| | 4 | 1953 193’[Te]/194’[Ta] b&w Telugu/Tamil d K.S. Prakash Rao pc Prakash Prod. dial [Te] Sri Sri, Arudra, Sunkara, Vasireddy dial [Ta] M.S. Subramanyam lyr Tapi Dharma Rao, Acharya Athreya c Jagirdar m Pendyala Nageshwara Rao lp G. Varalakshmi, A. Nageshwara Rao, Rajanala Nageshwara Rao, M.N. Nambiar, Vasantha, Mikkilineni, K. Siva Rao |
| | 7 | Melodrama about a middle-class mother (Varalakshmi) who raises her two children when her husband, unable to repay mounting debts, abandons his family. While the daughter (Vasantha) becomes a good soul, like her mother, the son (Nambiar) goes astray and eventually commits murder. Mother takes the blame for the crime and goes to jail, thus reforming her errant son. At this time in Telugu cinema, ‘the struggling mother’ is a nationalist as well as a melodramatic stereotype (cf.L.V. Prasad’s Pempudu Koduku, also 1953). |