Raj Kapoor Films Ranked

I’m not really ranking Raj Kapoor’s filmography, I’m just sharing some thoughts on eight of his films that I saw. I got annoyed that my several google searches along the lines of “Raj Kapoor films ranked” turned up nothing and I needed a title so I thought this was good.

I had the great privilege of attending a theatrical retrospective of Raj Kapoor’s work, put on by the Film Heritage Foundation (I recommend following them on Twitter or Instagram) which is doing great work in restoring and preserving Indian films, promoting India’s film heritage, and periodically putting together these retrospectives which play in theaters in a number of cities across India. These retrospectives are in collaboration with the merged government agencies NFDC-NFAI. Though they’ve been doing these for a few years now, it is the first I have been able to attend. I believe it was the first of their Hindi-language film retrospectives to have subtitles (I regret that I was traveling during the retrospective of Telugu star ANR’s films, which I had subtitles). They were showing 10 of Raj Kapoor’s films and I was able to watch eight of them within a week.

This was really exciting for me because I had never seen any of Kapoor’s films before (and in general I prefer watching older films to newer films, an opportunity I rarely get in theaters). The last time I was in the U.S. and had access to my fancy plasma TV (without which I will only see a movie in a good theater), I tried watching some RK films, but I found few available on streaming, and those that I did find had pretty poor picture quality. The lack of access to good quality prints is why before this I don’t believe I’d seen a single Hindi movie from before the 1970s. There have been a number of times when I’ve started watching some, only to turn them off after a few minutes with the thought that I’d rather wait for a restoration, even if it takes a decade.

I’m happy that it seems restorations of many classic are happening sooner rather than later thanks to the NFDC-NFAI’s National Film Heritage Mission, which they claim is the “World’s Largest Film Restoration Project” and which I claim is “India’s Greatest Government Program” (to be honest their claim is probably more accurate than mine, and perhaps the jury is still out on this program). I believe every film I saw as part of the Raj Kapoor fest was restored under this initiative and not by FHF, which usually works on more obscure movies and applies more TLC to their restorations. However, these restorations were taken over by Raj Kapoor’s grandson Kunal Kapoor who wasn’t happy with the work being done (I recommend the article about this, I love the story of Kunal’s father Shashi Kapoor having him bribe projectionists so they don’t dim the bulbs). I’m not sure what FHF’s relationship is with the NFDC-NFAI and if they work together in some way on the restorations, but it’s nice that they do these retrospectives together, even if the restorations are imperfect.

(If I understood correctly, NFDC-NFAI has their own restoration facility in Pune, while Kunal Kapoor went to work on the films at a Prasad facility in Mumbai, and both were listed in the restoration credits. If you’re interested you can read what I wrote about the Prasad group in my Hyderabad post. While reading about Raj Kapoor I learned that L.V. Prasad had come to Mumbai with a friend in hopes of becoming RK’s assistant at the time RK was filming Barsaat, but RK only accepted the friend, who became his chief AD who worked with him for decades to come. Prasad burst out crying and RK felt bad and helped him get a job at Prithvi Theatre. A fortuitous rejection! Raj later starred in Prasad’s Hindi film Sharada.)

From what I could tell, the restorations weren’t as great as, say, Satyajit Ray’s major films that I watched via Criterion, which probably had better preserved prints to work from in addition to bigger budget restorations, but I was very happy with all of them that I saw. As a layperson (albeit better informed than most), I thought they looked great. Could they have had more detail? Were they scrubbed too clean? Maybe, but whatever. I was never once taken out of the movie because of it, and I’ll be thrilled to see more Indian classics that look as good as this. With that said, I have no idea where to watch these or any of the other restored films that they’ve played at previous retrospectives. Hopefully these will be widely available on streaming (with the right aspect ratio!) soon (not pushing my luck with some Blu-rays, but that’d be nice too).

Now onto the films. 

I hadn’t planned to write this, but during the festival I was frustrated at how few opinions of the films I could actually find. Despite the massive popularity of his work, there are few reviews available. I found blog reviews of some of his films here and there, but they are often a mix of long plot summaries (I’ll never understand the need for a lengthy plot summary in a review) mixed with analyses of the themes and gender politics, and then some quick opinions, but I could rarely find anyone who wrote about more than two or three of his films, who gave a sense of the creative trajectory of his career and how they felt about it. There were some articles going through his career (the best I found were by Prathyush Parasuraman and Jai Arjun Singh), giving some good context for his work, but they were more focused on themes and how Kapoor’s life and art intersected than on the actual quality of his films, treating them more as texts to be analyzed than movies to be watched (I’ll proudly take an anti-intellectual, consumerist stand here and focus on the latter). Google searches such as “Raj Kapoor films ranked” got me nowhere other than lousy listicles that could’ve been made by an AI, and Letterboxd, while fun, was generally uncritical and shallow. There were occasional thoughtful reviews, but I still longed for someone’s views on the overall catalogue or at least a good chunk of the films to see how they fare against each other.

This is an issue I have with Indian cinema in general (and literature, as well). It’s hard to find reviews, or even quick thoughts and blurbs, on anything that’s more than a few decades old. I do appreciate having the context and trivia, but I also want some sense of if something is enjoyable to watch, as subjective as that is. I like hearing people’s opinions. I also like being able to differentiate the wheat from the chaff. There’s an unfortunate tendency to lump Indian films into baskets of “commercial entertainer,” “social message film,” or “art film” and leave it at that, without giving much of an evaluation of them on their own terms. A lot of criticisms I have while watching Indian films are criticisms that apply to most of the films and that aren’t a surprise to anyone, so it can feel pedantic to point out that a film is shallow, overlong, lacks interesting characters, suffers from dull repetitive melodrama, etc, but I think it does a disservice to the films that are actually very good (of which there are many) to brush them all aside as cultural artifacts that can’t transcend their context.

At some point during the festival, I thought to myself “I wish I could have seen more of his movies so I could make my own ‘Raj Kapoor films ranked’ article,” but eventually I thought, what the hell, I’ve seen eight films, which include his first seven films as a director.

The films I watched were:

Aag (1948)

Barsaat (1949)

Awara (1951)

Shree 420 (1955)

Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai (1960)

Sangam (1964)

Mera Naam Joker (1970)

Bobby (1973)

All except Bobby star Raj Kapoor, and all except Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai were directed by Raj Kapoor, though he still produced it.

I found it easy to pair up his films. Aag and Barsaat feel they belong to the same era of RK’s filmmaking, Awara and Shree 420 are another era (and though it’s quite different, Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai fits well enough into this era), and Sangam and Mera Naam Joker yet another. All three eras feel like different directors. Bobby feels like the start of a new era, though I wouldn’t say it feels like a different director from Sangam/MNJ. You’ll notice that I will say more on the first in each pair of films because I’m often talking about both films.

The films were a mixed back, both across films and often within films. The Awara/Shree 420 era was wonderful, though, and those films are the only ones I recommend to the average person. I only wish the whole catalogue were so good, but there was enough strong work in every film that I found them all worthwhile, if often frustrating. Generally Raj Kapoor did a great job as a filmmaker, but the material he was working with, which he often generated, tended to leave me uninspired. I’m a big fan of “auteur” filmmaking, but many times while watching his films I thought to myself that there’s great wisdom in the Hollywood assembly line system where scripts get developed and later matched with directors (which works less well these days, but was once a winning formula).

I also grew pretty fascinated by Raj Kapoor, the man, myth, legend, actor, director, producer (and editor!). I read two books about him (they were Raj Kapoor: The Master at Work by his assistant turned director Rahul Rawail, and Raj Kapoor Speaks, a book of quotes assembled by his daughter Ritu). He was a character, kind of crazy but brilliant and lovable, and it was interesting to see how he put his own life into movies. That said, I want to focus on the films themselves so I’ll largely be ignoring that. 

I saw the films in a fairly random order, but I’ll discuss them in the order of their release. I watched around 25 hours of Raj Kapoor cinema within a week, which in some ways isn’t recommended, it is obviously overkill. But it also left a profound impact on me. I loved the experience, and it also reoriented my thinking. The music never left my head. As I lived my own life in those seven days I periodically imagined dramatic dolly push-ins when I talked (this might sound like a joke but I’m actually serious). And it made me want to get back into making movies. Maybe one day I’ll trace some turn in my life back to this crazy week.

Aag - I enjoyed the first half well enough, even if I admittedly was going easy on it due to it being his directorial debut and from the 1940s (the first Indian film I’ve seen from the decade, in fact). However, the second half was pretty dull. It’s the shortest of his films, “only” two hours and 10 minutes, but still way too long and repetitive, without very appealing characters, all of which I’m sorry to say applies to many of his films. Chop off half an hour and maybe we’ve got a solid old fashioned melodrama. 

RK was clearly a talented filmmaker out of the gate, though, eager to impress with some terrific visuals (shot by V. N. Reddy). In my head, before seeing any of his films, I mainly expected broad comedy and melodrama, but I quickly felt a more artistic and cinematic sensibility here, one that would remain throughout his black and white films, and I was actually reminded of… Orson Welles? Is that outrageous to suggest? His early work is full of interesting compositions that make excellent use of light, shadow, and depth, and there’s an energy and verve to the filmmaking… at times. 

Other times it gets lost in the boring, pretentious melodrama. I’m not impressed with the script by Inder Raj Anand (a well known and prolific screenwriter, spanning the 40s through the 80s, this was among his first works). Perhaps the story, of a young man rebelling against family expectations and pursuing arts, was quite novel at the time, and there was potentially interesting material in the romantic drama aspect of the story, but neither went anywhere compelling. I liked the music by Ram Ganguly but didn’t find it very memorable. Performances are solid even though nobody really stood out to me.

Barsaat - Though it’s very different from Aag, my reaction was similar. There are outstanding visuals (shot by Jal Mistry in his debut) and this one had some great music (the debut of the legendary duo Shankar-Jaikishan, who did the music for all of RK’s films as a director up until Jaikishan’s death in 1971), but it’s a slog to sit through, self-serious and not engaging. I thought both films were at their best at their most surreal. A highlights reel of both films could be excellent, no subtitles necessary. The script (the debut of the eventually very famous Ramanand Sagar) has maybe an hour’s worth of material. Then there’s 40 or so minutes of songs. And somehow this is three hours. Indians have made many important contributions to the field of mathematics throughout history but this innovation was unnecessary. Still, RK completists should find much to appreciate. I probably liked this more than Aag overall. Though I found its musings to be pretentious and dull, I was surprised to see an Indian film from the 40s having open, philosophical conversations about casual sex.

Awara - This might be one of the greatest films ever made, and one of the great directorial leaps forward of all time (and speaking of great leaps forward, Chairman Mao was reportedly a huge fan of the film, and though I want to focus on my own reaction rather than the film’s massive success, it is worthy of mention that this is among the most popular films globally of the 1950s, with China and the Soviet Union being two particularly notable places where the film was much beloved, you can google it for more, and here is Jia Zhangke talking about the film and singing the theme song). 

Awara has all of the strengths of RK’s earlier films and none of their weaknesses. The first two films showed a lot of promise in Kapoor as a filmmaker but suffered from lackluster scripts. Here we have a wonderful screenplay by KA Abbas, and Kapoor just knocks it out on every level as he works on a bigger budget and ups his game as a filmmaker. (Though I’m not certain, I think this is the only film directed by Kapoor that has a script that didn’t originate with him, I’ll reiterate the wisdom of the old Hollywood studio system that limited directors’ powers, even if that’s not my preferred approach overall.) There’s a strong plot setup, a clever and effective structure, simple but well sketched characters, great melodrama, great music that is very well integrated into the film, the social messaging rises organically out of the story and doesn’t feel overdone, and it breezes by even with its three hour runtime, with a light touch and good humor despite the intense narrative. I don’t know enough about classic Hindi cinema to say this with certainty, but this feels like the proto-masala movie, with many of the tropes that I associate with later “Bollywood” present here but executed far better than the vast majority of the followers.

Awara is full of heightened melodrama and is an example of very Indian storytelling and filmmaking, but it's mixed with a cinematic aesthetic that feels quite in line with prestigious world cinema at the time, which I can’t say about any “very Indian” filmmaker today. (What would that even look like today? Slumdog Millionaire? I will also note that this played in competition at Cannes, and I believe the only other of RK’s films to play at a major fest was Boot Polish. A number of other KA Abbas films played at major fests, you can see my spreadsheet and post on the subject for more info.) 

This is the third film I’ve seen starring Raj Kapoor and Nargis (both co-starred in Aag and Barsaat as well), one of Indian cinema’s most famous on-screen couples, but this is the first one that I’ve seen where they really clicked with me, both as individual actors and as a pair. The whole cast is excellent, but the actor that most stood out to me is actually Prithviraj Kapoor (Raj’s father). What a face! What a screen presence! I also must mention this is the first collaboration between RK and Radhu Karmakar, Raj’s cinematographer for the rest of his career, and he does really excellent work here. I believe it’s also the first collaboration with M.R. Achrekar, who was RK’s regular production designer, also excellent.

Shree 420 - Creatively this is something of a part-two of Awara, with another KA Abbas script, a similar tramp-like character, similar social messaging, etc, and it’s a very solid follow-up, if not as good. In many ways it is just as good, and it is funnier and has even better music, but the script isn’t as tightly wound. The light, comic first half is a total delight, but the more melodramatic second half drags a bit, often being too simplistic in its messaging which feels like it leads the drama rather than building out of it. Still, if you loved Awara you will likely love this too.

Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai - Directed by the great Radhu Karmakar! As a dacoit film, it is quite different from the rest of the films I watched, and it is good old fashioned Hindi film fun with quite a good script (by Arjun Dev Rashk, whom I haven’t heard of). It is another “the lighter, more comic first half is better than the more serious second half” movie (not uncommon in India, and also… a metaphor for life?), but it is still very good throughout, and the first “half” happens to be closer to two-thirds of the runtime. There are some really wonderful S-J songs (Ho Maine Pyar Kiya is my favorite), and Padmini… wow. The word that kept coming to mind was “scrumptious.” She was like a gulab jamun transposed into the female form. I wanted to eat her. (Am I allowed to say that?) (Within the span of a week I saw Jagga the dacoit in Awara, Raka the the dacoit in Jis Desh, and then Taka the lion in Mufasa, that was funny.)

Sangam - Raj Kapoor is back in the director’s chair after nine years, this time with a four hour epic romantic melodrama, complete with two intervals! Back on screenwriting duties is Inder Raj Anand who did the great — wait, he did Aag? Oh no! Bring back KA Abbas! Okay, maybe IRJ has improved since then, and he has done numerous big films. He’s probably good. I’ll give him a chance. 

This was a tough film, and maybe the biggest mixed bag of them all. It has a lot going for it, but it is, unsurprisingly, too long, repetitive, and melodramatic, but more than that it is let down by something that is an issue in a lot of Indian romances that I’ve seen, though this is subjective and I guess partly cultural: the male lead is too annoying to be likeable. This is somewhat intentional and in a way works for the story being told, but it goes overboard. Also, coincidences and convenient contrivances are common in Indian films, and usually I’m game, but some of the ones that set up the story here just didn’t work for me. That said, if I weren’t frustrated at how annoying the protagonist was, I probably wouldn’t have been bothered. 

But… some of this is quite good. It feels like a few rewrites away from being great, at least on its own terms (not like Awara great). The co-lead Rajendra Kumar (whom I was unfamiliar with before) is terrific, a Natural Born Leading Man, and the female lead Vyjayanthimala is utterly delectable (can I donate to get a 4k restoration of Amrapali?). And though the early portions were often tedious, by the time we got to the European portions of the film I was having fun. I even started to like Raj Kapoor’s annoying character.

And once we got into the film’s fourth hour, following the second interval(!), it built into something kind of amazing. The finale of the film is glorious. Epic high gothic melodrama. It was extraordinary, like if Sergio Leone made a domestic drama. I’ve never seen anything like it. Masterful filmmaking from RK. It made me wish he directed a wider range of films. Imagine him doing a Hitchcockian thriller.

This was the first of his color films, and it’s beautifully shot (Radhu Karmakar actually went to train with Jack Cardiff). With that said, after this things were never the same. The poetry and precision of the black and white films made way for grandeur and opulence (though Sangam was a transition film, somewhere in the middle). Dramatic compositions with high contrast lighting shifted to candy colored pop art. A desire for interesting, artistic images to tell the story sometimes felt like it was overtaken by a desire to show how much money was spent on massive sets and props and exotic locations. Visually, it feels less of a piece with world cinema and more “Bollywood.” Less Orson Welles, more Yash Chopra. 

This isn’t a bad thing, I like both and I support directors evolving (and maybe RK invented the new Bollywood style?), but it coincides with a shift in storytelling that feels more broad. Raj Kapoor is often referred to as the “Showman” which seems like an odd description of his earlier work but a valid description of his films from Sangam onwards (I’m not sure when the term was first given), and an apology for what were grand productions with lackluster stories. But then, maybe I’m looking at it the wrong way and this is what Raj Kapoor always was, with Awara and Shree 420 being outliers where the worlds of Kapoor and Abbas melded into something beautiful.

By the way, Sangam has pretty good music with a few outstanding songs. The gorgeous Yeh Mera Prem Patra is the best, but I have a soft spot for the very fun Main Kya Karoon Ram, and though I’m not sure if it’s actually good or not I also love the simple, silly, repetitive, western inspired I Love You (S-J had some other fun western inspired work, see the Bombay Talkie album and background music, and maybe there are more.)

Mera Naam Joker - Four more hours! Two more intervals! The grandest production yet and KA Abbas is back with the pen! Unfortunately, it’s clear early on that this is a Raj Kapoor film written by KA Abbas, rather than the earlier films which feel like Kapoor directing KA Abbas scripts. 

I kinda liked it. It is basically three separate stories, bound together with a frame narrative (about how Raj Kapoor is a saint of a man), starring the same character but pretty much standalone (I was fascinated to learn that they were released as three separate films in the Soviet Union). All of the stories have some good material, but none really took off for me, and I’m not sure this very melodramatic mode was the best way to tell these stories. All are simultaneously underdeveloped and too long. A lot of people seem to think the third story is the weakest, but maybe that was my favorite. (Padmini is back! Rajendra Kumar is back!) The best parts of the film are about the protagonist’s sexual anxieties, and breasts play a prominent role in the narratives of two of the stories (this is the actual text of the films, not some attempt at subtextual analysis, quite surprising for an Indian film, and somehow there is nudity). The second film lacked that fun stuff but it had an astonishing moment in its portrayal of “tears of a clown.” There was a lot of good and great work in here, but the whole is tedious.

The music might be the weakest in any of his films, and the only songs I really liked were towards the end of the film when the characters are performing in historical dramas. I wished I could have been watching those historical dramas.

Bobby - “Only” three hours, but it felt as long as the last two films. Abbas wrote this one too, but it’s very much an RK film, though Raj doesn’t act, not even a cameo, instead launching his son as a star and breaking new ground and starting new trends with a youthful love story. I love Rishi Kapoor as an older actor (he was great, underrated, RIP!) but I don't find his younger performances that I’ve seen to be very compelling (he starred in the first portion of Mera Naam Joker as well), but maybe it’s just the script. He and his co-star Dimple were at least pleasant and cute rather than annoying, but their characters don’t offer much else to work with.

I actually really liked the setup (and the bite is great cinema), but once the romance got under way, eh. There’s nothing romantic. There’s nothing funny. It’s all very kiddy and juvenile (strong words from a KJo fan). It’s not witty or charming or anything, it just plods along. Once the conflict starts, it’s too generic, one-note, and repetitive. Stern parents in an Indian movie? No way! Maybe that was fresher 50+ years ago, but I don’t think it would have made a difference for me.

There’s good stuff in here, though, and the side characters were more interesting. I loved the character of Bobby’s dad, played by Prem Nath. There’s an odd subplot that I didn’t quite figure out about Rishi’s screen-mom’s breasts, that was intriguingly befuddling. I liked the mom’s high society friend who lusts after Rishi too. There was at least actual desire expressed there, not just self-expressed puppy love that close minded parents get in the way of.

Maybe it needed more fun music (this is the first RK film with songs by the great duo Laxmikant–Pyarelal). I liked much of it, but it was too dramatic. Stronger, catchier melodies could have sold the kiddy romance. Give me some bubblegum pop tunes to match the brightly colored outfits and flowers. The highlight of the movie and the strongest song is, without a doubt, Jhoot Bole Kauva Kate. Also fun is Na Mangun Sona Chandi, but the rest of the songs are kind of gloomy, I felt.

Raj Kapoor made three more films as a director after this: Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Prem Rog, and Ram Teri Ganga Maili. I need to see those, as well as the major earlier films he produced: Jagte Raho (which he starred in) and Boot Polish (where I believe he just has a cameo). There are others he produced in the 70s and 80s, and there’s the 1991 Henna which he had started working on before his death in 1988 and his son Randhir eventually directed (I liked seeing the artwork MF Husain created for the film’s opening credits). I look forward to updating this one day to give a full and complete picture of “Raj Kapoor films ranked.” (There are also his countless performances in films he didn’t produce or direct, but I don’t think he was creatively involved with any beyond his performances.)