Chandralekha

MADRAS MISCELLANY

A ‘Cecil B. DeMillean’ Chandralekha

S. MUTHIAH

Sixty years ago, a film was released in Tamil and Hindi that broke all box office records. S.S. Vasan, the person who made the film, has been called the ‘Cecil B. DeMille of Tamil Cinema’ by film historian Randor Guy.

Given how spectacular it was — and the appreciation lavished on it from 1948 till well into the 1950s, which is when I caught up with it — I’m sure that if re-released, it would do better at the box office then most Tamil films today.

“Chandralekha” also had a storyline that, corny though it was, grabbed everyone’s imagination. Film critic V.A.K. Ranga Rao has described it as “the most complete entertainer ever made.”

It was in 1943 that Vasan, following two successive hits, announced that his next film would be “Chandralekha”. Yet, when he launched an advertising blitz for the film, he had nothing more than a name for the heroine — which he had found used in the storyline of a tough, talented woman that he had rejected.

One of his storyboard men, Veppathur Kittoo, then developed a story the ‘Boss’ liked from Robert McCaire the Male Bandit, a novel by G.W.M. Reynolds who was synonymous with one of the most famous pulp magazines of the time, Mysteries of the Court of London.

When shooting began on “Chandralekha” in 1943, few realised it would take five years to complete. With Vasan making his debut as a director halfway through the shooting, scenes were shot and re-shot. In the end, the cost mounted up to Rs. 3 million, the most spent on making a film in India at the time.

Starring in the film as the gentle son of the king was M.K. Radha, who had not wanted to play the villain’s role.

The villainous son was Ranjan (of “Mangamma Sabatham” fame), who replaced Vasan’s first choice, K.J. Mahadevan, the hero of “Thyaga Bhoomi” who had proved too soft in the first shots that were made for “Chandralekha”.

The heroine was T.R. Rajakumari, whom Randor Guy considers “the first dream girl of Tamil Cinema.” Krishnan and Mathuram were part of a circus troupe that was an afterthought — but a key link in the story. And the rest of the cast was as well-known.

Many years later, Kothamangalam Subbu recalled, “During the film’s making our studio looked like a small kingdom…horses, elephants, lions, tigers in one corner, palaces here and there, over there a German lady training nearly a hundred dancers on one studio floor, a shapely Sinhalese lady teaching another group of dancers on real marble steps adjoining a palace, a studio worker making weapons, another making period furniture using expensive rosewood, others set props, headgear, and costumes, Ranjan undergoing fencing practice with our fight composer ‘Stunt’ Somu, our music directors composing and rehearsing songs in a building…there were so many activities going on simultaneously round-the-clock in the same place.”

Out of this mayhem there emerged a super hit whose highlight was the drum dance, to this day one of the most famous scenes in Tamil cinema.

Vasan had Gemini Studios’ 400 dancers preparing for that single sequence, and they rehearsed daily for six months. When they finally executed the scene flawlessly, the sequence had cost Rs. 5 lakh!

Making the film in Hindi sometime later, Vasan opened the doors of Hindi film theatres to films made by South Indians.

He also pioneered making South Indian films in English — a shorter version of “Chandralekha” in English was screened in the U.S. and Europe in the 1950s. All of this helped him make a fortune — but, more importantly, it made him one of India’s greatest film-makers and someone no film committee of the time could do without.

The tragedy is that his home on Edward Elliot’s Road (Dr. Radhakrishnan Salai) and his Gemini Studio, which should have been turned into a Vasan or Tamil cinema museum, have vanished.