Alibaba - Bengali - 1937

Alibaba - 1937 - Bengali Director: Madhu Bose Music Directors: T. Franco Polo, Nagardas Nayek Choreography: Sadhana Bose Cast: Marjina: Sadhana Bose Alibaba: Bibhuti Ganguly Fatima: Suprabha Mukherjee Kasim: Kamal Biswas Sakina: Indira Roy Abdullah: Madhu Bose Hussain: B.P. Mehra Mustafa: Preeti Kr. Majumdar Chief of the Thieves: Kali Ghosh English translation included. The Encyclopedia Of Indian Cinema has this to say about Alibaba: Dancer Sadhona Bose made her feature debut in Modhu Bose’s acclaimed Arabian Nights musical. Vidyavinode’s play, first staged in 1897 by the Classic Theatre with Nripen Basu and Kusum Kumari, remained one of the most popular pre-WW1 Bengali plays. It tells of the Baghdadi woodcutter Alibaba (M. Bose) and his maglc ’Open Sesame’ formula; of the hero’s jealous brother Kasim and of the slave girl Marjina (S. Bose). The film adapts the Calcutta work with composer Timir Baran. The slow, mannered acting and the frontally framed tableau shots are enlivened by the dance scenes, esp. the Marjina-Abdullah sequence which long set the standard for film musicals (cf. Lila Desai’s dance in Bidyapati, 1937). The surviving copy is probably incomplete. The source is very bad and I could of worked a year on it and it would still look bad. Many parts look like an old silent film with blown out whites and constant flickering. I did what I could and then tinted it to make it easier on the eyes. After the first 15 minutes or so (which are very bad) it gets better with some bad patches off and on throughout. Apparently, beginning at about 1:46:21 a different source was used as both the audio and video became noticeably worse. There’s another film in this channel that features Sadhana Bose, the English language 1941 film Raj Nartaki found here: