Raj Kapoor (1924–88) was a famous Indian film star, director, and producer. Belonging to one of Bollywood’s filmmaking dynasties, he started his career in his father’s film studio as a child actor (or clapper boy – the sources vary in this point). Founding R. K. Films in 1948, Kapoor came into his own in the 1950s and 1960s, becoming a representative figure in Hindi Popular Cinema of the early Neruvian post-war/liberation decades. Kapoor’s films clearly owe a great debt to Classical Hollywood studio filmmaking, exemplified by the actor’s tramp character appearing most famously in Awara [The Vagabond] (1951), Shree 420 (1955), and Jagte Raho [Stay Alert] (1956, directed by Amit Maitra and Sombhu Mitra). At the same time, there are traces of Italian neo-realist aesthetics, probably thanks to Kapoor’s association with the left-leaning IPTA (Indian People’s Theatre Association) and his regular collaboration with IPTA members such as scriptwriter K. A. Abbas. Especially with Awara, Kapoor received international recognition in the USSR, the Middle East, and communist China. The contradictory aesthetics of Kapoor’s films created tensions in his work as a director, which was typical of figures regarded as (popular) forerunners of the ‘New Cinema Movement’. This brings into focus the problem of defining the ‘classical’ as a point of reference and departure for a specifically modernist Indian cinema. Later works such as Sangam (1964), Bobby (1973), and Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1978) tended to be more sexually explicit and sensational, which led to repeated comparisons to Cecil B. DeMille.