Hunterwali

Hunterwali (1935)

Preceded by a legend describing its heroine as a 'Brave Indian girl who sacrificed royal luxuries to the cause of her people and her country', the story opens with a prologue showing Krishnavati and her infant son being thrown out of the house in a thunderstorm by the wicked Prime Minister Ranamal who also killed her brother. 20 years later the now adult son, Jaswant, is hit by a royal motor car and given a bag of gold in compensation. His refusal of the gift attracts the admiration of Princess Madhuri. When the nasty Ranamal, who wants to marry her, imprisons her father the king, she becomes the masked Hunterwali, 'protector of the poor and punisher of evildoers', and performer of stunts like jumping over a moving cartand fighting 20 soldiers at once. She steals Jaswant's prize horse, Punjab, but returns it later. Jaswant chances upon a nude Hunterwali bathing in the river and after a long duel captures her and takes her to Ranamal to claim his reward.

Date of release
1935-01-02
TMDB
7.0 / 10 (1)
Runtime
2h 44m
Genres
Adventure, Action
Director
Homi Wadia

Casting

Interesting facts

Hunterwali is a 1935 Indian Hindi-language action film by the Wadia Movietone company of Bombay, featuring Fearless Nadia as the heroine. A story of a princess who fights injustice as the masked crusader Hunterwali, the film propelled Nadia and the Wadia brothers of Wadia Movietone to fame.

Production

Hunterwali was a Black and White film running for 164 minutes. During the production, there was an objection to the film's title. Language pundits objected to the blending of two words; Hunter, an English word denoting "whip" and wali, which was a Hindi word made a corrupted hybrid which did not do justice to either language.

The main character in the film, Hunterwali/Madhuri, is the feisty and blue-eyed beauty, Nadia, in the disguise of a man. Mary Evans aka Nadia, an Australian entered Indian cinema in 1934 and had acted in two films, Desh Deepak and Noor-e-Yaman, before Hunterwali. Hunterwali was the first lead role of Nadia.

The producers Wadia Movietone (founded by the brothers JBH Wadia and Homi Wadia) specialised in stunt-based and mythological films at that time. The story line was developed by J.B.H. Wadia to suit Nadia's character. The plot is developed around the historical theme of a brave, fearless Indian girl who forgoes her royal luxurious lifestyle to be a people's person.

Inspired by the film serial The Perils of Pauline, Nadia did all her stunts. In the role of a masked avenging angel, the film pictured Nadia as a swashbuckling princess in disguise. In this disguise, she straddled on her horse around the countryside chasing enemies, wearing her hot pants, "with her big breasts and bare white thighs, and when she was not swinging from chandeliers, kicking or whipping men, she was righting wrong with her fists and…

The film is embellished with many bhajans by Govind Gopal. One of the popular songs starts with "Hunterwali hai bhali duniya ki leth," which is a glorification of Hunterwali. Master Mohammed, who acted as the king who also provided the music score.

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

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