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Half Ticket

1962 168’ b&w Hindi d Kalidas pc Cine Technicians Prod. st Surid Kar sc Ramesh Pant lyr Shailendra c Apurba Bhattacharjee m Salil Choudhury lp Kishore Kumar, Pran, Madhubala, Manorama, Om Prakash, Helen, Shammi, Tuntun, Moni Chatterjee, Sailen Bose, Dilip Mukherjee, Anil Ganguly, B.R. Kapoor, Mauji, Zeb Rehman

Slapstick crime thriller parodying the genre with Indian cinema’s weirdest and most sustained chase sequence. Raja Babu (Pran) stuffs stolen diamonds into the hip pocket of Vijay (Kumar), standing in front of him in a railway ticket queue. Vijay, a rich man’s socialist son with a bizarre way of organising protests, is running away from home dressed in shorts and a schoolboy cap to obtain the half- price ticket available to schoolchildren. Throughout the rest of the film, Raja Babu chases Vijay and keeps making ineffectual grabs at the hero’s hip pocket as they go through Bombay, visit a Cossack stage dance with Helen, a nautanki performance and eventually wind up in a crane, a hot-air balloon and an aeroplane that lands them atop a palm tree. The crazy plot recalls the Tashlin/Lewis? films and the Marx Brothers as well as the boisterous traditions of Indian urbanised folk theatre.

Film