Chinna Thambi Periya Thambi (1987)

1987 145’(124’) col Tamil d/sc/dial Manivannan pc Chamba Creations st Shanmughapriyam lyr Vairamuthu, Gangai Amaran, Sivakumar c A. Sabhapathy m Gangai Amaran lp Sathyaraj, Prabhu, Nadia, Sudha Chandran, Nizhalgal Ravi, Vijayan, V.M. John, Thirupur Ishwar, S. Varalakshmi Melodrama about good and evil in a country/ city conflict. The brothers (Prabhu and Satyaraj) live in a village. They are deliberately insulted by their haughty urban cousin Kavitha (Nadia) who is to marry the villain, a rich, Americareturned millionaire. When Kavitha’s parents die, creditors take all her wealth and her fiance now refuses to marry her. She is forced to find a job in the factory of the villain (Ravi) who tries to make her his mistress. Both brothers love their cousin (by Indian convention, one of them should have married her) and try to court her. When one of the twins is charged with theft by the villain, the other kills him and goes to jail, from where he emerges white-haired to see the other twin married to the cousin. The film reiterates, in the words of a Deep Focus review, the conventional commitment to relationships of a ‘familiar and communal nature as against secular relationships between individuals’.