Andha naall [ 1954 ]

 Exper­i­ment­ing alone is not the attribute for uncon­ven­tional think­ing but sup­port­ing such thoughts is also a manda­tory attribute. AVMeyyap­pan didn’t exper­i­ment directly but sup­ported the crew of Andha Naal for avoid­ing songs. Even today, this is con­sid­ered as a great sin in film mak­ing — Unnai Pol oru­van inserted songs as part of pro­mo­tions. It was 1954 [ in fact story is set in 1943 ] where the peo­ple can­not imag­ine a movie with­out songs– in fact the films com­peted with more num­ber of songs.

No songs –fine. So what’s great about a movie which came 55 years back? Let’s see.

Andha Naal [ 1954 ]

The story opens with the radio engi­neer Rajan being shot and he falls. The neigh­bor informs the police and they arrive at the crime scene. The case is inves­ti­gated by the inspec­tor Naidu and CID Sad­hanand­ham with var­i­ous evi­dences and per­sons asso­ci­ated in the case. Every­one has their own ver­sion of the death and gives clue about the other per­sons involved in the case. Rest of the inves­ti­ga­tion and get­ting the actual mur­derer is the story all about.

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 The first credit goes to AVM to boldly come for­ward to pro­duce such a exper­i­men­tal mas­ter­piece. It needs a sep­a­rate blog to talk about S.Balachander and his mul­ti­fac­eted skills. Have you heard of a film per­son­al­ity [ chess player, actor, singer, com­poser, writer and direc­tor ] who had quit films and became a Vid­hwan in Car­natic music. In addi­tion, he was self taught mas­ter in Veena, Sitar and other instru­ments. [Remem­ber the actor singing Kalyaanam..vaanzhvil venum kalyanam — he is S.Balachandar].

This is one of the clas­sics of Sivaji Gane­san where he sub­tly under­played the main neg­a­tive role. I doubt any other hero would agree to be shown as shot and die in the open­ing scene [ hero has to come back even after gun shots like Anbu­sel­van IPS :) ]. The story is very sleek and of course the dura­tion of the movie is also very apt [ 2hrs 10 mins ]. the cast­ing and the per­for­mances were highly applaud­able. The orig­i­nal story was writ­ten by S.Balachandar whereas the screen­play n dia­logues were penned by Javert Seethara­man [ a for­mer lawyer ! ]. His bril­liance is shown in dia­logues — espe­cially the unfold­ing inves­ti­ga­tion and the debate between Sivaji and Pan­dari bai. Muk­tha V.Srinivasan was the assis­tant direc­tor to SB.

It’s inter­est­ing to note that the back­ground score has been car­ried out by AVM’s inter­nal music group. They have used some songs as the BGM — For exam­ple Puthu pen­nin man­a­sai is used in the pic­nic scene and Ye Zindagi hindi song in park scene. The cin­e­matog­ra­phy was han­dled by S. Maruthi Rao and this was the first exper­ment with light and shad­ows [ Father of ‘Agni Natchathirm’ ]. Watch the scene in dancer Kalyani’s house reflects the on/off effect of a neon adver­tis­ing board. They are minute but very inter­est­ing to note. Had this movie been a suc­cess at box office, we would have got more such gems in Tamil cinema.

Once Kamal said if any one scene is taken out in the script, the script should have the impact. Andha Naall is the finest exam­ple of this state­ment. The bril­liant part is includ­ing the 1943 bomb­ing on Chen­nai in the story. In fact the day is all about this bomb­ing day.

I hap­pened to watch “Nadu Iravil” (1966) — a hor­ror movie from S.Balachander and of course his last film. I rec­om­mend this movie to under­stand what we lack in the new Tamil movies.

:)

Toto

 Note : Thanks to Ran­dor Guy — Film historian.

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