Mr & Mrs '55 - should have come with a warning..

Apparently tons of people were perfectly aware that Mr & Mrs '55, the Guru Dutt-directed romantic comedy that is neither very romantic nor all that comedic, had a plot more or less composed of aggravating anti-feminist/misogynist ideology drivel. Well, I sadly wasn't, so I actually bought the DVD and was fully anticipating a good time.

The plot should have been a warning sign, but I knew nothing of it, going in. Madhubala plays Anita, a rich girl who will inherit her father's riches after marriage. Her aunt, Sitadevi, is the film's unfortunate "Straw Feminist" (this link is to a great video that explains the term and the use of the stereotype in Hollywood films), who is partly responsible for the new divorce law, which makes divorcing easier. She hatches a plan to get Anita married to poor cartoonist Preetam (Guru Dutt), but he only agrees to this plan because he's met and fallen in love with Anita.

There's a way to be not all that feminist a film, but still not annoying. Where this story falls down is the fact that not only is Sitadevi a gross, exaggerated stereotype of a manhating feminist (and it is annoyingly underlined that she has "learned" feminism from her Western counterparts, because naturally there are no Indian feminists whatsoever!), she's also the sole villain. While in Hollywood, the "Straw Feminist" may be used to discredit feminism to say "everybody's already equal", in here her ridiculous, self-serving ideology is labelled feminist to prop up conservative ideology of women's natural place being in the home, doing chores and looking after children. Unlike most real life feminists, who advocate women having the choice to marry and work, or marry and work inside the home, or not marry at all, for that matter, Sitadevi naturally wants to dictate this choice herself.


I'll be honest: this film nearly ruined Guru Dutt for me.

The sad thing, this is not a terrible film. It would have been fine without the blatant ideology - they could have portrayed Sitadevi as a terrible woman (still not a feminist thing!) but that her feminism and her awful behaviour are not necessarily directly related. But because the film wants to push the idea that feminists are evil beasts who describe being a housewife as slavery and are against women making any choices that aren't "for the cause", it casts a real shadow over everything I enjoyed about the film - the Madhubala-Guru Dutt chemistry, the nicely frequent OP Nayar songs, the Johnny Walker comedy bits. There are numerous cute moments that could make up a good film, if I could ignore the ideological dialogues that pop up every now and then.

There was one particular terrible bit of dialogue, where Preetam's sister-in-law tells Anita, after she asks about the woman's husband and whether he beats her, "You sometimes get rocks in the rice, but you don't stop eating the rice." While I fully recognise that a lot may have been lost in the translation of this particular bit of dialogue, this bit was just downright offensive to me.

I should also point out, there are a great number of highly credible critiques of Western mainstream feminism from the Indian perspective - but this film and the ideas it presents are not some of them. There have been discussions of how the feminism of English women propped up colonialist and orientalist ideas that further subjugated Indian women, as well as how more modern white women "spoke for" women in poorer countries, rather than allowing them a voice of their own. (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Chandra Talpade Mohanty are just some of the people presenting the critiques I'm talking about.) But that's my Gender Studies minor talking, so let's get back to the film..


Johnny Walker and this actress, Yasmeen, who bears a vague resemblance to Rani Mukherji were probably my favourite thing when it comes down to it. They also were in my favourite song from the film, "Jaane kahan mera jigar gaya ji".

If you're at all like me in this department, just skip this film. As you can see from the screencaps, my SKY label DVD was also terrible in terms of picture quality, so that's definitely, definitely not worth the purchase, either.

The tale of three movies.

I've done a post before where I talked about two films both named Meera, which had in terms of story, execution or even language very little to do with each other.

Similarly I'll now discuss two films called Chori Chori - the 2003 one and the 1956 one.

The 2003 Chori Chori was recommended to me a couple of times by people who knew I liked Rani Mukherji a lot, and I think every Rani fan loves her lively, "bubbly" roles, if not best then at the very least a lot. I wasn't very different in that respect, considering Bunty aur Babli is my favourite film with her in it next to Hum Tum. I had my doubts about enjoying the film, considering I'm no huge Ajay fan (don't hate the guy, just don't like him a ton, either), but enough people whose tastes I trust liked it and so I bought the film.

I was open to it, I really was, but it just never won me over and I kept watching it in 15 minute chunks because that's about all I could do before my attention span would end and I'd just conclude I didn't really care. I mean, Rani did a fine job, and I didn't hate her character. But I just didn't care, and I quit watching, and I tried again, and quit watching, and again, and again, but never far enough to actually get to the ending of the film.

And so the DVD still sits on my shelf, never watched all the way through, as I type this. And the weird thing? I can't pinpoint the problem. Somebody suggested it was Ajay's acting, that I just couldn't buy his side of the romantic pairing. I suppose .. but I'd hate to lay all the blame on him.

So anyway...

I never had any intention of watching the 50's version of Chori Chori, probably because I wasn't in general very driven to watch Raj Kapoor/Nargis films. I loved them in Shree 420, of course, but then I watched Andaz, with them and Dilip Kumar, which ended up being among the few movies I've quit watching and never gone back to.

But then one evening near Christmas they showed It Happened One Night (1934, starring Clark Gable & Claudette Colbert) on Finnish television and I loved the movie to pieces (easily one of my favourite romantic comedies of all time). Naturally I immediately went to Wikipedia and saw that it had in fact been remade in Bollywood, as the 1956 Chori Chori.

Now, it was always clear to me that ITHO was the original version and would always therefore be the best one, but I was still keen to see the Bollywood version. And this Chori Chori I definitely liked. The changes to the original story of a runaway heiress and a writer meeting on a bus journey to a big city were minimal, limited to dialogue and of course, the integration of songs and comedy characters that weren't in the original (obligatory Johnny Walker), but watching those changes was really fun for me, just having seen the original film.

While neither of the stars necessarily make my favourites category, I really enjoyed them in this film. There's a lightness to everything in the film, as there should be, but there are also a couple of very nice more emotional moments where you can tell that this a film made in Bombay, not in Los Angeles.

And what really won me over was the soundtrack. The integration of the songs can be a tad odd sometimes, relying on side characters to make sure there are enough songs, but I can be forgiving when the songs are this good.

I especially loved Jahan Main Jaati Hoon:



Fun song, and cute picturization, especially towards the end.

Anyway, I don't feel comfortable comparing the two movies with one another, because of their obvious vast differences, and the fact whoever the 2003 was made for, it wasn't for me. I know it has tons of fans and everything, and I wish I could say I enjoyed it as much as they did, but I just didn't. The older Chori Chori was my favourite purely for the fact it was easy to sit through, and an overall fun watch.

Aasha; another victim of the half-and-half syndrome.

Hai bhagwan, what a cruel title to this review. The fact of the matter is that the 1957 film Aasha, starring Vyjayanthimala, Kishore Kumar and Pran, is not the most dramatic case of a Hindi film where one half is splendid and the other not so much. It's actually quite far from it. In this case, I think a lot could be attributed to a change of mood - when I began watching, I was so much on board with this film. Somewhere around the middle I had to pause it and put it away for a while, and when I returned to it, I still liked it, but wasn't feeling the magic anymore.

Such is life, I guess. I own this one on DVD now, so I might as well save it for later rewatches, hoping that will sway my opinion into a more positive direction.

Kishore plays Kishore, whose brother - okay, cousin - Raj (my first film seeing Pran as a younger man! awesome!) is not a very nice guy. He aspires to marry the rich girl Nirmala (my first film seeing Vyjayanthimala, yay!), who Kishore falls in love with. But as Raj is not a very nice guy, he has deceived a girl called Kamini, who he dated under the alias of Kishore and then dumped her. Kamini's father begs Raj to marry Kamini to make her a decent girl (or something), which he refuses to do (grr! so evil!) and instead kills the father and frames Kishore for the murder. Boo! Hiss!

But isn't Pran great? He's like good wine; even if not too aged, you will still get joyfully drunk!

Kishore is as Kishore does; a singing comedic sensation that is fully convincing in the more emotional scenes. It's just good stuff.

And Vyjayanthimala?

So adorable..

...fantastic dancer...

..even cutely comical! It was delightful finally seeing her in a film after hearing so much about her, and even though I watch 50's and 60's films only once in a blue moon, I will try to make the effort to see her movies in the future.

You've probably noticed by now, the film has song scenes in color, while otherwise it's black-and-white. The blend is not jarring for me; I've seen Mughal-e-Azam in similar shape many times, and it's not really an issue. In fact, it serves as a nice reminder of the two different visuals, how much colors contribute to a scene, but how well you can do without them!

You may wonder, why did I see this film, instead of so many other films (of Vyjayanthimala or otherwise)? "Iina meena deeka", of course. This wonderful song has been a long-time oldie song favourite of mine and I just had to see the film it was attached to. The version I knew was the picturization above; Vyjayanthimala crossdressing and then dancing in an elaborate set. Later in the movie, we get Kishore's lovely male version of the song. Was it worth it? Yes! I really enjoyed the picturization. It's nice to have context for your favourite tunes, even if the context is not mind-blowingly amazing but more of the cute variety.

What's the problem, then? It's hard to say. The plot starts off smoothly, there's lots of funny comedy, great Pran-Kishore interaction and beginnings of a wonderful romantic storyline.. But sometime after the midway mark, the movie kind of gets stuck. Things still happen, mind you, but the plot seems to be doing a few circles to take up time until we get to the better, fantastically dramatic finale that is in all accounts, an epic bunch of events. Since I watched the film in two halves, it seemed probably like the film just lost it when I sat down to return to it. Maybe that viewpoint sort of skewers my view; the greatness of the beginning is not so fresh in my mind anymore.

Regardless, I wouldn't advice against seeing it. Kishore has done better films, as has Vyjayanthimala, I'm sure (though not sure what those films may be!) so there might be better introduction films to these stars, but for existing fans, or just fans of "Eena meena deeka", give it a spin. Why not?

Do it for younger-Pran!