Sri MGR Year 98, 22nd January, Thursday
One of my friend purchased a new mobile phone on checking the software's installed I happened to see Box TV. After logging into Box TV, I found our Puratchi Thalaivar MGR movie listed along with other language movies.
As a pleasant surprise the movie list showed Sri Murugan (1946) an image of our Thalaivar dancing with Malathy. I clicked the link quickly and found the below image.
It showed the synopsis of the movie Sri Murugan and it is given below.
Sri Murugan
Tamil | Drama | 2:15:16
Director : M.Somasundaram
Description : Bangalore based stage and screen star Honnappa Bhagavathar replaced M.K.Thyagaraja Bhagavathar, the first superstar of South Indian Cinema in Sri Murugan of 1946. Sri Murugan is the beautiful God who is the son of Shiva and Parvati and the brother of Ganesha, the elephant God. Lord Murugan has many names. Subramanium, Karthikeyan, Skandan, Saravanan etc.
MGR fans very well know that this movie negative has been lost due to fire accident. And MGR tried for the print when he was the Chief Minister. In this Sri Murugan movie MGR acted as Lord Shiva and did a good performance which gave an opportunity for him to act as a Hero in the next movie Rajakumari.
On seeing the synopsis I clicked the play button with great enthusiasm, my mind was thinking how to capture the movie and how to show this to our fellow MGR followers, the link continued to show an ad after the ad the titles were in Malayalam language, showing in black and white, Merryland Trivandrum presents Sri Murugan. From the letters I guessed it is Gemini Ganesan how come Gemini Ganesan played a role with MGR, I thought maybe as it is rare movie people should have not known the fact, watched the title fully and the scene continued to show Gemini Ganesan entering the frame in Lord Shiva costume and his physique looked like from a 70s movie.
Came to know that this is a Malayalam movie Sree Murugan and not the Tamil version that MGR had acted. Now you can understand why I gave the title April In January how they had fooled us by showing the MGR image for a Malayalam movie. Checked with youtube and found it is a colour movie.