Mumbai Ni Mohini (1925)

Millionaire Ratanlal (Mohanlala) is an old man without an heir. He marries the rich, estern­ educated Mohini. He has two managers, the sincere and faithful Dhairyadhar and the Anglicised crook Manhar. Mohini, bored with her marriage, falls in love with Manhar who embezzles Rs 50,000 from Ratanlal's office and frames Dhairyadhar for the crime, who is imprisoned. Mohini's affair with Manhar develops and they decide to eliminate old man Ratanlal but they are caught. In the end the two schemers die. The title, which in translation simply means Mohini of Bombay, is also a pun on the phrase 'the Ch<.rms of Bombay'. It preceded by a few months Kohinoor's Mojili Mumbai, the best-known example of a thriller set amongst Bombay's colonial bourgeoisie. Desai's film ran into a legal problem when the noted Gujarati novelist Gopalji Delwadekar claimed that he had written the script, commissioned by Bhogilal Dave's Star Film and that it was based on his novel Chandrakala (possibly adapted from Baron Lytton's play Night And Morning). Nirbhayshankar Thakkar, officially credited with the story, claimed that he had written it drawing on his own experiences as a poor medical student in Bombay.