PM Review

  Mehboob Khan’s Mother India [1957] is a melorealistic movie [I prefer to use MELODRAMA when the story is written fully on fictional ground & MELOREAL when story is adapted from real incidence with fictional touch ] I have seen after Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin [1954] just the following Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali [1955]. It’s evidently clear that South Asian cinema had flourished after post-independence & partitions.   The first half, till Ramu & Birju being grown up, is a superbly a true realist film and is commendable but it turned into melodramatic with so many subplots and compulsively emotional chronicles that made Mother India a near epical cinema. Mother India had a probability to fall into the genre of Akira’s Rashomon [1950] in respect of the high morality of women character and with all the loopholes of social justice. But its hyperbolic melodrama kept it stayed back with the Indian formula film.   There are some establishing and epic s...

  When I was reading the heart-wrenching descriptions and narrations from Charlie Chaplin’s  My Autobiography [1964], my eyes just froze at the line, “There  were patches everywhere, on the elbows, trousers, shoes and stockings.” [4] Afterward, While I was watching Chaplin’s “The Kid” (1921), I found a verisimilar costumes and moods & expressions on the faces of the Tramp (Charlie Chaplin) & the Kid (Jackie Coogan) who is the one of the most expressive child artist I have ever seen.   It is beyond doubt that no other filmmakers than Charlie Chaplin could, as far as I know, apply and make art from the autobiographical extractions so elegantly and truthfully. I could barely differentiate the deep feeling of vulnerability a single mother could have when I saw the mother ( Edna Purviance ) who abandoned his newborn baby both being deserted by her man, the artist and being burdened because of child’s identity and economic destitution with Charlie’s...