Galatta Kalyanam

<p>Madan and Lalitha are in love. Lalitha is the second daughter of a businessman, Dharmalingam. While seeking her hand in marriage, Dharmalingam lays down a condition that all his daughters’ weddings are to be held simultaneously, thereby entrusting Madan with the unenviable task of finding suitable grooms for his other daughters. Madan seeks the help of his friend, Chandran in his mission. Madan, however, soon realises that he has a Herculean task ahead of him – the eldest daughter Rathna is averse to marriage. The others have their own tastes and preferences. After encountering a lot of difficulties, they manage to find grooms for all of them. However, on the wedding eve, one of the grooms goes missing. After tracing the gang, Madan fights them to rescue the groom and finally all pairs get married. was the adaptation of a play written by Gopu, which was staged in a star night organised for donations during the of 1962. Gopu completed the script within two days. After seeing the positive response the play received, Ganesan expressed interest in adapting the play into a feature film. This was the first film which had Gopu working outside the banner of and the film was directed by Sridhar’s cousin C. V. Rajendran. It is the first film produced by Ramkumar Films named after Ganesan’s son. The film had Ganesan and Jayalalitha pairing for first time. The song sequence “Engal Kalyanam” was shot at becoming the first film to be shot there. Rajendran required that all the lead actors appear in the song, but was unable to bring them all together except for “half a day of shoot” due to their other commitments; as a result, he had to rely on “used cuts, zooms and whizz-pans to circumvent the challenge”. To portray Ganesan as “stylish and youthful”, he created a shot of him walking from the manager’s room to his seat, hoping it would create a huge response among the audience. The music was composed by , with lyrics by . The song “Nalla Idam” contains the lines “Nalla Idam, Nee Vandha Idam” (Good place, the place you have come), which writer R. Kannan interpreted as meaning Jayalalithaa had moved to Sivaji Ganesan from acting exclusively with . was released on 12 April 1968. appreciated the film for its comical dialogues and non-confusing direction. In 2003, Malathi Rangarajan of wrote, “Together with Nagesh, Sivaji Ganesan made watching a memorable experience”. In 2013, Anupama Subramanian of praised Jayalalitha’s performance, stating that “It was [..] which brought out her flair for comedy”. The title of the Tamil-dubbed version of the film (2021) was taken from this film.</p>