FilmIndia (Jan-Nov 1942)

Film Music Of The South "Choose Thy Song" Says The Writer By : R. SATAKOPAN (Madras) They say that music is the language of the gods but when it comes from the "gods and goddesses" ot the South Indian screen it seems to lose all its divine melody. A three hours' stay (often it is four and even more) makes it appear a three years' presence in Dante's Inferno; and for the folly of the payment made at the counter -the penalty has to be paid in full. Without dragging any particular picture, director, actor or actress into the" mire it is worthwhile to give most of them a piece of the patron's mind and feeling about their idiosyncracy, if not idiocy. Heroes, especially heroines, are selected for reasons which will not stand scrutiny. A fine tune sung in the radio and heard invisib'y through the wireless, a word of recommendation from a friend who has his own axe to grind (in course of time he grinds it in company with the director), a desire to secure acquaintance or to reward a friendship cnce contracted (don't ask whv and what) and a host of other suspicious reasons get into the field for which the penalty is paid by the ignorant public who are led away (or rather m sled) by spicy and coloured advertisement. Not that God's creatures must be found fault with. God made them (in theory at least) and therefore let them pass for men and women. But they have no business to make their unwanted appearance at public expense. The world will be thankful (though it may not be the better by it) if they confine their presence to the directors' antechambers. It Is the common excuse that the stars — they have very little resemblance to the things of that name either in Hollywood horizon or in the blue sky above — are selected for their (in the directors' judgment which is often very poor) musical talents; and for this faulty and criminal judgment — God have mercy on it — they make a cold-blooded butchery of the language of the gcds. First, their very figures with their unseeming curves and bends seem surely to have been intended by the Invisible Almighty to be invisible from the^ outside world — at least on the screen which is intended to hold up high ideals and ideas. Some are so fair that charcoal would make a chalkmark on the face. Others are such a huge mass of protoplasm that they would do better to run round the world before they think of a screen career, shedding one cunce of flesh at every step. In the South, thanks to the blunted vision of our screen deities, these creatures of god are taken wholesale and wholesome. No one could object to anyone earning and choosi-ng a career, but the objection is only against their public acting, when they are least fit for it. To match the angles and streamlines comes the dress. To the protruding (on all four sides, if not more) waistline is added many a waste line. They have to be seen to be believed, and truth is stranger than fiction. Thus for instance a South Indian "Sita" will bear no Comparison to the Sita of Ayodhya. She is here, not rarely, a miniature mountain, gasping for breath at every step and for every song. Rama will bear no resemblance of ever having wielded the bow and arrow —leave aside the havoc he is depicted in the epic to have played with those mighty weapons and supernatural prowess — nor could any one say by a look at his broken walks and sunken limbs whether at all he could have broken Siva's mighty unliftable bow for winning the fair hands of his beloved wife. Conversation is the least part of Mr. R. Satakopan their qualification — the style, the mode of utterance, the bend of accent and the force of delivery. The golden days of the movie era seem a million times better by comparison; and when, as it sometimes happens, the talking machine fails and makes the talkie a silent movie what a welcome relief it gives! Music is their hallmark, and for that they are chosen. For this piece of disservice to humanity which the directors make in their finds — or rather m'sfinds — the stars (excuse me for using an inapplicable name) make a clean murder of them. Trivial scenes turn poetical and musical; and a dialogue that could end in a couple of straight minutes is extended to cruel and curved twenty. Lovers in actual life must needs have infinite and impossible patience if they were to commit the folly of imitating the Southern Filmland,1 and conduct the love scene in full dress music paying at'ention to ragams and thalams^ and making mincemeat of the sacred situation. And in what are considered to be rapturous situations our "stars" present themselves most distracted with their awful and woeful turning of their eyes, first to the director (their godfather and creator), then to the musical accom 43