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Woh Kaun Thi

aka Who Was She? 1964 140’ b&w Hindi d Raj Khosla p N.N. Sippy pc Prithvi Pics s Dhruva Chatterjee dial Ehsan Rizvi lyr Mehdi Ali Khan c K.H. Kapadia m Madan Mohan lp Sadhana, Manoj Kumar, Pravin Choudhury, K.N. Singh, Raj Mehra, Dhumal, Mohan Choti, Ratnamala, Helen, Prem Chopra

A rare big-budget excursion into the thriller genre, the story concerns a young doctor, Anand (Kumar), obsessed by a woman (Sadhana) who appears to him with different names and in different guises, making him doubt his senses. Like Vertigo (1958), the story evokes the supernatural and madness but eventually the hero unravels the plot. The villain of the piece is Anand’s friend Dr Ramesh (Chopra) who concocts the plot to drive Anand insane in order to get hold of an inheritance. The enigmatic, sexually repressed figure played by Sadhana ranges from a ghostlike apparition to Anand’s future wife (with a seduction scene where she momentarily turns ‘human’ to the song Lag jaa gale). In spite of the often woefully inadequate soundtrack and the fact that the suspense hinges mainly on the repeated use of the song Naina barse rimjhim (sung by Lata Mangeshkar), it remains one of director Khosla’s favourites. The film was remade in Tamil as Yar Nee by Sathyam (1966).

Film