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January 1941 ^1
fILmindia
These grazelle eyes of Jayshree will hypnotise you in "Shejari", a Prabhat picture in Marathi.
dialogue became inaudible. (This was quite cften as the boring sequences were many. The film was a three hour Tom Mix — a condensed serial — and the management had seen fit to mix up all the reels so that the plot was entirely inexplicable).
This is a very valuable thing — the part icipation of the audience in the film, and it shows more than anything else (even than the mammcth circulation of that paper 'fllmindia') how film-conscious the Indian film public is. The producers will do well to humour it, and no' to exploit it too far with inferior films. The quality of excitement in the audience had largely been lo:;t in the European and American public; deluged with second late films they have become blase, and it takes a film in a thousand, a "Fury" or a "Grapes of Wrath" to rouse them out of their stupor.
A COOLIES' FILM
And now fcr the producers. The dominant impression I have carried
with me is that the Indian film is made for money and for nothing else. The few exceptions, Mr. A. K Chettiar's "Mahatma Gandhi", for
instance, and "Achhut" (which, in spite, or rather because of its t'heme was probably as great a moneymaker as any of them) are nothing more than exceptions.
It seems to me that the basic element in Indian life to-day is a political or social one — to ignore social questions, or to skate over them in a half-hearted way, is short-sighted. One day the Boy-meets-Girl theme, interspersed with thousands of feet of songs and conversation, will not be so popular; and to cling feverishly to the byeways of Indian life is to alienate the greater part cf the progressive and intelligent public. Even now I find the Indian intelligentsia, Hollywood and Elstree fans, unwilling to go to Indian films in spite of the nationalist appeal. Like the Chinese students who call their war a "ccolies, war", the Ind'an intellectual, with more justice, will call the Indian film a "coolies' film".
This tendency helps to drive still deeper the already existing wedge between the intellectual and the Indian masses. Yet the films are not genuine mass films; they are ^rtifici^l ijiiddle class productions,
The flame in his hand has kindled a new flame in the heart of Ani§ in "Fadosi", a Prabhat picture in Hindi,
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