Naalai Namadhey is MGR’s 125th movie. All the songs are still popular especially “Naalai Namadhey Indha Naalum Namadhey” which was used to recall re-union in many movies later.

As we know it was a remake of the evergreen hit Yaadon Ki Baarat, was making waves all over Tamil Nadu in 1973-74. Sethu Madhavan of Malayalam film world (A great director who had done some excellent films in Malayalam. Also directed some Tamil films, the last of which was Nammavar) got the remake rights and approached MGR.

The initial plan was MGR will do Dharmendra’s role, Sivakumar will do Vijay Arora’s role & Kamal Hassan for Tariq’s role. But MGR again as his wont did not accept and he dictated his own terms and made it happen. Since the eldest did not have Jodi and songs, he took the second son’s role also and brought Chandramohan (Sankarabharanam fame- though it was released much later 1979) for Tariq’s role.

This clearly affected the movie and moreover when it was released on 4th July 1975, Yaadon Ki Baarat was still fresh in the minds of the people and if you remember Naalai Namadhey had no such elements that would satisfy a MGR fan. The supposedly long run of MGR’s films in normal circumstances can be contributed to another factor. The Gap between two MGR films will be big and for hard-core MGR fans who used to repeatedly view the movie, they had no other go and this helped the movies to run for more days. Compared to this MGR’s movies always had a short gap between them. In the case of Naalai Namadhey, the MGR fans had nothing to cheer about and moreover on 22nd August 1975 (just after of 49 days of Naalai Namadhey’s release), Idhyakani was released and so MGR fans dropped Naalai Namadhey and it bit the dust at the Box Office. After it’ release (it was not a announced before) the ad came out stating that Naalai Namadhey is MGR’s 125th movie, but it did not help.