Review of Mughal-e-Azam (1960) by Mike M — 31 Jul 2008

A key text from what we might call the classical Bollywood cinema, drawing heavily on Shakespeare as an influence: a tale of thwarted lovers and courtly intrigue... Not all the film's pageantry translates, and it's still hard to see why the stolid, podgy Kumar became revered amongst audiences in quite the way he did.

(Compare him with his latter-day equivalent, the clownish, playful Shah Rukh Khan, and he comes in a distant second; Khan even has better movie-star hair.) Its remaining pleasures are timeless: sets that a Selznick would have killed for; a selection of keening love songs; and a dramatic (if not wholly overblown) final hour in which thousands of extras teem across the screen, elephants are pitted against cannon fire, and the script's rather fanciful notion of death as the ultimate expression of love can be pursued to its warped conclusion.

I'm guessing that, on its initial release in 1960, there wasn't a dry eye in the house.