Bollywood Rumors: 8 Things About Bollywood You May Not Know

Bollywood Rumors > 8 Things About Bollywood You May Not Know

[Sepia Mutiny] I guess you might not have seen much of the really good, yet commercially sucessful Hindi cinema of the 1950s and 1960s - the early films of Raj Kapoor (Awara, Shree 420, Barsaat), Guru Dutt (Pyaasa etc.), Mehboob Khan (I think his Andaaz, with Nargis, RK, and Dilip Kumar, is one of the most stylishly esecuted films the Bombay industry had ever produced) and other notable films like Sahib, Bibi Aur Ghulam (possibly ghost-directed by GD), which are superlatively well-written (many of these were written by members of the Progressive Theatre movement, including K.A. Abbas), well-thought-out, and intelligently directed films that work within the parameters of the overall aesthetic and commercial of Hindi cinema but are also serious works of art.

Some related posts from Technorati and Google.

[Pulp Fiction] The Lost Face of Indian Cinema: He had honed his naturalistic acting skills as a director, writer and actor at IPTA plays and in Abbas’s ”˜Dharti Ke Lal’. Later, he would repeat this neo-realistic approach in the equally memorable ”˜Garam Coat’.

[ANICCA] Delayed report on Greg's shoot: So, it turns out that the main hands behind the music scene in Hindi films were all from Goa, which wasn't a part of India then. These musicians were all classically trained in childhood, sang/played in church and went on to play in dance bands or jazz bands that played in clubs, pre-independence.

[Twenty Onwards] Indian Films in Time's Top 100 List: Corliss who supposedly has a great interest in Indian cinema, notes that films such as Pyaasa came out during the golden age of Indian film-making, where directors such as Ray were pioneering India's art cinema and directors such as Raj Kapoor creating magic in the mainstream. By including Mani Ratnam in the list, Corliss also tries to clear the confusion that Bombay is only one of the many centers of cinema in India (Read his comments in the link).

[O3.indiatimes.com] Raj Kapoor- the Sex-ploiter: . At best, the film had shock value with the heroine baring her breasts for the first time in Hindi cinema. The truth though is that the erotic element in the film was as exciting as a mammography report. Raj Kapoor, the great showman died confirming his fetish for female anantomy and in the name of art, he expoloited all his heroines to the fullest.

[Bollywood501.com] March 22, 2005: Anari and the early films of Hrishikesh Mukherjee: of film technicians who came out of the early Bimal Roy production crew, of whom Hrishikesh Mukherjee was the film editor, were all avid students of film, versed in the movies of Hollywood, European, Soviet and of course Hindi cinema. So when watching an early film of Mukherjee's like Anari, one is struck by the influences of Rouben Mamoulian and Howard Hawks from Hollywood, Jean Renoir from Europe, and inevitably Bimal Roy from India, that Mukherjee uses in terms of style, pacing, and framing.

[Nytimes.com] Bollywood's Good Girls Learn to Be Bad - New York Times: Chan's arm at the Cannes Film Festival, she is, .The vamp, Hindi cinema's designated bad girl, was traditionally just as .