"Raja Harishchandra" is a 1913 movie from India and as it is over 100 years old now and as such a black-and-white silent film. According to IMDb, the run-time is 40 minutes, but I have also read other numbers, so the only one who knows for sure is probably writer and director Dhundiraj Govind Phalke and he has been dead for a long time. But it is not that important anyway as only fragments of the film still exist apparently. Do not be fooled by a 50-minute version on Youtube or other video sites. This one includes a long introduction that is not part of the film I think, unless they included something similar to a making of early on as part of the film. For example, we find out about how women would not appear in front of a camera and as such the female characters were played by men. The actual movie (or what we still have preserved from it) runs for clearly under 20 minutes in the version I saw. Also, another movie by the same filmmaker is show in the last 10 minutes and it is also not part of "Raja Harishchandra". As for the film itself, it is obvious that costumes were at least as important back then already as they are today in Bollywood's finest. The story is so-so only though and the lack of a sufficient amount of subtitles makes this a mediocre watch at best. But for a first film, it's really not a failure. Then again Europe and the United States have been making movie for 20 years or so already at that point in 1913 and India sure had a huge gap to close in both quality and quantity. I give this one a thumbs-down. Only worth seeing for film historians.
Review of Raja Harishchandra
