Daag

Sunil is convicted of a killing he committed to protect a woman. On the way to prison he is presumed dead in a train crash. Years later he is living under another name, in another city, with another woman. Then his first wife Sunita appears. The subject is not the triangle but the way justice cuts a man in two. Sunil is never acting in bad faith; there is a defensible reason at every step, and the outcome is that he has lied to both women. Rather than placing him somewhere, the film forces him to choose. The form is Indian melodrama of the seventies: long confrontation scenes, songs, an edit built on feeling. The music by Laxmikant-Pyarelal did at least as much for the film's commercial life as its story. This was the first film Yash Chopra made with his own company, which is to say the beginning of Yash Raj Films. What is now one of the largest production houses in Indian cinema starts here. The plot has been compared to Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. Rajesh Khanna plays Sunil, Sharmila Tagore his first wife and Rakhee the second woman. Who it is for: viewers who like classical Indian melodrama and the Rajesh Khanna years. Who it is not for: anyone who wants the two women's stories treated in their own right; the narrative turns on the man's dilemma to the end.