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I'm posting the text of the article because this is a site you have to register for and a link won't work. Mother India is playing at the Lincoln Center!
MOVIE REVIEW | 'MOTHER INDIA'
The Social Epic That Launched Indian Cinema
By DAVE KEHR
A defining film in the history of Bollywood, the Hindi film industry based in Bombay, Mehboob Khan's "Mother India" (1957) is often said to have helped set the pattern for the nearly 50 years of Indian film that has followed it. Filmed in the highly unstable Gevacolor process, this nationalist epic is a sprawling, three-hour melodrama with plenty of time out for anomalous musical numbers and situation comedy. Its central character is a peasant woman, Radha (Nargis), whose determination to weather all forms of social and personal adversity without compromising her honor becomes a symbol of India's own pride as an ancient culture and a new democracy.
The film is at once a sort of Indian "Stella Dallas," which finds the heroine making sacrifice after sacrifice on behalf of her family, and a "Gone With the Wind"-style epic of social change.
When Radha is first married, she discovers that her mother has gone into debt with the heartless local money lender, Sukhilala (Kanhaiyalal), to finance the lush festivities. But a marriage that begins in debt is already in danger. Gradually Radha and her husband (Raaj Kumar) are forced to sell off much of their land and cattle to finance the exorbitant interest the moneylender demands. When the husband loses both arms in a farming accident and can no longer support his family, he runs away in shame, leaving Radha with their two young sons. At this point "Mother India" shades into "Mother Courage."
Determined to bring her boys up properly, Radha works her fingers to the bone on what's left of the farm. Although the evil moneylender is always skulking around, offering to take Radha as his wife, she resists the insult to her honor and chastity. Through strength of will she brings her boys into adulthood, producing the sober, responsible Ramu (Rajendra Kumar) and the impish, irresponsible but irresistibly charming Birju (Sunil Dutt, who later married Nargis).
"Mother India" opens today for a one-week engagement at the Walter Reade Theater in Lincoln Center, where it is being shown in a print restored by the British Film Institute. The Indian climate has clearly taken its toll on the delicate dyes of the color negative, and many of the film's most spectacular effects can be imagined only from the fading traces left on the screen.
Directed by Mehboob Khan
In Hindi, with English subtitles
Not rated, 175 minutes
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