Mera Naam Joker (1970)

Three women each receive a toy clown and an invitation to the final performance of the famous clown Raju. In flashbacks, the teenage Raju, the son of a clown who died in the ring, falls for his schoolteacher Mary, who is about to marry David. As a young man he joins Gemini Circus and falls for Marina, a visiting Russian trapeze artist, across a language barrier, and his mother dies after seeing him perform in the ring. Later he befriends a street orphan who turns out to be a girl, Meena, and helps her towards stardom while hiding his own heartbreaks. Raj Kapoor plays Raju, with his son Rishi Kapoor as the boy Raju in his first film, Simi Garewal as Mary, the Russian ballerina Kseniya Ryabinkina as Marina and Padmini as Meena, with Dharmendra and Manoj Kumar in cameos and Rajendra Kumar opposite Padmini in the third chapter. It took six years, the mortgaging of all Kapoor's assets, and a first cut of about five hours. It was planned in six chapters and finished in three, and Kapoor shot the third first because Padmini and Rajendra Kumar were available. In India it failed so badly that Raj Kapoor was in financial crisis; in the Soviet Union, where it opened in 1972 as three separate films, it drew 73.1 million admissions. It later became a cult classic.