Dil Aur Mohabbat

This could have been a great noir movie, if only Vijay Anand would have directed it. In the hands of Anand Dutta (who never made another movie), it was a bit of a mess.

Title: Dil Aur Mohabbat
Year: 1968
Cast: Joy Mukherjee, Sharmila Tagore, Nasir Hussein, Ashok Kumar, KN Singh, Bela Bose, Johnny Walker

The movie opens well, with Ashok Kumar, a policeman, coming home to his ailing wife, Asha Nadkarni and his young son- Sachin (looking really really adorable!)

After quickly establishing Ashok's honesty, and his son's early tendencies towards the opposite, Asha quickly dies. The son grows up at school in Bombay, with the strange habit of sleeping with his own picture by his bed :S

Joy also likes to visit gambling houses, where he gambles (heeh), smokes (!),

... and likes to play snooker (why are all the balls the same color? doesn't it matter? I thought they should be different- will a snooker guru please enlighten us?) against the backdrop of surreal-ly painted walls and a grooving Bela Bose.


But Joy also goes to school: he studies at what reads like "APC College" of Mathematics, which is fake- there are APCs in Calcutta and the South though. His classmates are quite a bunch: An aging Johnny Walker who dresses like the early Beatles, and Anoop Kumar.

But Sharmila makes up for these deficiencies when she rides into college on a lambretta, wearing a gorgeous yellow confection!

And of course Joy disguises himself (as he has done so often before) to cadge a ride.

And after the usual bickering, of course they fall in love,

but for once the heroine coyly, but very stylishly announces her romance to her father, Nasir Hussein.

On her Birthday she has a truly fugly cake,

but takes the opportunity to give a ring to Joy symbolizing their engagement. Now this is very odd- isn't the guy supposed to give the ring? But looking at the size of her pearl ring (which I COVET), she perhaps doesn't need one...

Now that the ring is on, Joy decides to mend his gambling ways. But not before 1 last game of cards on a heart/kidney-shaped table.

The guy he is playing with dies when a scuffle ensues, and gasp- he happens to be the club owner, KN Singh's brother!

Urged on by Bela, Joy runs for his life,

... but only after he meets up with Sharmila and convinces her of his innocence.

So that when his dad comes to Bombay and realises his son is wanted for murder (look at the magazines- apparently Manohar Kahaniyan, Screen and Maya still existed then!),

... then Sharmila can meet him and bond with her future father-in-law :)

Of course Bela must assist Ashok in establishing Joy's innocence as well.

... But will KN really let Joy go so easily? What other nefarious plans does he have for Joy? ( I am convinced Joy wore that same pink-striped shirt in "Phir Wohi Dil Laaya Hoon")

Will Joy ever reconcile with his dad? Will he ever meet Sharmila again? Will Sharmila wear her pearl ring to the end? Will KN Singh keep on using lightbulbs that match Joy's shirts?

What will happen?

To find out, watch the travesty that is "Dil aur Mohabbat."

Notes:

1- Sharmila is luminous. As is Joy- and they looked really great together. I don't know if they did other movies together, but please let me know if you have recommendations.

2- I wish we had more of KN Singh in there- he just wasn't around enough.

3- Bela Bose has so many songs! She isn't bad looking, but not in the Helen/Faryal category, who I tend to enjoy more. The songs themselves are not bad- nothing that blew me away, but serviceable.

4- Repeating what I said in the beginning: the story had the makings of an excellent noir film. But it is treated as a romance, and therefore fails to deliver all that it could. If only they had roped in Vijay, or Brij, this could have been a way better movie.