Babla (1951)

Typical instance of the commercially successful realist Bengali melodrama of this period, as a pop variation of what the later New Theatres directors were doing after the war. A compositor in a printing press (Bannerjee) brings his wife (Sen) and son Babla (Bhattacharya) to Calcutta. He has an accident and his overworked wife succumbs to tuberculosis. Babla leaves school to work as a newspaper hawker. When he finds a purse full of money, he dutifully returns it to its owner and refuses to be helped. Returning home, he finds his mother dead. Widely advertised in the Hindi market, the film was accurately described in Filmfare (16.10.1953) as failing ‘from sheer excess’. The film’s Malayalam remake, Newspaper Boy (1955), was much more of a critical success.