| | 12 | This important film in Sulochana's career at the Imperial Studio cast her as Sundari, the innocent village beauty with an ineffectual father, adrift in the big, bad city where she is preyed upon by lustful men seeking to force her into prostitution. The hero, Navichand, is a film actor and the film milieu is represented by a studio boss and a comedian, Gazdar, nicknamed Charlie Chaplin. Other features of the urban landscape, besides 'electric trains, motor cars and buses, the giant wheel, cinemas and theatres', as the publicity pamphlet claims, include a corrupt policeman, a racecourse and the fictional Bachelors' Club whose members see Sundari and promptly postpone their collective pledge never to marry. The film was part of Imperial's calculated and successful effort to manufacture a star image for the actress. |