India's first talkie and Jinnah

[hab...@anony.net]

excerpt

http://www.dawn.com/news/1200439/indias-first-talkie-alam-ara-and-jinnahs-role-in-it

India’s first talkie ‘Alam Ara’ and Jinnah’s role in it
It was somewhere around 1930 when the idea of Alam Ara took root.
Having seen Universal Pictures’ Show Boat (1929) (a “40 per cent
talkie” in his words), at the Excelsior Theatre in Bombay, Imperial
Movietone boss, Ardershir Irani began harbouring thoughts of making
India’s first talking and singing picture.

As there was no precedent in India of making a talkie, the odds Irani
faced were huge.

There were no soundproof stages nor technical know-how to make a film
that had sound. Nevertheless, Irani decided to take the challenge head
on. He decided to make a screen version of a popular stage play
written by the doyen of Bombay dramatists, Joseph David, who agreed to
adapt the play for the silver screen. The resulting film was Alam Ara.

Alam Ara is a fantasy set piece around typical royal intrigue with a
lost-and-found subplot thrown in. The story revolves around the King
of Kumarpur and his two wives, Dilbahar and Navbahar, both childless.
A fakir predicts that Navbahar will give birth to a son, which gets
Dilbahar all worked up. She has designs on army chief Adil, but he
spurns her. So Dilbahar has him imprisoned and his pregnant wife
banished.

Adil’s wife dies giving birth to a girl, Alam Ara, who is brought up
by nomads. When Alam Ara finds out she is Adil’s daughter, she
secretly leaves the nomads' camp and makes her way to the palace to
attempt to free her father out from prison. There she sees the
handsome young prince and the two fall in love.

Irani kept his project a secret. He picked up the basics of sound
recording from an American expert, Wilford Deming, who had come in to
assemble the Tanar recording equipment for Imperial at the
astronomical sum of Rs100 a day.

Filming was done mostly between 1am and 4am in the night as the studio
was close to the railway tracks, and the noise of the trains was
unavoidable during the day.

Search for the cast
Since Alam Ara was a talkie, the casting was of utmost importance. As
it was imperative for actors to know the language, Zubeida got the nod
to play the title role instead of of the studio’s top star, Sulochana.
As it turns out, Sulochana was actually an Iraqi Jew whose real name
was Ruby Myers. She was not proficient in Urdu or Hindustani and thus
lost out on the opportunity to be the first talkie heroine of Indian
cinema.

For the hero, Irani had all but fixed on Mehboob Khan, the future
director of classics like Aurat (1940), Anmol Ghadi (1946), Aan (1952)
and Mother India (1957), but then decided to go for a more
commercially viable name. As Alam Ara was a tale that also involved
stunts and fight sequences, Irani thought of casting the biggest stunt
star of silent cinema, Master Vithal, who was called the Douglas
Fairbanks of India.

Master Vithal had graduated to becoming India’s top swashbuckling star
after entering the film industry by playing a dancing girl in Kalyan
Khajina (1924). He had since joined Sharada Studio and graduated to
becoming a dashing action hero. In his eagerness to play the lead role
in India’s first talkie, he broke his contract with Sharada and signed
on with Irani. Sharada, however, refused to take this lying down and
filed a case against Vithal for breach of contract.

Legal saviour, founder of a nation
Coming to Vithal’s legal aid was Bombay’s leading legal expert at the
time: Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

Jinnah made a very effective defence of Vithal’s right to star in Alam
Ara and ensured that Irani got the hero he wanted for his landmark
film.