Oonche Log (1965)

Melodrama about an upright father, the blind Major Chandrakant (A. Kumar), with a good son, the policeman Srikanth (R. Kumar), and the other son the dissolute playboy Rajnikant (Khan). Rajnikant impregnates and then abandons a woman who commits suicide as a result. The woman’s brother Mohan (Bose) kills Rajnikant and wants to hide from the pursuing policeman, Srikanth. He is sheltered by the sympathetic major. The melodramatic pivot contrasts the father’s revulsion for his son’s murderer with his even greater revulsion at his son’s callous philandering. Srikanth has to arrest his own father for having sheltered a killer. One of the more successful adaptations of a play to the screen, the film is shot like a thriller, using emphatic ‘suspense’ music to bridge the extended ‘realistic’ longueurs. Made at the Vijaya-Vauhini Studios in Madras, it adapted K. Balachander’s best-known play, filmed by Balachander himself (Major Chandrakant) the following year.