Woman in white

The perfect gentleman that he is,he offers to give her a lift. The moment she sits in the car,the wipers stop working. The man is unable to see the road ahead but she can. He notices that her finger is bleeding. He asks her what happened and she says,“Mujhe khoon achcha lagta hai (I like blood).” She asks to be dropped at a graveyard. The cemetery gates swing open as she enters. She merges with the mist and the only reminder of her is the haunting song Naina barse rimjhim rimjhim. The man is visibly spooked out and so are we. The title credits of Woh Kaun Thi roll.

With this film,Raj Khosla started his mystery trilogy starring Sadhana. The director and his muse repeated the success of the 1964 film with Mera Saaya (1966) and Anita (1967). Woh Kaun Thi was loosely inspired by Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White. Incidentally,Khosla’s mentor,Guru Dutt was making a film titled Raaz based on the same story. He planned to cast Waheeda Rehman and had signed RD Burman,who at the age of 18,was going to make his debut. RD had even recorded two songs but Raaz was abandoned after five reels were canned. The writer of Raaz,Dhruv Chatterjee then sold his story to Khosla.

Khosla went to Manoj Kumar to play the role of Dr Anand,a man trapped in extraordinary situations. He is in love with Seema (Helen),who is killed when someone injects her with cyanide. As he deals with this,he keeps bumping into the mysterious woman in white who no one else can see. He loses it when he discovers that his new bride Sandhya (Sadhana) bears a striking resemblance to the mysterious lady.

Kumar looks back at the film where he played “a haunted man” with fondness. His contribution to Woh Kaun Thi went beyond acting,he designed the publicity posters and contributed to the film’s dialogues. “We were shooting the Shokh nazar ki bijliya song in Shimla when I was given the dialogues. I was disappointed with what was written so I started scribbling a few lines. I was hesitant to go to Raj who was a very big name after having directed Dev Anand. I mustered up my courage and went up to him with my lines. He read it and declared to the unit,‘This man is writing the dialogues.’ ,” reminisces Kumar. Describing Khosla as a “kaamchor and brilliant director”,Kumar talks about the director’s pessimism. “I used to call him Maharaj. It was a big job to take him out of his house to the studio. He just didn’t like anything. ‘Yeh koi set hai?’,‘Yeh koi scene hai?’ used to be his constant refrain. But the moment the camera started rolling,he was in command. Raj was brilliant and never let work feel like work,” adds Kumar.

Khosla’s brilliance is displayed in the noir touches in Woh Kaun Thi. The misty mood,the cut-to-cut edit pattern,the sound effect added to the spook quotient of the film. Madan Mohan’s music is also an important character in the film. The story goes that Madan Mohan had the tune of Naina barse for 18 years but could not find the situation for it. Interestingly,Lata Mangeshkar could not record the song on the scheduled date owing to a bad throat,so Madan Mohan recorded the song in his own voice and Sadhana was asked to lip sync to it during the shoot. The song became the film’s theme and it’s alluded to in the movie when Sandhya says,“Yeh geet mujhe bahut achcha lagta hai.” To which Anand replies,“Iss liye har jagah gaati phir rahi ho.”

As for the other Lata number Lag jaa gale,which the singer names as one of her most favourite songs,it very nearly didn’t make it to the film. Khosla had initially rejected the song. “I got a call from Madan Mohan asking me to come over to his place immediately. He was very disturbed that Raj had rejected it. So I called Raj again and told him to hear a new tune. We played him the same tune of Lag jaa gale. There was a pin-drop silence after the song,and then Raj took his shoe and started hitting his head with it. He said,‘Yaa toh mera dimaag kharab tha yaa mera mood kharab tha’,” says Kumar.

Woh Kaun Thi would not be what it is,without its leading lady. With that mysterious smile,Sadhana is bewitching in the film. The hero calls her as a chalaava (illusion) and says,“bahut khoobsurat hai… kissi gunah ki tarah.” Khosla builds up the mystery element well but the resolution is a tad disappointing. There are a few red herrings in the film,and some plot developments remain unexplained. The wipers bit,for example. Kumar says that was a hotly debated point during the shooting. “Raj said leave it to the audience. We don’t need to explain everything,” he says.

Woh Kaun Thi remains one of our finest mystery- noir attempts. You will find that Khosla took a jab at Bimal Roy’s 1958 film Madhumati. In a sequence where two servants are sharing ghost tales,a woman attired like Vyjayanthimala from Roy’s mystery movie appears and what do you know,her name is also Madhumati.

harneet.singh@expressindia.com