The Vagabond
Mr. 420
When Fire, the first film directed by Raj Kapoor, premiered in 1948, Indian popular cinema was on the verge of a golden age. Directly influenced by the nautanki tradition, which combined dance and melodrama, it produced romances, family stories, historical dramas, and mythology. From the moment sound was introduced, Indian films incorporated songs; singing stars were in such high demand that many nonsinging actors and actresses had to have their songs dubbed by other people. The films’ melodrama may seem almost lurid to Westerners, but because the movies were often aimed at common people, the stories were heavily symbolic and the dialogue and acting excessively dramatic.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Like Hitchcock, whose popular thrillers often reflected personal obsession, Kapoor was a consummate showman who controlled every aspect of his films, from the script to the cast, camera work, music, editing, and marketing. With his longtime cinematographer Radhu Karmakar he planned the complete sequence of shots before he began shooting (though he never used storyboards). And like Hitchcock, he developed strong relationships with his leading ladies that often informed his movies; the single greatest influence on his career was the actress Nargis, the “woman in white” who became his mistress and his muse.
Fathers are a rarity in Kapoor’s movies: even in The Vagabond the father is absent from his son’s life, and father figures like Jagga the dacoit (outlaw) in The Vagabond and Seth Dharmachand in Mr. 420 are inherently untrustworthy. Kapoor was not close to his father, who had a busy career as a stage and screen actor, and when Raj launched his own acting career he made his way completely independent of his father. So the father-son dynamic in The Vagabond is inherently interesting. The father, Judge Raghunath, represents feudal authority–Raghunath is another name for Lord Rama, the god usually invoked to preserve the caste system. Judge Raghunath drives his pregnant wife Leela out of his house just as Lord Rama banished his pregnant wife Sita. Screenwriters Abbas and Sathe, both socialist activists and agnostics, relished the chance to take potshots at a religious symbol, and while Raj Kapoor was deeply religious, he preserved the cultural subtext of their script.
In Mr. 420 the madonna and the whore are two different characters: Nargis plays a righteous schoolteacher, Vidya (another name for the goddess of knowledge), while Nadira is the cabaret dancer Maya (or illusion), who leads Raj down the path of dishonesty toward wealth. In The Vagabond, Rita accepts Raj unconditionally, but Vidya will accept him only when he’s honest. In the four years that passed between the two projects Nargis had grown in her stature as an actress and as a creative colleague of Kapoor, and her on-screen role reflected that growth. (At the same time Lata Mangeshkar, who provided Nargis’s singing voice in Rain, The Vagabond, and Mr. 420, had developed a distinct vocal style.)
