The art of gentle persuasion….

Guru Dutt and Dev Anand were great personal friends. Thick as thieves, after the shirt swap during the Prabhat Film Company days by the errant laundryman. They made a pact at the time.

Dev Anand and he made a pact while at Prabhat that if Guru Dutt were to become a filmmaker, he would hire Dev Anand as his hero, and if Dev Anand were to produce a film, he would use Guru Dutt as its director. Keeping that promise, the duo made two super-hit films together.

This song is from one of them.

Jaal is a crime thriller, a noir film written and directed by Guru Dutt. The film stars Dev Anand and Geeta Bali in lead roles.

The film was very successful at the box office

Jaal is considered a noir classic for its grey shaded characters which were among the first of its type in Indian cinema.

Filmfare has listed it in Best Bollywood Noir Films of ’50s.

Jaal was one of the first Bollywood films that portrayed an Anti-Hero character in the lead. It established the idea of Anti-Hero with “no qualms about bending moral codes” , not seen much before in Bollywood, where such villainy was usually left purely to the Villains and their henchmen or molls, a carry forward from the days of mythological and historical films (falsified sometimes esp in relation to Moghuls whose brutal crimes were usually glossed over and the brutal and barbaric rapist/murderers/looters presented as romantic, progressive characters, which they were anything but). Check this song out. https://youtu.be/z4zbkAFR8Fo

One of the shooting locations for the movie was Malvan, Sindhudurg District, where this song was shot, too. While returning from Malvan Dev Anand and Geeta Bali met with an accident. He almost broke his ribs. They spent some time in the local (District hospital run by the Government) hospital for recovery.

A similar shooting accident during the filming of Mother India led to Sunil Dutt and Nargis falling in love and marrying. It didn’t have a similar effect on these two though. Dev Anand wanted to marry Suraiya and Geeta Bali , destined to be Mrs Shammi Kapoor.

The movie has fabulous music by the man who should have been King but chose to devote himself to music, Sachindev Burman. The lovely lyrics are by Sahir Ludhiyanvi. Incidentally the other 2 songs of the movie in a male voice are sung by Hemantakumar Mukhopadhyaya. This is the only song sung by Kishore kumar in the movie. Geeta Dutt has the right naughty/plaintive/teasing tone. I love the way she rolls the r’s in नजराना दिलका…

Enjoy the song, folks and the day. Stay hydrated and healthy

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