| | 7 | Written by a CP ideologue, the plot concerns Arul, the bright son of a mill worker, who marries the mill owner’s daughter Lily, becomes a barrister and ends up leading an amalgamation of mill workers’ unions in a strike against the introduction of new machinery. He dies while preventing the mill owner from dynamiting a bridge filled with protesting workers. The Veena master Balachander, fresh from his successful Andha Naal (1954), achieves some excellent sequences (the workers passing over the Hamilton Bridge near Fort St George in Madras) shot by the Bengali director turned Tamil cameraman Ghosh. The censors cut 1034ft out of the film, including a series of lines spoken by the hero in a court scene and references to class struggle and economic inequality. People’s Films with its Mosfilm-type logo is an early effort to define a Tamil Communist cinema, briefly sustained by Ghosh. |