Aap Ki Parchhaiyan (1964)

Mohan Kumar wrote this one, produced it and directed it, and the print says all three on a single card. Dharmendra and Supriya Choudhury take the only two names above the title, with Vijay Lakshmi introduced beside them. Supriya Choudhury had come from Ritwik Ghatak's Meghe Dhaka Tara four years earlier and made very few Hindi films; this is one of them. Around the two of them the picture fills up with people - Shashikala, Suresh, Nazir Hussain, Leela Chitnis, Mumtaz and Om Prakash - and a child who gets a card of his own: introducing MOPPET RAJOO. It is a black-and-white film that lives indoors. A house with a staircase, a college, a laboratory, a sickroom with a woman lying in it; and then it goes out of doors for the songs, to a hillside and to a crowd on a beach. The music is Madan Mohan's, to Raja Mehdi Ali Khan's words - the pairing that would make Woh Kaun Thi the same year and Mera Saaya after it - sung by Lata Mangeshkar, Mohammed Rafi and Asha Bhosle, with the gramophone records on H.M.V. Three songs: Agar Mujhse Mohabbat Hai, which is Lata's; and Yehi Hai Tamanna and Main Nigaahein Tere Chehre Se, both Rafi's. Two names in the small print repay a second look. The art is by Sudhendu Roy, who designed Bimal Roy's films and later directed Saudagar himself. And the fourth of four assistants to the director is Sohanlal Kanwar, a few years away from directing Pehchan and Sanyasi. The dialogue is by the Urdu writer Sarshar Sailani. No censor card survives at the head of this print: it opens straight on the MK monogram of Mohan Kumar's Emkay Productions.