FilmIndia (1946)

FILMINDIA lADIO Mr. Exhibitor-. During the past we have attempted to serve you to the best of our ability We feel we have remained on friendly terms whether we did business with you or not This policy we will maintain. It is with pleasure that we announce the arrival in India of really worthwhile productWe submit the following features : "THRZHN leopard ujomftn (JOHNNY WEISSMULLER BRENDA JOYCE ) A FOUR x x x x SPECIAL — A TOP PRODUCTION ! 91 (I PLUS BEDLAM' ANNA LEE) (BORIS KARLOFF "THE SPIRAL* STAIRCASE" ( DOROTHY McGUIRE — GEORGE BRENT — ETHEL BARRYMORE ) "FROM THIS DAY FORWARD" (JOAN FONTAINE MARK STEVENS) * FOUR PICTURES THAT WILL DEFINITELY MAKE MONEY FOR YOU ★ THE BEST THING IN EVERY PROGRAM'. WRITE US DIRECT RKO RADIO PICTURES LTD. P. O. BOX 733 — BOMBAY I. OR OUR PHYSICAL DISTRIBUTORS EMPIRE TALKIE DISTRIBUTORS CALCUTTA — BOMBAY — LAHORE — MADRAS June, 1946 of Bengal is on starvation diet, these fellows still cling to their feudal claims to impress the Editor with their family triees. When I asked Baburao Patel what he thought of all these 'Nobles', 'Aristocrats', 'Shahzadas' and 'Zamindars' as screen recruits, he said: "I guess my ancestors were just good dacoits and all these "Aristocrats" must have been my ancestral customers. The customer is always right and as long as he pays you can't dispute his ancestry." The recruits who send their photographs seem to have completely missed the purpose of 'filmindia's' plan to help them. No one in the film industry is interested in the family trees of the recruits. Though the film industry needs educated and cultured talent there is no necessity to put an extra emphasis on the noble extraction of the recruits. The primary essentials are looks and talent for acting. If these essentials are present, no one would mind if the recruit comes from the poorest family of the Punjab or of any other province. A recruit from Lucknow once sent us a painfully long family history 'claiming direct descent from Nawab Wajid Ali Shah. Moreover, he claimed that no one in Lucknow talked the Urdu which he spok He reported himself extremely well-off, and wanted to join the films "to teach people how to talk Urdu; There are many boys with this "teaching complex" who want to join the films to teach the film industry something or other. A consistent candidate is one Mr. Atib Usmani, once from Lucknow now in Bombay, who wants to overhaul the film industry completely from the top to the bottom by joining as an actor. We wish hin all luck when he joins up if at all he does. One wonders how long shall we, as Indians, keep talking of our ancestors, our family trees and our teaching complexes, inspite of the painful fact that for hundreds of years we have done nothing better than being slaves of one ruler or another? With freedom round the corner and starvation within, can't we root out our ancient complexes and start building up a new world without 'nobles', 'aristocrats' and 'zamindars'? HIRLEKAR AND HIS BLUFFS? Many readers have heen writing to us asking: What new improvements have been introduced into the Indian film industry by Mr. K. S. Hirlekar and his four colleagues who visited England and America as "delegates" of the Indian film industry? We reply by asking a counter-question: What has Hirlekar ever achieved with his numerous ideas so far to expect anything substantial from him now? It is over six months now that the five "experts", who flew to Hollywood as "delegates" of the Indian film industry, returned to their country and our film industry, which was expected to skyrocket itself to dizzy heights qf quality and competition with the secret of Hollywood in the pockets of these "experts'", is still where it was or perhaps worse off than ever before. 10