FilmIndia (Jan-Nov 1942)

fuly 1942 FILMINDIA aburao Pendharkar and Shanta Hublikar make a rare imantic team in "Pahila Palna", a streamlined comedy. The members of the Film Advisory Board richly ;serve this abuse for being good to a white-skinned >reigner. But that is not the only thing Alex Shaw has been lying about us. In a paper read before the East India Association 1 London on the 20th May, Alex Shaw said: "Though the Indian Film industry has greatly exnded in recent years, the men in charge of it," he id, "were still mostly people who had no taste and tie ability except for making balance-sheets, mergers id business deals. The film magnates still thought ey were catering for imbeciles, and their greatest m in life was to extract the most money from their diences. "The banality of the average Indian film was suffi•nt reason for the fact that the educated Indian blic despise these films. Films imported into India re often attacked for their bad moral effect, but iir wildest errors paled before the flagrantly vulgar imes of many Indian films. "These sort of films had completely destroyed the ;stige of the film industry in India, so that young lians with intelligence would not take up films as :areer. "The best authors ignored the films and the whole t store of Indian art and literature is for all prac1 purposes untouched. In England you have the les of Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Huxley, Vaughan, liams and William Watton connected with film cing. but in India the names of Tagore, Radhatonan and Raman are conspicuously absent." We have yet to come across a greater liar than Alex Shaw. Alex Shaw says that Indian producers have no taste and little ability and that they cater for imbeciles to extract money. Alex Shaw would be surprised to know that man to man our producers in India can compete in taste and ability with the best producers available in England and America. While some of the leading American producers have been recently exposed as unpunished criminals (vide: article elsewhere in this issue), not one producer in India, in thirty years of film making, has been dubbed a criminal. While Indian producers in their pursuit of honest business try to meet the various demands of the different people of a large continent, the average American producer robs his own trusting share-holders by preparing fraudulent vouchers and turns the honest business of film production into a racket of crime. Who is, therefore, extracting money from imbeciles? In India there is no code of censors on grounds of morality. Only in Christian countries like America and England, where good morals go begging, the church and other religious institutions rise in revolt when Elstree and Hollywood transgress the ordinary limits of decency. Indians only protest, and "filmindia" leads the agitations, when the white-skinned producers of the West slander India with the solitary aim of tightening the imperialist grip. Sulochana, charming and attractive as ever, compels attention in "Ankh Michowni", an Amur picture. 5