Mother India (1957)

One of my favorites

A really beautiful indian musical.

I only wish there had been subtitles during the music, other than that, I loved it :D August 17, 2008

Buy the Video

A while ago, I got rid of my VCR and put in a DVD player in my computer. I re-purchased almost all the films I had in DVD format.

This movie is one of the great classics of world cinema and is a must view. Why am I rating it only 3 stars? The DVD transfer is AWFUL. I sorely regret having given away my VHS copy; it was much better.

Buy the VHS. May 21, 2006

Earth And High Heaven

It's kind of like GONE WITH THE WIND, and it's sort of like THE GOOD EARTH, and even a bit like EAST OF EDEN, but really MOTHER INDIA is its own thing, one of the loci classici of so-called "Bollywood."

The young screen star Radha Mitchell (PITCH BLACK, NEVERLAND, MELINDA AND MELINDA) was named after the longsuffering heroine, Radha in this movie, as Scarlett Johanson was similarly named after the heroine of GONE WITH THE WIND. Perhaps that's why Woody Allen was attracted to them both and employed them in recent films. He was reaching back into old epic roots and didn't even know it.

Radha is a young maiden in India whose mother entangles her into a scheme whereby a local moneylender would pay for the cost of her wedding, but in the process, like Shylock, he comes to "own" the whole family and causes them pain for generations to come. The mother is not a simpleton, more like a Lillian Gish type, and besides, we get the picture that this is just how things were done back then, and that dowries and fancy weddings were everything to these people. The action switches to the birth and development of Radha's two little boys, Ramu and Birju, who grow and mature during the film, and struggle against the age-old curse of the moneylender, who nows owns everything (like the carpetbaggers in GONE WITH THE WIND).

The only thing that you've ever seen in Western cinema to compare it to fairly would be Michael Powell's GONE TO EARTH with Jennifer Jones (sometimes called THE WILD HEART). Jennifer Jones, perhaps Susan Hayward, is the only Hollywood star with emotional power enough to have conveyed, maybe, Radha's metonymic attachment to land and family. Alas she never got a chance to perform in the cinema of Bombay! It's all about melodrama, music, dance, spectacle, heart and something else, something that can't be pinned down. Recommended with a plus sign, and two such signs should you ever have had a mother or a country. October 7, 2005

The grievous reality!

Haunting film and painful portrait of Indian in those fifties. Ferocious critique of the caste's system that rules the life of Indian people through the traps employed by a swindler band to cheat illiterate persons.

A brave film made with honesty, courage and honour, nominated as Best Foreign Film in 1957.
February 14, 2005

GREAT MOVIE, BAD DVD TRANSFER

Mother India was the first movie from India to be nominated for an Oscar in the Best Foreign Language Film category in 1957 (if I'm not mistaken). It's a three-hour epic, with musical numbers atypical of the Bollywood films. It's also the tragic tale of a woman's struggle to raise her children amidst poverty, inhumanity, greed, corruption, and the destructive forces of nature. The weakness of the story is that it tries to be everything: drama, comedy, social realism, a MUSICAL, an EPIC, etc., which makes the middle part of the film so weak. When the children, the two sons, grow into manhood their scenes have too much of a farcical look and feel that, eventually, turns tragic. Yet, what holds it all together is the tremendous performance of the female protagonist. Some of the cinematography is breathtaking, especially when the sky dwarfs the people in Gone With the Windesque style. Unfortunately the film has not been cleaned up (restored) for this DVD, and it has myriad lines, dots, etc. A couple of scenes go briefly out of focus. For the price I paid, I thought I would be getting a more pristine version. It's just basically a video tape on DVD, and a bad copy at that!!! Which is a shame, because it's an astonishing film despite its weaknesses. Once I resigned myself to the fact that I was not going to be enjoying a tecnically superior version of the film on DVD, and had to settle for what it is, I didn't feel too ripped off because the story can be quite compelling. Had I known, however, that the quality of this DVD was so mediocre, I would not have bought it. But the movie is definitely an experience and deserves 5 stars. July 10, 2003

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