Barsaat Ki Raat

Last night i got a chance to watch this movie. The movie was one of the biggest hits at the box-office in 1960. So i was expecting a lot. And surely this movie has not disappointed me. The characters were good and performance was so nice. Everybody was trying to outdo each other in performance. There are at least two good reasons to watch this under-appreciated gem of a film. Firstly it offers three notably strong female characters, superbly played by talented actresses. Secondly it has a memorable score, with lyrics by the great Sahir Ludhianvi (an Urdu poet), sung by a stellar list of playback singers, and culminating in a series of dazzling qawwali performances (of love-saturated and Sufi-inflected couplets on the pleasures and pains of love) that are among the best ever filmed. But you have to know Hindi and Urdu words to appreciate the dialogues.