Beautiful-sounding song composed by Pandit Amarnath; beautiful scene also. It is my impression at this point that Hindi films from the 1940s generally did not convey an unrealistically cheerful view of life.
I found this song posted at one of the YouTube sites that I subscribe to, a couple of days ago. Coincidentally, a debate had started in a prior post regarding whether S.D. Batish or G.M. Durrani was the male singer in the Shamshad Begum-led song “Pagdee Pahan Ke…” from Madhosh (1951). I held onto the clip because I thought the debate might be settled soon and then I would have something else definitive to add (or definitely not to add), but it doesn’t seem to have been fully settled at this point. (I have to say, there is something satisfying about the fact that a question I raised on this blog regarding one particular song has inspired so much debate. Of course, I am not as qualified in knowledge or background as either of the debaters, so I am keeping somewhat neutral here, but I am following this closely.) Also it was nice to discover S.D. Batish and to hear a little more about G.M. Durrani, whose voice I did very much enjoy in a duet that he sang with Noor Jehan in one of the songs from Mirza Sahiban. I have generally neglected male singers and dancers on this blog, and it is time I paid more attention to some of them. I do know a little about some of the female singers from the ’40s, and I get the impression that female stars and singers got much more attention in that decade. But I like both the male and female singers from the ’40s, a decade which contained some beautiful music. In fact, the 1940s are becoming my favorite decade for Hindi film music. The ’50s may have had more great dance scenes and better movies in general, but most of the music I’m listening to lately is Hindi film music from the 1940s or the first couple of years of the ’50s. (And as I’ve said before, isn’t it ironic, considering that I once prided myself on my knowledge of the contemporary global music scene? Though contemporaries have remixed 1940s film music quite a few times lately, as I have discovered. I have been thinking of doing a post of less-than-stellar remixes of ’40s and early ’50s songs – but haven’t been able to bring myself to put those clips on this blog as yet, since the originals are so much better.)
Happy 80th birthday, Lata Mangeshkar. For some very good Lata birthday posts – two years in a row – you should go to Carlito’s blog, here and here.
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P.S. That’s a nice picture of Lata on the right, which I found surfing around last night. Don’t let the blog format confuse you; the image at the top doesn’t feature Lata. ;-)
It’s been a long time since I did a “songs stuck in my head” post, but this one would qualify perfectly. I’m just playing it over and over, especially for those sweet vocals by you-know-who… Actually, the whole Madhosh soundtrack, by Madan Mohan, is a very uplifting and catchy work (maybe not as deep or heavy as others that I’ve been listening to lately, but then I don’t think it’s meant to be). Usha Kiran’s acting and dancing in a couple of these songs is very charming also (though no doubt Meena Kumari was the main attraction in this film). I don’t know much about Usha Kiran, though she apparently acted in films for several decades. Anyway, I think I’ll put this movie on my list and pick it up sometime.
This is one of many very colorful scenes in the Malayalam movie Arabikkatha (2007), which I finally found in the library yesterday and watched last night… And I have to say, this movie was as enjoyable as I’d expected. This is a very sweet good vs. evil kind of tale, about a good and idealistic communist versus a mean and corrupt communist. (Once again…only in Kerala…) It’s also story about how this good and idealistic communist learns a few things to temper some of his more naive notions. In the middle, there seems to be a romance brewing, but that doesn’t fully develop because of another nice realistic touch; that is, that the fantasies our hero has about his dream Chinese girl can’t really come true, and neither can the fantasies he’s always had about China. That part is a bit tangential for a central sort-of-romance, but it also provides an excuse for a really fun fantasy/dream sequence (which I actually posted to this blog a few days before May Day), which includes some great little touches like this statue:
As I’ve said before, if you think communist references and imagery disappeared from Indian films after the 1950s, you just need to set your sights a little further south, where socialism has been thriving (at least until the last elections…).
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P.S. If anyone didn’t get why I thought old Mehboob would like that house so much, here’s another look at his logo.
My eyes and ears were riveted for close to half of the movie… Beautiful music (Shankar Jaikishan’s best, and one of Lata’s best), beautiful scenes and settings, real quality acting (Nargis was outstanding), and incredible chemistry between Raj and Nargis. (I’ve also been watching Mela (1948) on and off the past few days, which pairs Nargis with Dilip Kumar. Dilip is great and Nargis is great here also, but the chemistry between them doesn’t come close to this!)
So, I wanted to love this movie, I wanted to say that it was Raj Kapoor’s first masterpiece. But there were a couple of problems for me, such as the plot. The plot just wasn’t very interesting to me, and it ended in completely predictable fashion (which must have been predictable even in 1949, I think).
It basically revolves around two guys roaming around the mountains and various related vacation spots, seeking or finding love with very different approaches. One guy, Gopal, played by Prem Nath, is a big cad, thinking that he can be casual about love, being unfaithful and very neglectful to the pretty and obviously rather vulnerable girl Neela, played by Nimmi. (By the way, I was reminded of her role in Aan, which came outtwo years later, where she played another love-obsessed and obviously doomed character. I guess Nimmi did well with such roles.) Then there’s the character whom Raj plays, named Pran (probably not a choice that would have been made a couple of years later), who’s a big romantic waiting for the true love to whom he will devote himself wholly, eternally, etc. And that, of course, happens when he meets the Nargis character, Reshma.
Meanwhile, Pran has been giving a few speeches to Gopal about how he’ll get what’s coming to him if he continues his careless behavior, and there are many references to how he’s playing with fire. But Gopal refuses to return to Neela in a timely fashion because he’s having too much fun travelling around, enjoying the night life, dancing with Cuckoo and that sort of thing, while Neela is apparently getting increasingly miserable…
And as the movie progresses, we hear more and more poetic lines being exchanged by everyone with everyone about love. There’s pretty much nothing else that the main characters talk about, and that is the biggest disappointment. Personally, I found myself longing for the social content of Raj Kapoor’s slightly later movies. Maybe it’s just a matter of opinion whether you take to the big questions being raised in movies like Shree 420 and Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai regarding capitalism and socialism, practicality versus idealism, the nature of the outlaw culture, etc., but let me tell you, I love that stuff! Here, there’s some stuff about romanticism versus modernity (with maybe an insight on the brutality of true backwardness), and I think there’s some stuff about the plight of woman(?), but the big questions that make Raj’s ’50s films so interesting to me just don’t arise (yet) – or let’s say arise only barely.
Also, very much unlike in Raj’s somewhat later films, there is no real discussion of how the main male characters must earn a living, what they in fact must do to earn a living, and whether that living can be honest or not. There is a rather moving scene involving a prostitute who is selling herself in order to feed her sick child (a scene that reminded me a lot of a scene from Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa – though Barsaat came out close to a decade earlier), but there seems to be no discussion about how the need to earn a living affects either Gopal or Pran.
Could it be that these two guys are just too independently wealthy to have such concerns? As Philip of Philip’sfil-ums notes, this film seems to be “centered around the adventures of two city boys who apparently have no worldly obligations beyond roaming the Vale of Kashmir in an enormous foreign car, hiring ostentatious bungalows, composing poetry, and breaking hearts.”
As I’ve said, there’s some weirdness in the middle, which I suppose comprises the most suspenseful part of the plot, but it didn’t hold my interest all that much. Mainly, this part revolves around the perils of Reshma. To sum it up quickly, we see Reshma nearly drowned due to a murderous act by her father, who is concerned that her romantic liaisons with Pran will endanger an arranged marriage and, worse, cause insult to the family’s honor. (Could this be one of the earlier films to go in that direction? Certainly, there were a whole lot that did so later…) Then Reshma ends up being rescued from the river by some bullying imbecilic fisherman/woodsman/mountain man(?) who believes that now he has the right to own her and force her to marry him. (And he can get pretty scary – after all, it is K.N. Singh!)
Additionally, there’s some odd Buddhist monk-type “doctor” who seems to enable and facilitate the bullying imbecile’s worst tendencies, mainly because he’s afraid of the guy, and also – at least in the case of the impending wedding – he might get a little money out of the deal. (Not a flattering comment on the spiritual men of the mountains, I guess.) And poor Reshma almost does get bullied into marrying the fisherman/mountain man, but just in the nick of time, Pran and Gopal end up literally crashing her wedding, trashing their expensive car and putting Pran’s life in danger (before it is further endangered by that big bully groom, who really gives a go at finishing him off before the police arrive). After that, there are some dramatic scenes in the hospital where the undying faith of Reshma’s love saves Pran’s life, followed by a joyous reunion.
Gopal also goes through a sort of conversion witnessing all this, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t going to pay dearly for his past sins (though someone else is going to pay even more). And I must admit, the end is certainly sad enough, even though it is also entirely expected. (By the way, if you think there’s any chance you don’t know what’s going to happen at the end, don’t let me spoil that for you. If you have no such concerns, you can see the whole sad ending in this song clip .)
I don’t mean to complain too much about this film because in many ways it is a fine work. I suppose I wouldn’t have been at all disappointed if my expectations near the beginning hadn’t been lifted into the stratosphere. But I think those sorts of expectations could be met more completely with another viewing of Shree 420. (Or maybe, one of these days, if I finally get myself a copy of Awara…)
V. Shantaram’s Teen Batti Char Rasta gives me a perfect opportunity to continue my recent trend of comparing old movies to one another, because this one immediately reminded me of a couple of others that I’d seen. When I saw the opening scene, with the household containing five daughters-in-law speaking languages from five different Indian states (in addition to two parents who come from different places, and all those sons who must be considered an odd combination), I immediately thought, oh, so this is a comedy about the need for Indian unification, and the Vyjayanthimala starrer New Delhi (1956) came to mind.
But when the story of Sandhya’s character Kshama comes out, it turns out that there’s another moral even more prevalent. Now, I was thinking of the 1952 Pakistani film Dupatta. Back when I wrote my review of Dupatta, I talked about the line spelling out the moral near the beginning, “Love doesn’t depend on beauty” (uttered by a doctor who is obviously unable to do some requested plastic surgery), and I said, “Of course, we are never quite sure if this moral would work the same for the characters involved if the gender of Beauty and the Beast were reversed.” But now, with Teen Batti Char Rasta, the situation is posed with the genders reversed…sort of. There’s a difference, though. Dupatta revolves around the story of a man who’s been badly burned in World War II (within a story told to a woman whose husband has been badly damanged in a car accident), and we know even before we see him that he’s going to be damn ugly. But Kshama doesn’t look deformed in Teen Batti; she’s just looks like Sandhya with a lot of dark makeup on. In fact, if you ask me, she’s quite cute and adorable. I don’t know if this trick was deliberate – maybe to reinforce the idea of how silly it is in India to consider dark skin a sign of ugliness? – but in any event, it took me some suspension of belief to consider Sandhya as the ugly duckling who everybody wants to shun upon sight.
But Kshama also has another identity, the radio singer Kokila, whose voice is considered very beautiful. And that makes sense since, after all, her voice is Lata Mangeshkar’s, and these are some of the sweetest Lata songs I’ve ever heard! (I especially like the song I posted the other day. Of course, credit should also be given to the music director, Shivram Krishan.) So, it makes sense that Kshama, who is taunted and insulted constantly because of her looks, would find it very rewarding to be a singer on the radio, where she, as Kokila, is very much admired. The DVD subtitles might get it wrong sometimes…
…but it’s clear that her natural medium is RADIO.
But then what happens when somebody forms a picture in his mind based on her voice on the radio and then finds out what she really looks like? That’s the centerpiece of the drama that unfolds in Teen Batti Char Rasta. This drama really gets underway when Kshama gets a job as a maid in that household with all the daughters-in-law from different states and encounters the sixth, unmarried son. This guy, Ramesh, played by Karan Dewan, is apparently considered a real handsome devil…
Though I’m not so sure myself – personally, I think Dewan looked a bit better nine years earlier, in Ratan. Still, everyone expects that Ramesh will find himself a beautiful wife – especially since he is some kind of writer and artist to boot (and not the poor kind of artist or writer either). Ramesh, meanwhile, is completely in love with the voice of Kokila, but since he has no idea that she and Kshama are the same woman, he creates his own picture of her, based on his mental impressions, that is a bit off the mark…
When Kshama sees this picture and finds out who it is supposed to be, she immediately dreads the thought of Ramesh learning that she is the real Kokila. But unfortunately, she can’t avoid this discovery one night, when Ramesh stalks her after a radio performance. For a while, he is able to see her only from behind or at a distance, but when he finally catches up with her and notices that she is entering his own house, there’s no disgusing the truth anymore. After this, there are a couple of unpleasant scenes in which he tells Kshama outright that he has been devastated by the discovery that she is Kokila, because it has dashed his hopes, ruined his aspirations, etc. Kshama stands up to Ramesh a little, but neither she nor anybody else informs him how insulting his behavior really is, nor is there any mention that maybe there’s something a bit creepy about stalking one’s favorite radio star across town. In any event, Kshama disappears in shame for a little while, and this is when we begin to see signs that maybe Ramesh is starting to fall for the real Kshama…
And that is probably the dramatic peak of this movie that is for the most part pretty light fare, though it is memorable as well as fun, mainly for the performances by Sandhya. Having seen Sandhya in Navrang and in many dance scenes from other films, I knew that she had qualities as an actress, but I didn’t realize that she could be so much fun as an actress even in a movie in which she’s acting much more than she’s dancing. She does have a few really nice dance scenes here – especially when she is relating news about her feelings or the events of her life to her poor and ailing father – who for some reason always brings out the dancer in her…
But most of the work that Sandhya does in this film is straight acting and a lot of wonderful miming to Lata’s voice. She generates much sympathy in the many sad moments that this character goes through, but for the most part, she seems just right for what is essentially a zany comedy. (Somewhere toward the end of the movie, in one of a few plot twists I won’t go into too much, some jealous people give Kshama a powder to drink that causes her to lose her voice, without any idea if or when it will ever return. It’s a terrible thing to happen to her, but on the other hand, the hoarse voice that Sandhya puts on for this part of the movie is quite funny.)
V. Shantaram’s direction for this film is sometimes quite zany too, though it actually seems a little less fantastic and more realistic than in, say, Navrang, or in the many clips I’ve seen from other movies that he made in the 1950s. He keeps the off-the-wall touches relatively minimal and light, and when he does get kookier, it’s to very nice effect, as in the final number, “Teen Deep Aur Char,” which left me smiling for a while afterwards…
I received this message from a friend, forwarded (with picture included) from a New York University cinema studies list…
The Department of Cinema Studies’
WEDNESDAY NIGHT SERIES
A weekly public gathering of the Cinema Studies community, designed to foster the exchange of ideas between students, faculty, and guests. Refreshments provided at all events.
NEXT WEDNESDAY:
Faculty Film Night
Richard Allen – Pakeezah
Professor Richard Allen presents one of his favorite films: Pakeezah (1972, Kamal Amrohi, 126 minutes). Discussion to follow.
Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 6:15PM
Tisch School of the Arts
721 Broadway, Room 648, Michelson Theater
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I searched a little for more info… I couldn’t find it, but I did find these things:
If you would like to contact me, e-mail to chardsinger [at] yahoo.com. I also have a Facebook timeline, where I have been spending too much time. (But it is only partially like this blog in terms of subject matter.) Anyway, especially if you know me somewhat, and you are on Facebook, you might want to connect there. Send an e-mail so that we can talk more about it and maybe exchange URLs to “friend.”
![image003[1]](https://roughinhere.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/image0031.jpg "image003[1]")
Dances on the Footpath 
