Shylock (film) Shylock (film) Shylock is a 1940 Indian Tamil-language film directed by Kinema Ramu and Serukalathur Sama (under the name Sama-Ramu) and produced by Bharat Pictures. It is based on William Shakespeare's play "The Merchant of Venice". The film stars Sama as the title character, T. V. Janakam as Portia, S. G. Kasi Iyer as Antonio, P. S. Sivaramalingam as the Duke and T. S. Santhanam as Bassanio. The film was a commercial failure, and no print of it has survived, making it a lost film. Kinema Ramu, a lawyer based in Kumbakonam and scholar on William Shakespeare, wrote the dialogue
The Merchant of Venice (1923 film) German retained Shakespeare’s nomenclature, but in the American they were given new names sourced from the Italian work "Il Pecorone", a 14th-century short story collection attributed to Giovanni Fiorentino, from which Shakespeare is believed to have drawn his idea. The film purports to be a return to the original, as an excuse for its differences from the play. The characters are renamed in the extant English script. The script varies significantly from Shakespeare's original. Mordecai, The Jew of Mestri, has a young daughter, Rachela, whom he has betrothed against her will to Elias, the son of his merchant friend Tubal.