It’s sad to hear that India has lost its first ever film with dialogues and songs. The film ‘Alam Ara’ was made way back in 1931 by Ardeshir Irani and told the love story of a prince and a gypsy girl.
All the powerful people and the ones that matter couldn’t even preserve one copy of the forefather of all the present day Hindi movies. Such a thing is least likely to happen in Hollywood.
So much for the global status of Bollywood and the industry producing the most number of films in the world! Somebody please tell all these ‘important’ showbiz people that it’s quality and not quantity that matters!
The news that the last remaining copy was stored at the National Film Archives at Pune but five years back a massive fire destroyed the last copies of films like ‘Raja Harishchandra and ‘Achyut Kanya’ and ‘Alam Ara’ which starred Prithviraj Kapoor, Zubeida, Master Vithal and L.V.Prasad.
Efforts were made to find out whether a copy of the movie existed in any part of the world, but now it has been revealed that not a single print exists.
‘Alam Ara’ was inspired by Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘Show Boat’ by Universal Pictures and was based on a Parsi play written by Joseph David
–(SAMPURN)
