Do Dooni Chaar

The lodger spends the night in the bath-tub because there's a girl in his bed. When he cautiously opens his eyes he finds the determined young woman asleep outside his tub. He gingerly raises her hand. He hangs on to the hand till you finally begin to wonder whether he's waiting for the script writer to think up something to do with it. He gets rid of the hand by clamping it around a clothes hanger and you are left wishing they would hurry up with that script.
 
You are also left wishing something wicked and happened in the interval before he finally left via the window. If only the girl (Sudha Sharma) had been a bit more skittish with her husband's double or the double (Kishore) had become a little more interested in her, audiences might have become a little more interested in the proceedings.

Half the excuse for all that virtue is of course that the hero is virtuous. The other half is the woman's sister (Tanuja). The romance seemed to start off pleasantly enough with Tanuja taking him for her runaway brother-in-law, chasing him all over the fairground, and Kishore in turn trying to keep an eye on the girl till they finally found themselves face to face across a sideshow crowd.

The affair fizzles out with Kishore's escape. There is a single brief moment of laughter when he returns to woo the girl than dashes off when she swoons. She recovers when Sudha dashes up demanding an explanation- "I have seen it all." And Tanuja says- "If you've seen it all why ask me?" The girls are left wearing charming sulks till the menfolk return to bore.
 
The biggest bore i the film ("Do Dooni Chaar") is the jeweller and they've dumped him into a long drawn out final sequence when it's time to clear up the tangle. It's boring enough in the police station and then every now and then they cut to the house as if they were hoping something funny might have happened there.

The women finally turn up outside the lock-up and while they stand talking to the inspector, the cameraman dashes off for a long hot for no reason in particular. And a while later he dashes off to stare Kishore and Asit alighting from a tonga then pans frantically all over the country finishing off with a rom on the women as if he half expected them to vanish in the interval.


This article was published in Filmfare magazine’s 6 November, 1970  edition as a part of 'Filmfare Reviews' of the film "Do Dooni Chaar" (1968).


Image credit:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LrezefqOmM