The Vagabond

A judge (Prithviraj Kapoor) rejects his pregnant wife after she is kidnapped and presumably raped by a criminal. Protesting her innocence, she lives in abject poverty and raises her son Raju (Raj Kapoor), who grows up to be a sly, sexy, and carefree bandit. Raju is soon recruited into a criminal gang, but when he is reunited with his childhood sweetheart Rita (Nargis), he tries to extricate himself from the vicious circle of poverty and violence.

Awaara's marvelous, extended dream sequence -- with Kapoor and Nargis successively cast in different guises, some mythological, some modern -- revolutionized Hindi cinema, and introduced the idea of externalizing characters' inner conflicts though song-and-dance numbers.