Movies Made in Several Languages

One of the fads of 1950s was to create movies in multiple languages at the same time. The motivation must have been to reduce the overhead costs while producing as well as to get the popularity of one movie translated into the other languages. While dubbing was prevalent during those days, the motivation for remaking, sometimes simultaneously, was intended to cash in on the stars (actors) known to a particular language.

Here are a couple of examples both from 1957. There are more we will address later.

1. Devasundari

 (Click for More Info from MSI): This movie perhaps has the record of being made in 5 languages SIMULTANEOUSLY 

Released on the Christmas day in 1957, Devasundari was a phenomenal box office flop despite having 20+ songs in Malayalam and didn't do that well in any other languages either. Another unique aspect of this movie is that it had the same name 'Devasundari' in all languages.

During an interview with yours truly, Jose Prakash once said that he acted in Tamil as well as malayalam 

Here are details from all languages:

1. Tamil  Direction - H V Babu  Stars - Madhuridevi, Lakshmikantham, T R Mahalingam etc
2. Telugu - Direction H V Babu  Stars - Sowcar Janaki, Kantha Rao
3. Malayalam  Direction - Nambiyar   Stars - Sahtyan, Nazir, Kumari Thankam
4. Kannada  Direction - C V Raju  Stars - B Saroja  Devi, Muthuraja, Kalyankumar etc
5. Sinhalese   Direction - K C Krishnamoorthy  Stars - Florida, A T Junior, etc 

2. Thaskaraveeran

(Click here for More Info from MSI): This movie in fact did one better than Devasundari in languages. They released it in 6 languages, although that happened over a span of 4 years. The names of the movies in different languages were different too.

1. Malaikkallan - Tamil 
2. Aggiramudu - Telugu 
3. Azaad - Hindi 
4. Bettada Kalla - Kannada 
5. Thaskaraveeran - Malayalam 
6. Shoorasena - Sinhalese