chopra pc Yash-Raj Films st Pamela Chopra co-sc/dial Sagar Sarhadi lyr Sahir Ludhianvi c Kay Gee, Romesh Bhalla m Khayyam

lp Amitabh Bachchan, Shashi Kapoor, Waheeda Rehman, Raakhee, Neetu Singh, Rishi Kapoor, Naseem, Simi Garewal, Parikshit Sahni

The poet Amit (Bachchan) loves Pooja (Raakhee) but she, under pressure from her parents, marries another (S. Kapoor). The resulting tensions between the two families are resolved only in the next generation: Pooja’s son (Rishi Kapoor) will choose the partner he prefers. According to the film, the object of his desire also chooses him. Remembered for Mukesh’s rendering of the title song Kabhi kabhie mere dil main khayal ata hai.

  MANIMUZHAKKUM

aka Tolling of the Bell

1976 112’ b&w Malayalam

d/sc P. A. Backer pc Anaswara Chitra st Sara Thomas m P. Devarajan

lp Hari, Cyril, Veeran, Prabhakaran, Urmila, Charulata, Vani

Backer’s 2nd film is a melodrama about an infantile youth, Jose Paul, whose love life is blighted by his early years in a Christian orphanage. Born a Hindu, he is imbued with Christian beliefs by a kindly priest, Father Francis. Later he is adopted by a rich Hindu uncle, who renames him and urges him to change his religion. Jose Paul’s problems with his own sense of identity are dramatised in terms of his relations with women: rejected by a rich woman for his complicated past, he is refused next by a Hindu woman for having been a Christian and again by the daughter of his Christian employer in Madras for having been a Hindu.

  MANMATHA LEELAI

1976 161’col Tamil

d/sc K. Balachander pc Kalakendra Movies lyr Kannadasan c B.S. Lokanathan m M.S. Vishwanathan

lp Kamalahasan, Y.G.P. Mahendran, Y.G. Parthasarathy, M.R.R. Ravi, Harihara Subramanyam, Halam, Y. Vijaya, Jayapradha, Hema Choudhury, Jayavijaya, Sudha

Balachander’s comedy-melodrama about a rich company director (Kamalahasan) who has everything but a child. He compulsively has affairs until he comes to terms with his infertility just in time to save his marriage.

  MANTHAN

aka The Churning

1976 134’ col Hindi

d/co-st Shyam Benegal pc Sahyadri Films co-st V. Kurien sc Vijay Tendulkar dial Kaifi Azmi lyr Niti Sagar c Govind Nihalani m Vanraj Bhatia

lp Girish Karnad, Smita Patil, Naseeruddin Shah, Sadhu Meher, Anant Nag, Amrish Puri, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Mohan Agashe, Savita Bajaj, Abha Dhulia, Anjali Paingankar

Although the film suggests in its opening title, ‘500,000 farmers of Gujarat present …’, that it was publicly financed, it was in fact made through the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB), a controversial organisation headed by Dr V. Kurien, who shares a script credit. Established in 1965 to regularise milk co-operatives and to enhance their productivity with new technology, the NDDB was accused of aggravating India’s foreign debt and of diverting resources destined to help the rural poor into servicing the urban upper-class market. Made during this controversy to enhance the NDDB’s image, Manthan tells a version of the organisation’s early years when corrupt local politicians, middlemen and an uneducated community’s prejudices had to be overcome to create local co-operatives. Karnad plays what is presumably a fictional version of Dr Kurien himself while Kharbanda is the villainous Sarpanch (village head). Shah and Patil represent the voices of progress among the peasantry. The Andhra Hindi spoken in Ankur (1973) and Nishant (1975) is here replaced by Gujarati Hindi.

  MRIGAYA

aka The Royal Hunt

1976 119’ col Hindi

d/co-sc Mrinal Sen p Rajeshwara Rao pc Udaya Bhaskar co-sc Mohit Chattopadhyay st Bhagavati Charan Panigrahi c K.K. Mahajan m Salil Choudhury

lp Mithun Chakraborty, Robert Wright, Mamata Shankar, Gyanesh Mukherjee, Sajal Roy Choudhury, Samit Bhanja, Ann Wright, Sadhu Meher, Anup Kumar

After a series of stylistically complex, politically oriented experiments with modes of cinematic storytelling, Sen achieved this controlled yet seductive allegorical tale shot in vibrant colours. Set in the 30s in Orissa with echoes of the Santhal revolt, a tribal hunter, Ghinua (Chakraborty) feels a kinship with a middle-aged British colonial administrator (Wright) who is equally passionate about hunting and perhaps also attracted to the vigorous young man. Protected by colonial notions of law and order, the moneylender Bhuban Sardar (Meher) pursues a tribal rebel (Bhanja) and legally murders him, taking his head to the Administrator for his reward. When Ghinua’s wife (Shankar) is seized by the greedy moneylender in lieu of payment, the young man hunts down the villain and proudly takes the villain’s head as a hunting trophy to the British officer, claiming he has rid the jungle of its most savage beast. The young hero in his turn becomes the prey of colonial justice. Made during the Emergency, the film’s ramifications go beyond the depiction of a clash of cultures, advocating resistance against the imposition of an administrative tyranny that ends up recompensing the perpetrators of injustice. First major role by Mithun Chakraborty, later a Hindi cinema star associated with disco musicals.