1/3/2023 0 Comments Chitiram pesudhadi tamil album(The film was first released in 1959.) Perhaps it’s because the rhetoric fits right in with the historical (or folkloric, if you believe, as some do, that the film takes many liberties with facts) milieu. Veerapandiya Kattabomman, surprisingly, is more watchable than many of the social melodramas of the era. But this may be due to problems with the negative, and it doesn’t affect the three-hour film at all – save for the war portions where we wait for the inevitable, it all just zips by. The picture quality – the colours, mainly – is a bit inconsistent. Gemini Ganesan, Padmini, OAK Devar, VK Ramasamy as the smarmy Ettappan – there’s not one bad performance in the bunch. And a time actors were chosen for their felicity with the language. There was actually a time a Tamil-film heroine was being hailed as a paragon of Tamil speech. The scene where the battlefield-bound Kattabomman takes leave of his wife (S Varalakshmi) is stuffed with dialogue and yet as affecting as something we’d call “pure cinema” – though I did laugh once, when he described her thus: “ thaen sotta Thamizh paesum thiruvilakku.” Imagine. The camera whisks us to the first row, and perhaps even beyond, right by the actors. Show, don’t tell, we’re often told – but when the dialogues are so moving, so effective, it doesn’t matter that the film, for the most part, looks like a photographed stage play. To watch Veerapandiya Kattabomman is to marvel at the shades and nuances an actor can infuse into oratory.Īnd to realise – if one needed this realisation – how effective dialogues can be in cinema. There’s the way he spits out the name “Collector Lushington.” There’s the way – when informed that the British have cannons – he utters the word “ beerangi,” apparently quaking with fear but actually mocking that very fear. But watching the film all over again, we see how much more there is to it, right from Sivaji’s first words, a prayer to Lord Murugan. The speakers aid the illusion that Sivaji’s voice is all around us, and the barely disguised contempt when he gets to “ manjal araithu pani purindhaaya” is something to behold. On the big screen, the speech is more resonant than you remember. It’s essentially a single scene – the scene in which Kattabomman (Sivaji Ganesan, who’s beyond magnificent) gives Lord Jackson the chaste-Tamil equivalent of a giant, upraised middle finger. For generations, Veerapandiya Kattabomman isn’t the story of a brave king brought down by the British. It’s the film that fuelled a thousand acting dreams.
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