Director: Charu Roy; Writer: Bhupendranath Bannerjee; Cinematographer: Bibhuti Das; Cast: Manoranjan Bhattacharya, Nirmalendu Lahiri, Tulsi Lahiri, Dhiraj Bhattacharya, Sarat Chatterjee, Mani Ghosh, Kartick Roy, Bhanu Roy, Manorama, Meera Dutta, Charuvala, Kamala Jharia
Summary: One of the first Bengali films to attempt a realist idiom with a story about a lower-middle-class family, praised by Satyajit Ray for its ability to ‘steer clear from Hollywood’. The family consists of Dinadas the father, a mother and some sons, only one of whom earns money. It opens with a series of dissolves presenting each son: one is smoking a cigar and trains for an acting career reciting Michael Madhusudhan Dutt; the next is an aspirant writer smoking a hukka (a bubble-pipe); the third wants to be a dancer and smokes a bidi (reed). The mother complains that there is no peace in the house; the father returns from the market to find everything in a mess; the earning brother prefers to spend his money buying expensive cosmetics. The story shows a rivalry with the family of Sukhadas, first over who Dinadas’s only daughter will marry, and then, more seriously, over the Anglo-Indian prostitute Flora, with whom the sons of both patriarchs fall in love. In an interview reprinted along with excerpts of Bangalee’s script in
Chitravas (1987), Charu Roy claimed that this was the first film using source lighting as a shooting principle, deploying a tonal range as practised by Osten’s German crew. Tulsi Lahiri, who acted in and scored this film, was also a prominent Bengali film-maker (
Happy Club, 1936) and became a key figure in the film industry’s assimilation of the IPTA-influenced realist idiom (e.g. via his acting in Sushil Majumdar’s
Dukhir Iman, 1954).
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