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Mahal
India 1949
produced by
Bombay Talkies
directed by Kamal Amrohi
starring Ashok Kumar, Madhubala, Vijaya Laxmi, Kumar, Kanu Roy
edited by Bimal Roy
review by
Mike Haberfelner
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Shankar (Ashok Kumar) arrives at a mansion his father bought one stormy night. The mansion has been
uninhabitated for 40 years safe for the gardener & his daughter,
& the gardener tells Shankar the romantic but tragic story of the
couple who previously lived here, but there love ending in death &
suicide. As soon as the gardener leaves, Shankar finds a portrait of
said previous owner - looking remarably like himself - & he sees a
woman (Madhubala), he believes to be the ghost of Kamini, the female of
the gardener's story. Shankar soon becomes obsessed with the house &
the ghost of Kamini, & all the efforts of his best friend to lure
him away from there - he even sends him to a brothel - add up to naught.
Then Kamini tells him she can come to life again, in the form of the
daughter of the gardener, but only if he marries the girl first without
lifting her veil (a bit of a giveaway in my view), he agrees to do so,
but before he actually can, he is abducted by his own father &
forced to marry Ranjana (Vijaya Laxmi), the girl he was promised to.
However, in their wedding night, when Shankar wants to remove Ranjini's
veil (= consummate the marriage), he suddenly stops at the strike of a
clock & wanders off. Insulted, Ranjana refuses to lift her veil
until he does so - which he never does, still haunted (& obsessed)
by Kamini's ghost, always reminded of her when he hears a clock striking
or even ticking. To escape this, he takes his wife on journeys to places
ever more exotic, ever more creepy, until he thinks he found his peace
in a mountain refuge, inhabited by snakes & bats, which is nearly
driving Ranjana over the edge. But then she decides to take fate into
her own hand, putting a clock right next to him & when she sees him
wandering off by the strike of the clock, she follows him. When she sees
him at the mansion with Kamini, she decides it's payback time, taking
poison & framing him for murdering her. He is taken to court, where
one of the witnesses is the gardener's daughter, who turns out to be
Kamini's ghost, or rather she has played the role of Kamini's ghost,
figureing that that was the only way she could receive the everlasting
love that Kamini did. However, Shankar is still sentenced to death by
hanging, but far from being mad at the woman formerly known as Kamini's
ghost, he asks his best friend to marry & take care of her in his
stead. But then, literally in the last minute, Shankar is saved from the
gallows when a letter by Ranjana turns up admitting to having framed
Shankar. He runs to his friend's house but is unable to reach there
until after the friend's wedding to the gardener's daughter - which is
just as well since he's already poisoned himself ...
Nice piece of gothic cinema - a genre that's for some reason not all
that popular in India - making great use of imaginative, creepy sets
& marrying the spooky atmosphere to the melodramatic lovestory very
competently.
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review © by Mike Haberfelner
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find Mahal at adultvideouniverse.com