Sakuntalai

Sakuntalai (1940)

சகுந்தலை

Sakuntalai is the story of the mythological queen Shakuntala, whose tale is told in the Mahabharata and dramatised by Kalidasa in the play Abhijñānaśākuntalam.

Date of release
1940-12-12
Runtime
3h 0m
Genres
Drama
Director
Ellis R. Dungan

Casting

Interesting facts

Sakuntalai is a 1940 Indian Tamil-language film directed by Ellis R. Dungan and starring M. S. Subbulakshmi and G. N. Balasubramaniam.

Production

Subbulakshmi and her husband T. Sadasivam formed Royal Talkies to produce their own films. They decided to make a movie based on Shakuntala's life and asked director K. Subramanyam, to direct the film. Subramaniam was not able to do so because of prior commitments and recommended Ellis Dungan to be hired instead. Sadasivam wrote the screenplay and Papanasam Sivan was hired to write the lyrics. Carnatic singer G. N.

I hired a scantily dressed female dancer for the role of a water nymph. She was a young European girl in her late twenties, possessing a beautiful Venus-type figure, who performed acrobatic dances with a male partner in cabaret shows at the Connemara Hotel in Madras. In an unheard-of technique in Indian films, she came up out of a water tank and danced in her rather skin-tight one-piece bathing suit.

The completed film was 17,400 Feet in length (around 3 hours run time). The film advanced the popularity of singing lead actress M. S. Subbulakshmi.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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