Albela

This movie will easily feature in the top ten list of the most entertaining Hindi movie ever. No doubt. The major contributor here is the songs. A dozen of them and one better than the other.

The hero, Bhagwan Palav, was not any hero material. At best, a short stocky comedian. Nonetheless, he acted opposite the effervescent and bubbly Geeta Bali to make this gem of a movie.

No mean contribution by music director C. Ramchandra who also sang all the songs under his pet name Chitalkar.

The story is a cliche. A now successful man returns to find that the very family he cared for is now in ruins, and how he saves them from their miseries. Master Bhagwan directed and wrote the film's script himself. It, thus, comes as no surprise that he is the hero of the movie.

However, a short plump hero with expressions looking like a penguin is not your average day to day hero. The expressions of others are good, and the songs are beautiful. The songs however are too many in number. If someone is not speaking anything, they are singing. The songs slow this movie.

This movie would have been a masterpiece if some other hero was chosen wisely. To me this movie seems overrated.

Spending 2.5 hrs watching this movie during these depressing pandemic times has been extremely enjoyable. I have always been a film buff..especially the 40s, 50s and 60s. While one always refers to this as the golden time period for hindi film music - this was also a great time for other great technicalities of film making like screenplay, editing, cinematography...etc. Albela is a wonderful example of the same. No trickery., no special effects, no cutting scenes every two seconds, and best of all..no dubbing.

Everything about this movie is top notch and of course the soundtrack is exceptional. It is sad that Bhagwan Dada is remembered as the guy whose dancing is aped by non dancers like Amitabh. He is a bundle of talent in acting and dialogue delivery. Very sad that his life turned out the way it did.

I watched this with my teenage sons and this is a great way to introduce kids to the golden age of hindi films. After having watched Pyaasa the other day after many years and praising it non stop - this movie really surprised me and in many aspects even surpasses Pyaasa.