This isn't the first movie of Helen, but her entrance here, at about age 19, feels like a triumphant introduction - slim as a reed, with a young girl's face made up lightly, just to emphasize the tilt of her eyes, she glides down a staircase in a Chinese costume to perform Meera Naam Chin Chin Chu, an all-time great Hindi cinema song. I think the movie is worth owning for this and for Madhubala in an Ava Gardner-like incarnation, singing and dancing in full-skirted lush western dresses.
An unusual film to me -- it seems to be a Bollywood effort at a noir-style mystery story. I'd say the "noir" element is present in the milieu and the cinematography more than in the story itself. The world of the story is a world of seedy small hotels and nightclubs in Calcutta. Most of the main dramatic scenes are interiors of these places at night, and people are always moving in and out of light that casts various shadows on their faces.
A dramatic chase scene makes great use of the Howrah Bridge, an imposing Erector-Set structure that is a Calcutta landmark.
There's also a style of Indian Orientalism here, as well I think as a use of some motifs from LA noir of this time period - there is a Chinese villain, played well by an Indian actor (i.e. not the random bowing slant-eyed stereotype we run into here and there in other movies) and the first part of the story takes place in Rangoon, its characters' home - so there are many references to "oriental exotic" outside of India.
Not unusually and not surprisingly, the story lacks the things that make noir noir - we've got our stereotypes moving around, doing things and reacting to things, and we don't have any of the moral ambiguity of the American film noir, where a hero without conventional social moorings has his own ethics, and a woman probably will not turn out to be who she seems to be. We do, though, have wonderful 50s western costumes on the primary characters, as well as Indian-style masala characters who sing, dance, and have a wedding which Madhubala stops to watch when she is pursuing someone.
The story also sticks mostly to the characters involved in the mystery - Ashok Kumar, Madhubala, a Tonga-wallah who is Ashok's guide into the more mysterious parts of Calcutta; the Chinese art dealer, and the man named Joe who owns a hotel and makes claims on owning Madhubala too. There is also the opium-smoker who witnessed the murder, and his lovely fiancé. But there are no extra relatives bringing in "emotion," which, for India, does stick to the noir mystery format and to the single plot line to an exceptional degree.
The basic story: Ashok Kumar, in Rangoon, learns that his brother has apparently stolen the precious family heirloom dragon statuette, and soon thereafter learns the brother has been killed in the course of his effort to sell it, so he travels to Calcutta to try to reclaim the thing and solve the mystery.
Along the way he meets Madhubala, who sings and dances in a hotel. At an early point I think we were meant to wonder whose side she was on, beyond that, the plot lost me somewhat, and I also don't think it was totally coherent but may be wrong. If someone else watches the whole thing, I'd like to know if you think the existence of the duplicate Family Heirloom really had anything to do with anything that happened.
Anyhow enjoy it for its eight songs, Helen (in just the one), and Madhubala.
