When I was compiling my list of Raj Kumar songs last week, it occurred to me that there are several major films of his that I haven’t reviewed yet. Dil Apna aur Preet Paraayi, for instance, which stars one of my favourite actresses, and features one of my favourite songs. A film I watched many years ago and remember only in a fairly rudimentary way. Time for a rewatch, I decided.
Years ago, while going through Dean Martin’s filmography (I went through a phase of being obsessed with his work), I stumbled upon Bells Are Ringing. I saw it for Dean, and while I liked him in it, I was bowled over by his co-star, Judy Holliday. Why hadn’t I even heard of her before? Why hadn’t anyone told me about her? How come she isn’t better-known?
Since then, whenever I’ve heard of a Judy Holliday film, I’ve hurried off to see if it’s available online. This is the latest: a delightful rom-com, starring Judy Holliday opposite Jack Lemmon in his first big role, about a young woman who wants to make a name for herself. Literally.
The story begins in New York’s Central Park, where Gladys Glover (Judy Holliday) is wandering around, in her stockinged feet, tossing peanuts to pigeons. She sits down next to some random man and because he’s irritable and passes snide remarks about her feeding the pigeons, walking barefoot, etc, Gladys snaps back at him, giving as good as she gets.
If you are an aficionado of old Hindi film music, you can probably guess why I wanted to watch this film: it has some really good songs, courtesy Majrooh Sultanpuri and Chitragupta (who should probably head the list of seriously underrated music directors). There was, in my case, another reason, a slice of family history. During World War II, when the Japanese invaded Burma and thousands of Indians had to flee the country, my uncle Col KC Datta (my father’s sister’s husband) was one of the Indian Army officers tasked with helping refugees cross those many miles of jungle into India. It was a hair-raising experience; my uncle caught kala azar on the way, but managed to complete the task.
What might Burmah Road be about? I did not really expect that it would be about that epic trek my uncle was part of; but perhaps something about the Burma campaign? Or about the INA in Burma, à la Pehla Aadmi? If none of that, at least something like Aadhi Raat ke Baad or Howrah Bridge, set partly in Burma?
Nope. Nothing like that. Burmah Road in this film is the name of a principality, and it’s not very clear exactly where it is. It is ruled by a king (Chaman Puri), whom everybody refers to as His Highness Burmah Road. This king has a young son, and is very worried about the future of this child, as well as of Burmah Road.
Aka The Immortal Song, a Marathi film directed by V Shantaram, about the Marathi poet Honaji Sayaji Shilarkhane (1754-1844).
Given that Indian cinema (and not Hindi cinema, but several other regional film industries as well) have always focussed heavily on songs, it’s hardly a surprise that films based on the lives of singers and/or poets have been made time and again. In Hindi, there’s been everything from Meera to Mirza Ghalib to Kavi Kalidas; in Gujarati, I’ve seen Kalapi, about Sursinhji Takhtasinhji Gohil ‘Kalapi’. And then there’s this, about Honaji.
The story begins in Saswad, where Honaji ‘Hona’ (Panditrao Nagarkar) lives with his mother Vithabai (Lalita Pawar) and his wife (?). This is not actually their home; they used to live in Pune with Hona’s uncle. However, the uncle was part of a tamasha troupe, and Vithabai found that a potential bad influence on Hona. She didn’t want him to get corrupted, so she shifted the family to Saswad, where Hona now spends his time being a cowherd.
In Satyajit Ray’s 1966 film Nayak (‘The Hero’), the eponymous ‘hero’, the hugely popular superstar Arindam Mukherjee (Uttam Kumar), is travelling by train from Kolkata to Delhi to receive an award. He is sharing a compartment with a family, of whom the father, Mr Bose (Ranjit Sen) spends most of his time outside the compartment. The mother (Bharati Devi) is left pretty much on her own to look after their teenaged daughter Bulbul (Lali Chowdhury), who is unwell and is lying on the upper berth.
When Arindam first enters their compartment, the effect of his arrival is palpable. Bulbul has been reading a book; one look at him and the book ends up beside her, forgotten. On the berth underneath, Mrs Bose, having settled in (and informed Arindam that her daughter is a fan of his) surreptitiously opens her handbag, takes out a mirror and takes a quick peek at herself.
Such is the effect of close proximity to a celebrity.
Continue readingAka Golconda ka Qaidi: a film made both in Hindi as well as English, though I’ve only seen the English version, not the Hindi, which I couldn’t find anywhere, despite much searching.
Prem Nath directed and starred in Prisoner of Golconda, which also starred his wife Bina Rai and his younger brother Rajendra Nath (whose debut this was, going by the film’s credits). I don’t remember now how I happened to stumble upon the film on YouTube, but I was immediately intrigued; Indian films in English from that era always have that effect on me. What’s more, on a web page, I saw it mentioned (as it turned out, incorrectly) that Prisoner of Golconda was a fantasy. This, I decided, was a film that might merit watching, since the last Prem Nath-starrer fantasy I saw, Aab-e-Hayat, was a thorough entertainer.
But no, Prisoner of Golconda is no fantasy at all. This is a patriotic film, a story set in the early 1940s, and Prem Shankar (Prem Nath) is a police officer, an ASP, who comes to the rescue of a besieged police station where the local officer, Zorawar Singh (Hiralal) has found himself surrounded by a crowd of irate locals. These people, full of anger for the high-handed ways of the British government (and, naturally enough, seeing in the police the embodiment of that colonial government) have been on the rampage. They have already set fire to a post office and are now getting ready to destroy the police station as well.
When Dharmendra passed away earlier this year, it struck me that while I have watched many of his films—from both before and after 1970, the cut-off year for my blog—I have reviewed relatively few. I decided, therefore, to make amends. By watching, for instance, Aaye Din Bahaar Ke and Aaya Saawan Jhoomke. Here’s another one, teaming Dharmendra with one of his more frequent co-stars, Sharmila Tagore.
The story begins on a road where Sunil (?) is walking along with his father, Hari Ram (?). Daddy, walking in the middle of the road [? Why? Also, you know what’s going to happen when a character walks in the middle of the road], is hit by a car, and the next we see, he’s dying in hospital, with Sunil, Sunil’s younger sister, and their mother (Achla Sachdev) looking gloomily on while a policeman tries to get Daddy’s final testimony. Daddy manages to gasp out an accusation: Seth Vishwanath has murdered him; the car accident was no accident. He dies, and the cop goes off to arrest Sethji.
After a long, long time, a review of an Alfred Hitchcock film. Hitch has been one of my favourite directors ever since I (then aged twelve) first watched The Lady Vanishes. In the first few years of blogging, I ended up reviewing most of my favourite Hitch films from before 1970: The Thirty-Nine Steps, Rear Window, The Trouble With Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Spellbound, Lifeboat… and others. But it’s been a while, and this film has been lying among the bookmarks on my browser, waiting to be watched, for quite a while now.
The aptly-named Stage Fright is set in the world of theatre, where Eve Gill (a very young Jane Wyman) is an aspiring actress. She has still not quite managed to make it into any productions, really, but she is hopeful. When the story begins, though, Eve is not acting or rehearsing: she’s busy helping a friend of hers who’s in trouble. Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd) is likely to get implicated in a murder, and Eve is driving him to (hopefully) safety.
In 1947, as a birthday present for Queen Mary, Agatha Christie wrote a radio play called Three Blind Mice, about eight people snowed in, in a manor—one of them (who, we don’t know till the end) a murderer. Later adapted into a short story and then a theatrical play called The Mousetrap (because Three Blind Mice was already the title of a play), Christie’s work set a record. The Mousetrap, which saw its 30,000th performance in March 2026, is the longest-running play in history.
Such an iconic play, such a popular one, surely it must have been adapted for the screen many times (especially given the popularity of Christie’s books as source material for cinema)? But no; when the play was first staged at West End, one of the clauses in the contract was that no work on a cinematic adaptation could begin until the West End production had been closed for at least six months. And the play continues to be performed at West End…
But that, it seems, didn’t stop film-makers in other countries from using the story and making their own versions of it. The Bengali film Chupi Chupi Aashey (‘He Comes Stealthily‘) is an adaptation of The Mousetrap, and was supposedly the first Indian film to be based on a book by Agatha Christie.
Given that I am a fan of mid-1950s-early 1960s Dev Anand, and that this film also stars Vyjyanthimala (whom I like a lot), it should come as no surprise that I’ve had this film bookmarked for several years now. Somehow it kept getting ignored, until some weeks back, when I discovered that Amardeep was a remake of the 1956 Tamil film Amara Deepam (starring Shivaji Ganesan, Savitri, and Padmini). And that Amara Deepam was based on Random Harvest.
