“(Raj Kapoor's) first film is a full-blown brooding melodrama, etched in highlights and shadows, told in flashback, in which Kapoor plays a theatrical producer whose face has been horribly burned. He encounters a woman who has no name, comes from nowhere: all of her family have been killed in the fires of Partition. The intensity, the conviction of the love scenes, the total immersion of the actors in their roles in Aag/Fire, were not common currency in the Hindi cinema of the day. The visual style is a rich intermixture of film noir and expressionism.... Although no box-office blockbuster, Aag was a breath of fresh air in Hindi cinema, a sharp break with musty traditional techniques. It fired the imagination of teenagers. Its 24-year-old director was hailed as the leader of the youth movement in films. Raj Kapoor later remarked, ‘I'll never forget Aag because it was the story of youth consumed by the desire for a brighter and more intense life. And all those who flitted like shadows through my own life, giving something, taking something, were in that film.'” Elliott Stein