An inspiration and source for Farah Khan's Om Shanti Om, Subhash Ghai's Karz ("debt") is in virtually every respect a flawless masala entertainer. It has everything, and I mean everything. As one of Hindi cinema's canonical peechle janam stories, it has a healthy dose of mysticism and larger-than-life themes like justice, karma, and familial bonds. It has a main character, Monty (Rishi Kapoor), who is a famous stage performer, for no reason other than to provide excuses for its fantastic, over-the-top songs - set pieces like song from which Om Shanti Om took its name, in which Rishi Kapoor dances awkwardly on a giant spinning record after riding in on the tone arm. It has Pran, playing a good guy who speaks largely in couplets. It has a brilliant Aruna Irani item number that also features Pran disguised as a fakir. It has Simi Garewal, in a melodramatic yet wonderfully rangy performance - cold and creepy as a murderer, and increasingly disturbed and distressed as Monty gaslights her into explosive confession of her crimes. It has Durga Khote, who recognizes Monty as the reincarnation of her murdered son without question. It has strange, inappropriate nude photographs sprinkled throughout its sets, for the camera to focus on at symbolically charged moments. It has a bizarre, greedy villain, Sir Juda (Premnath), who communicates by tapping out codes that only his henchman Mac Mohan can understand. It has Iftekhar and Yusuf Khan in hilarious fake beards. It even has Jalal Agha. In short, Karz has just about everything there is to love about Hindi movies in one fantastic package, with a quick pace and very little fat (allowing for a little pudge around Rishi Kapoor's rapidly spreading middle).
My utter delight as I soaked in every frame of this hilarious, satisfying movie came out in the tweets I made while I was watching it, many with screencaps to highlight the visual awesomeness. Thanks to Storify, I have collected all those tweets here, and allow them to serve as my review of this fantastically entertaining movie.
So without further ado, here is the joy and brilliance of Karz, summarized via live-tweets from a gobsmacked, delighted Carla.
Be sure to click the "Read More" link after Durga Khote - there are more tweets and I'd like you to see them all.
When I read about how Hindi movies were made in the 1970s, I can't help but be impressed by the alacrity with which the Bombay studios churned out product. Actors shuttling between three shootings a day and dubbing sessions in the evening; dialogue writers cranking out lines on set; stories resketched on the fly as actors' schedules conflicted or productions ran out of money - it's miraculous that movies of any quality were produced at all. Many a masala movie with an exciting cast and a promising first hour falls casualty to the risks of that kind of improvisational, shoestring filmmaking. The "curse of the second half" bumps more such movies than I can count right off the rails.
Chor sipahee ("thief and officer") is a textbook case of this, stylish fun masala with a lot going for it before it disintegrates into incoherence. You can feel the production becoming more rushed and careless as the film wears on. Twists in the story become more ad hoc and less clearly rendered; characters recede into the background or disappear altogether. And yet there is enough of both style and substance to redeem these sins of sloppy production, yielding sufficient reward for the masala connoisseur.
On the side of substance, Chor sipahee - like all the best masala films - hangs its wacky trappings on a profound social theme. In this case, the theme is the nature of criminality and redemption, and whether punishment or rehabilitation is the better philosophy for stopping and deterring criminal behavior. Shankar (Shashi Kapoor), a maverick but effective police inspector, believes so firmly in the principle of rehabilitation that he actually undermines attempts to punish criminals. When he encounters Raja (Vinod Khanna), an unrepentant gang leader, Shankar sees the ultimate opportunity to put his views into practice, and vows to reform Raja. Shankar is willing to go to great lengths to secure Raja's turnaround - he joins Raja's gang, renounces family ties, and apparently becomes a vicious evildoer himself. This is a subterfuge intended to show Raja the error of his ways.
Naturally, the plan is effective, and by out-badding the bad guys (including Ranjit as a gang leader who is either an Arab or peculiarly Arabophilic), Shankar convinces Raja that a life of crime is no life worth living. I would be lying if I said I understood the logic here, either of Shankar or of the script. For an alternate view, though, do see the excellent exegesis by Post-Punk Cinema Club, which finds remarkable depth and coherence in what seems to me slapdash filmmaking at its most joyously ad hoc.
On the side of style, Chor sipahee is 70s masala at its full-bore best. From Vinod Khanna's superb high-heeled boots, to Shashi Kapoor's badass leather jacket (he is decked throughout in fantastic costumes designed by his wife, Jennifer Kendall), there's no shortage of awesome to feast your eyes on. It's almost a waste to write a review of a movie such as this when I don't have a DVD to take screencaptures from. Fortunately Post-Punk and Memsaab are both on the case; see their posts for the full complement of visual goodness.
No masala movie worth its salt is complete without an outlandishly-costumed qawwali, and Chor sipahee delivers with "Duniya hai aati jaati," in which Shashi Kapoor and Vinod Khanna, in identical qawwal outfits, repeatedly exchange places via cleverly executed backflips. This song, only about 45 minutes into the movie, also marks the last interesting thing my beloved Shabana Azmi gets to do in it.
As often happens in her masala turns, Shabana Azmi is woefully underused in Chor sipahee. She has a terrific scene very early in the movie, in which she outwits Raja while he tries to rob her father's safe. (At this point in the film it must be admitted that Raja doesn't seem terribly smart for a successful recidivist crook.) Parveen Babi gets a bit more substance to her role, as Raja's righteous sister Bharti. In a delightful bit of masala melodrama, Bharti, disgusted by Raja's criminal pursuits, refuses his angry demand that she demonstrate her love by tying a rakhi on his wrist. Durga Khote gets a marvelously filmi turn as well,as Raja and Bharti's mother. In one terrific scene, she demonstrates her loving forgiveness for Raja by fixing him a bowl of kheer, and he demonstrates his unrepentant viciousness by refusing to eat it. Fortunately for everyone, Shankar turns up and eats the sweet with relish, to mother's wide-eyed delight.
On reflection, especially after reading the other reviews I've mentioned, I feel I should have found Chor sipahee more satisfying than I did. As Memsaab enumerates, it hits all the required masala elements and then some. 70s masala is a little bit like pizza - even when it's mediocre, it's still pretty good while it's happening. Chor sipahee is a good time, even if there's not much to remember the next day. And Shashi Kapoor does look mighty groovy when he dons appropriate threads for joining a smuggling ring:
(Thanks to Memsaab for the shamelessly purloined screencaptures.)
As I mentioned in my recent review of Sridevi's superb English Vinglish, as a non-Indian, an outsider and relative newcomer to Hindi movies, I lack the nostalgic perspective that infuses and informs the desi experience of certain movies. It is a great pleasure and fascination for me to learn about the movies that give my desi friends and acquaintances that magnificent nostalgic thrill. And so I love to watch the old favorites that would have been a part of my childhood had I grown up with Hindi movies. When I tweeted about watching Satte pe satta ("seven for seven"), I learned that this outrageously silly movie was one of those favorites so cherished by Indians roughly my age, and their delight in remembering it made watching this movie even more fun than it already is on its own.
Amaluu's thorough and loving tribute to this movie handily provides a detailed summary of its story along with many screencaptures. In short, the movie starts as a quotation of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and then takes a decidedly filmi turn. Ravi (Amitabh Bachchan) is the eldest and closest to civilized of a pack of seven brothers who literally live in a barn. Ravi's six brothers are poorly socialized squabblers who are pathologically afraid of bathing. Ravi meets Indu (Hema Malini), and woos and weds her. Indu is horrified by the pigsty of a homestead and its denizens, but she gamely sets about civilizing them. Meanwhile the boys meet a group of girls they take a shining to, who are caretakers to a paraplegic heiress named Seema (Ranjeeta Kaur). Seema's uncle, Ranjit Singh (Amjad Khan), wants her dead, hoping to get his hands on her fortune. Singh hires a vicious mercenary, Babu (also Amitabh), who just happens to be a dead ringer for Ravi. Singh's men kidnap Ravi, and Babu infiltrates the family hoping to get his chance to off Seema. But the warmth of the family's love for each other gets under Babu's skin, and his second thoughts lead him on the road to redemption.
There is so much to love in this hilarious, delightful movie. The antics of the six brothers are a riot, from prancing about in their chaddees to wrecking the house in sprawling melees in which they hurl food, flour, and even livestock at one another. These scenes are marvelously choreographed and a pure belly laugh to watch. All six of the brothers are terrific, but Shakti Kapoor especially stands out in a rare nonvillanous appearance. Amitabh is a treat, too, showcasing his talent for comedy instead of his angry young man avatar. The scene in which Singh gets Ravi drunk is an absolute scream, one of the funniest drunk scenes I've ever seen in any language. And Amitabh delivers as expected the film's many songs - his arms really do go on for ever and ever.
Hema Malini is a perennial favorite in Filmi Geek's house, and she delivers amply here, funny, charming, gorgeous, and sweet.
(I want to be that rose.) Indu's arc, of course, is problematic if one thinks too hard about it. Ravi marries her under rather false pretenses - she believes that she is joining a quiet, idyllic household of just Ravi and his sweet youngest brother Sunny (Sachin Pilgaonkar). Ravi's nervousness as she is about to learn the truth about the chaos that awaits her is quite hilarious, but one can't help but bristle a bit at the deception. And naturally, Indu's role in the household is somewhere between housekeeper, babysitter, and den mother. She takes over the kitchen duties the moment she arrives, almost without changing out of her wedding sari. She forces the boys to wash and shave, and teaches them some manners. The movie tempers the nauseating sexism of these tropes by couching them in so much humor and charm that one just has to laugh along and forgive. The sequence in which she marches the brothers off to the bath with military precision is riotous. And the song in which she teaches them how to woo a woman, "Jhuka ke sar ko puchho," offers a generous helping of the heart-melting charm that makes Hema such a pleasure to watch.
The movie's second half offers up much of what one expects from a rollicking masala ride. The very notion of a villain who just happens to look exactly like the hero is, on its own, satisfyingly filmi. And Babu's villainy is hilariously over-the-top, until the power of love melts his cold assassin's heart. In one of the most egregious morsels of Masala Logic one will ever see, after Babu's deception is revealed, Indu decides to forgive him because he never took sexual advantage of her even when she believed he was her husband. That's right, folks - he lied to us, infiltrated our home, and tried to stab Seema - but at least he didn't rape me! It's hard to imagine setting one's standards much lower. The film also teaches us, in time-honored masala-medicine ishtyle, that all one needs to overcome paralysis is a good solid scare.
There are even a few nudge-nudge, wink-wink moments - look for something weirdly suggestive involving a lollipop, as the movie heads into its climax. And then there is this, which caused me quite a double-take. Did someone really just hand Amitabh a condom?
All in all, Satte pe satta is just too much fun to miss. It's not hard to see why so many people my age grew up loving this movie. Its slapstick and broadness is perfectly silly for kids, and at the same time it offers winking laughs for the grownups too. I'm thoroughly glad I got to know it,
even if in my case that knowledge comes 30 years after the fact. I'll be nostalgic for it from now on.
My movie reviews here at Filmi Geek usually hew to a standard format. An introductory paragraph like this one is followed by a brief plot summary - often just the first third of the story, enough to lay the foundation for a discussion of the movie's portrayals and themes. Then, the bulk of the text is devoted to just that discussion.
With Prakash Mehra's Hera pheri ("monkey business"), though, that format just won't fit. This movie is, at its best, a series of reasonably entertaining bits that tell a barely-coherent story about the power of friendship. But that is a very charitable reading. I watched the movie twice - paying fairly close attention the second time - and I still don't think I followed the plot all the way through. And since the story really has no bearing on one's enjoyment of this otherwise largely satisfying masala jaunt, I won't spend any more words on it.
At the core of Hera pheri is one of Hindi film's epic buddy-pyaar jodis, Amitabh Bachchan and Vinod Khanna. Their Vijay and Ajay (no points for guessing which one is Vijay) do not quite reach Jai and Veeru territory when it comes to lifetime devotion and finishing one another's sentences. But what they lack in longevity they more than make up for in homoeroticism.
Isn't it romantic? The gay subtext is so strong that (as either Beth or Amrita put it, may they forgive me for not remembering which) it isn't even really subtext - it's just text. In one scene, Ajay and Vijay curl up under a blanket together to sleep on the living room floor, while Kiran (Saira Banu) sleeps in their bedroom. Vijay gets up in hopes of a rendezvous with Kiran, only to discover that Ajay has tied the two of them together with a bit of rope. ROPE. Later in the movie, they tearfully embrace and declare that their love for one another transcends all other relationships. Coupled with Ajay in hot pants and that knotted blouse shirt, one has to conclude that at least some of the crew of this movie knew exactly what they were doing.
Buddy-pyaar romance aside, Hera pheri offers plenty in the way of satisfyingly fun masala antics. A hilarious extended sequence in a casino features Vijay pulling a magnificent card-table scam against Asrani, in which he coolly scams the casino manager at the same time. The casino itself is one of those superb sets that one only finds in masala movies of the 1970s. The set is showcased well in Padma Khanna's item number, "Aapka sarkar kya kuchh," where the playing-card decor of the casino is reflected in the playing-card design of Padma's outfit.
And there's nothing quite like a song in which the heroes pull off a supreme con job by posing as holy men. I loved this gambit in Shaan and it works brilliantly here as well, in the movie's indisputable highlight, the qawwali "Darbar mein uparwale ke."
In another hilarious sequence, the boys set up a whole cadre of smugglers, thugs, and all around nasty guys with threatening phone calls, hoping to ambush them at the casino. After some first-class sneaking around...
...the fellas get caught out, and what follows is a terrific Keystone-Kops-esque chase with some quality comedic fight scenes. (Incidentally, comedy dishum-dishum beats earnest dishum-dishum hands down.)
One of my favorite sequences comes during the breakup phase of the romance - the inevitable down-point late in the film where Ajay and Vijay have had a falling out, and Vijay mourns the loss of his true love. Vijay wanders through dark streets, past a long sequence of movie posters plastered to a wall - posters that alternate between the titles Dost and Dushman. At one point Vijay rips one of the posters, and the word "Dost" floats dejectedly down a culvert. It's really quite an elegant series of shots, perhaps the most artful in the film. Technical problems prevent me from putting a screencapture here, but you can see it about three and a half minutes into this song.
With all of this and more masala goodness going for it - including a filmi-insane maa, Ajay's dubious parentage cemented by a long-lost pendant, and a villain's lair tricked out with numerous images of the famous Trimurti from the Elephanta cave - Hera pheri could have been a repeat-watcher as satisfying as Parvarish, Manmohan Desai's gem featuring the same pair of actors. What holds it back - and ultimately drags it down into the realm of mere rainy-afternoon, half-attention timepass - is its terrible C-list female stars. Saira Banu is rarely that appealing even in her prime, and here she is well past it, bringing very little life or energy to the screen. I hate to have to say this. Saira Banu was only in her mid-30s when this movie was made, and I want very much to favor female stars as romantic leads up to and well beyond this age. But Saira Banu doesn't make my case for me. Her first appearance in the movie, which doesn't come until a full hour in, is just puzzling - a squealing, appalling attempt at playing the ingenue. This is forgivable as it becomes clear that her character is not meant to be ingenuous. But it doesn't offset one's gut reaction that she be muted and removed from the screen as quickly as possible.
The other lead, Sulakshana Pandit, is utterly forgettable. This poor-woman's Neetu Singh may as well be a cipher; she is thoroughly lacking in charm, appeal, charisma, or any of the other qualities that make her contemporaries so enjoyable. Indeed, one wonders how excellent this movie could have been if the budget had room for, say, the real Neetu Singh in Sulakshana's place, and Parveen Babi in Saira Banu's. That would have been a masala flick for the ages. As it stands, Prakash Mehra seems to have known what he had - that is to say, what he lacked - in these two, as they get relatively little screen time between them. And so, for the first time ever, I can say of a masala movie that it did not need to give its female leads more to do. If nothing else, Hera pheri is an object lesson for directors in just how crucial women are when it comes to elevating a movie into something truly memorable. Neglect them, and your movie withers on the vine.
When I visited Beth, we watched a whole mess of movies. "Mess," it turns out, is an apt description of Hira aur patthar ("diamond and stone"), about as disappointing an attempt at masala as I've ever seen. Beth and I figured we could not go wrong with a movie that featured each of our respective fake-pretend movie significant others, Shashi Kapoor and Shabana Azmi. As an added bonus for me, there is also Ashok Kumar, myrecentfascination. When "with Asrani and Bindu" came up in the credits, Beth and I actually high-fived each other. A short time into the movie we caught a glimpse of Manorama as well. "This is going to be great," we thought. What better way to spend our visit together than with this cast? Alas.
As a young boy, Shankar loses his faith in God - particularly Jagdishwar, worshiped in the temple high on a clifftop overlooking his village - when his mother is fatally wounded in a fire and the boy's prayers fail to revive her. The fire was set by a cruel zamindar, Vikram Singh (Raj Mehra), bent on extracting as much money as possible from the farmers who work his land. Shankar's father and uncle (Bharat Bhushan and Chandrashekhar), now without their farm, take up the work of carrying pilgrims up to the temple on a doli. Even when he grows to adulthood, though, Shankar (Shashi Kapoor) still refuses to visit the temple, and won't even mount the steps - despite the entreaties of his cousin Tota (Asrani), Shankar refuses to carry a doli of his own. To shoulder his share of the family's debts to Vikram Singh, Shankar plans to make his fortune in the city. On the eve of his departure, though, he meets Gauri (Shabana Azmi), the daughter of the security officer who guards the temple. Smitten, Shankar relents - he stays in the village, agrees to carry the doli, and gladly climbs the steps each day to visit Gauri. But he still refuses to enter the temple, enraging Gauri's father. And when Shankar and his friend Dr Anand (Ashok Kumar) learn of Vikram Singh's thievery against the village and the temple, Singh's son Pratap (Narendranath) plots to put Shankar's life and liberty in peril. Pratap has another reason to want Shankar out of the way - the girl he loves, the vampish Rupa (Bindu), favors Shankar over him.
Hira aur patthar starts off with so much promise. The seeds of masala goodness are sown early and one expects them to sprout richly. There is terrific trauma-drama-o-rama as young Shekhar bounds up and down the temple steps screaming pleadingly for Jagdishwar to save his mother's life. There is a marvelously filmi passage-of-time sequence, in which the frustrated boy shows his anger with God by casting stones at his reflection. Ripples spread, the credits roll, and soon we see the grown Shankar sitting on the very same riverbank, still casting angry stones.
This is the kind of foundation that great masala films are laid upon. There is a charming meet-cute sequence between Gauri and Shankar at a vegetable stand, in which she accidentally squirts him with tomato seeds, and smiles that bashful, tooth-covering smile characteristic of Shabana Azmi when she was this young and self-conscious.
There is even a pretty decent first action sequence - Shankar takes on Pratap Singh in the open market, knocking over vegetable stands and snack carts to rescue Gauri from Pratap's harrassment. (This is after Pratap manhandles Gauri in the street and a bunch of men stand around just watching. Just like real life!)
Reminiscing about these early scenes with Beth, I described them as "back when we still thought this was going to be a good movie."
"We were so young and naïve," Beth replied.
So where does it all go wrong? It's hard to say exactly where Hira aur Patthar bumps off the rails. It just loses steam and takes a turn for the boring about halfway through. Bindu lacks her full glory as a vamp, and Pratap is about as mealy and unsatisfying a villain as I've ever seen. The movie lacks any kind of connective tissue, any grand masala theme to tie all the elements together. It flirts with a couple ideas - Shankar's steadfast denial of religious faith is one, and a false start in which it appears Shankar will organize the doliwale into some kind labor force is another - but nothing crystallizes. There are no great songs, no boisterous qawwali, no costume-donning antics, no climactic set-up to chase the villain down in his lair. In short, Hira aur patthar is not grounded enough to be a passable serious movie, and not silly enough to be a passable masala movie. To misapply Gertrude Stein, "There is no there there."
There are just a couple of moments worth their masala salt that lift Hira aur patthar out of Filmi Geek's new "Execrable" category and into "Timepass". One comes in service of Tota's quest to marry a village girl named Chanda (Jayshree). This hilarious scene features wedding rites performed in the back of a speeding truck driven by the stereotyped friendly Punjabi truck driver, while the bride's father and his choice of groom follow in a car that falls apart piece by piece. There is also some elegant suspense in a fight scene between Pratap and an unruly customer who tries to rape Rupa - a stabbing occurs behind an upturned couch, and for quite a long effective moment it is not at all clear who died.
But that's about it, and it's just not enough to sustain. It's telling that this far into the review I haven't had much to say about either of the principals, for whom Beth and I ostensibly chose this movie. That is because even they don't have a lot to offer. Shashi Kapoor comes as close to phoning it in as I've ever seen him do, and Shabana Azmi - my dear, beloved Shabana Azmi - just doesn't have a whole lot to do save some flitting (and as much as I adore her, she's not really much of a flitter) and some fretting. They look pretty, though, and Shabana always gives good sari.
And if nothing else, the Hira aur patthar offers a generous helping of the marvelous Manorama and the faces she pulls like no other. So I leave you with a sampling of that - a Manorama panorama, if you will.
My favorite Manmohan Desai movies, like Amar Akbar Anthony and Parvarish, cloak grand allegorical themes in glorious wackadoodle masala trappings. Continuing the unorthodox Rajesh Khanna retrospective that I began with Haathi mere saathi, I went into Desai's Sachaa jhutha ("truth and lies") hoping for more of the same. What I got doesn't quite measure up in substance - but it is nevertheless a satisfying masala meal.
Bhola (Rajesh Khanna) is a simple village guy, a musician who wants nothing more than to see his beloved sister Belu (Kumari Naaz) happily married. Suitors demand a hefty dowry, though, because Belu is lame, dependent upon crutches for mobility. So Bhola heads to Mumbai in hopes of making enough money to get Belu settled. Once there, Bhola is mistaken for an eccentric millionaire, Ranjit (also Rajesh Khanna), for whom he happens to be a dead ringer. Ranjit happens to moonlight as a serial jewel thief, and he sees an opportunity - he hires Bhola to impersonate him, duping the innocent fellow with a sob story about his mother, so that he can pull off big heists with Bhola supplying his alibi. Meanwhile, police inspector Pradhan (Vinod Khanna) suspects Ranjit for the larcenies, and sets his colleague Leela (Mumtaz) to go undercover and get close to Ranjit. But it's Bhola, not Ranjit, that Leela gets to know - and naturally, sparks fly.
Where Haathi mere saathi was all about the elephants, Sachaa jhutha is mostly about Rajesh Khanna and his double role. And I have to get this out of the way: I still don't much like Rajesh Khanna. If I have to watch him, though, Sachaa jhutha is the best way I can think of to do it. As Ranjit, Khanna's role demands that he be smarmy and repulsive - so my usual response to him suits quite nicely. And the double role, requiring him to distinguish Bhola from Ranjit, gives him more opportunity for range, for projecting a state other than droopy, froggy, and supercilious. Bhola is, on the whole, more wide-eyed, ingenuous, and energetic than most Rajesh Khanna characters. Which is not to say Bhola is entirely consistent - he may be a bit too smooth in his wooing of Leela than his character, otherwise a guileless bumpkin, really should be. But these are minor critiques of a pair of performances that are fun and more than adequately appealing even to this decided non-fan.
As to the film as a whole, one does have certain expectations of Manmohan Desai masala, and in that I can't fairly say that Sachaa jhutha disappoints. The movie may lack the grand philosophical scope of some of Desai's more expansive films, but it nevertheless does have - as the title promises - a minor point to make about the triumph of truth and guilelessness over deceite and subterfuge. The two adorable and hilarious sequences in which love is confessed and blossoms under the influence of a truth serum (really!) underscore this point.
And substance aside, Sachaa jhutha is crammed full of juicy masala morsels. There are unexplained, inexplicable dopplegangers and ensuing mistaken identities; a hilariously stylish costume party (see this song); a villain's teched-up, tricked-out underground lair. There is a cute gender-reversed Pygmalion sequence, reminiscent of one in Jab jab phool khile, in which Ranjit's moll Ruby (Faryal) teaches Bhola to behave like a gentleman. And the climax relies on the mass administration of a stupefaction drug - in a movie that already contains a truth serum. (Soul-baring and stupefaction? That sounds like the effect certain women have on me...)
Desai's masala Bombay is a city of magnified coincidence, one in which the same half-dozen people run into one another again and again - or nearly miss doing so, as the story demands. And that doesn't even reach the village side of the story, which features Belu's smart and loyal dog, as well as Belu and Bhola's cruel, wretched stepmother (Praveen Paul) who gets her just deserts in a magnificent filmi flood. She goes out in grand, symbolically-charged Desai style, with nothing left as she sinks beneath the surge but a few floating Rupee notes, notes she earlier snatched from Belu's hand and stuffed into her greedy choli.
Yet with all that going on, Sachaa jhutha is surprisingly taut for 150 minutes of masala. Rounding out the fun is a terrific appearance by a young, dashing Vinod Khanna as the serious Inspector Pradhan. This is first class Action Vinod stuff - he provides most of the movie's dishum-dishum, while putting nary a crease in his expensively-tailored suits. And then there is the delectable Mumtaz, adorable as a cupcake. She, of course, is at her best in the movie's many fabulous songs. From her groovy moves in "Pyar karle pyar" to her superfab outfit in "O tum jo kehdo," Mumtaz makes sure there is no shortage of eye-candy. But the hottest song of all is "Yunhi tum mujhse baat karti ho," in which, under the influence of the truth serum, Bhola and Leela confess their love on the deck of a boat in the harbor.
Sachaa jhutha is simply great fun to watch, as any masala movie should be. And, as many good movies do, it just gets better and better in memory - writing this review has made me itch to return to it and revisit the all grooviest, funniest, wackiest, sexiest scenes. Thanks to Memsaab (from whom I cribbed the screen-grab at the top of this post) I may do just that ...
I have not yet seen every Salim-Javed movie, but I have seen a lot of them, more than enough to know just how good the duo is at telling riveting stories with a flawless balance of all the requisite masala elements. Kaala patthar ("black rock") is no exception, with superb drama, heart-melting romance, and moving arcs of redemption. This is one movie - yet another - that I wonder why I waited so long to watch, and immediately watched twice more.
The Dhanraj coal mine is a dangerous place, beset by accidents that all too frequently cost workers their lives. But it is also a profitable place, and its owner, Dhanraj Puri (Prem Chopra), minces no words in explaining that he values the coal more than the people who dig it out for him at such risk. His earnest new engineer, Ravi Malhotra (Shashi Kapoor), discovers that one of the active mine tunnels is dangerously close to flooding, but Dhanraj callously dismisses his concerns and insists that the men keep digging. Ravi enlists the help of a brassy young reporter, Anita (Parveen Babi), who writes an exposé on the terrible conditions in the mine. He also earns the trust of Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan), a troubled mine worker whose fearless drive to heroism makes him both friends and enemies - including Mangal (Shatrughan Sinha), an escaped convict who struts arrogantly into the mining town. Meanwhile, Vijay finds solace for his restless, guilt-wracked psyche in the company of the mine's idealistic doctor, Sudha Sen (Rakhee). And Channo (Neetu Singh), a local girl who sells good-luck trinkets, must decide between turning Mangal into the police, or falling in love with him.
There is much going on in this multi-starrer to which that facile plot summary cannot do justice. Salim-Javed's evocative dialogues add a deftly poetic touch that make the moving scenes even more so. One of the best is naive Sudha Sen's introduction to the reality of the mine hospital, presented to her by the outgoing doctor (Sanjeev Kumar in a wonderful cameo). "Is hospital mein mariz nahin," he laments, "laashein aati hain - voh laashein jo abhi puri tarah mari nahin hain." ("There are no patients in this hospital, just corpses - corpses that are not yet fully dead.") Sanjeev Kumar is one of my favorite actors at any rate, and his pained resignation in this small scene is just magnificently rendered. In another standout scene - too lengthy for me to reproduce the dialogue here - Vijay and Sudha discuss the nature of dreams, and why the lost souls of the mining town so willingly pony up their hard-earned rupees for Channo's baubles. These touching scenes provide a perfect counterpoint to balance Kaala patthar's generous offerings of improbable, classic-style dishum-dishum.
Yash Chopra's visuals, too, are often arresting and symbolically loaded. Even the obvious visual cues, like the contrast between the grime of the coal miners on the one hand and Dhanraj's crisp suits and shiny cars on the other, are skillfully rendered and add texture to the story. Vijay, of course, appears in his first scene smeared with even more sweat and coal dust than his peers, suggesting at the very start that he throws himself into his work with a vigor and aggression that boils up from the depths of his character. The scenes of the mine's operations are also rich and compelling. The film opens with wide shots of the mine's ground-level works, enormous machines shuttling and processing mountains of coal while endless lines of grimy, exhausted men file into and out of the mine's mouth. These operations shots, reminding me of the fascinating steel-mill sequences that open Shyam Benegal's Kalyug, set the scene with a powerful evocation of the grit and heat of coal-mine labor. Another beautiful wide shot later in the film - one of the few that shows women working the mines too - sharply contrasts the women's colorful rural dress against the slate-grey of the ground they toil on and the deep black of the coal they carry on their heads.
(Click the image for a full-size look.) Even the background score - not something I am usually particularly clued into as a movie-viewer - adds both depth and levity as needed. In one excellent sequence early in the movie, a resonant long note in the score melts seamlessly into the call of the mine's emergency klaxon, a sound heard altogether too often by the beleaguered miners. (In that scene, the miners bolt energetically to the scene of the accident; later, they seem to drag themselves sullenly, with a resigned, "what is it this time" affect.)
Kaala patthar's three romantic threads span the full spectrum of masala pyaar. Anita and Ravi's courtship is jaunty and light; their banter provides the closest thing Kaala patthar offers to a comic side plot. (Like Salim-Javed's outstanding Deewaar, Kaala patthar has too much substantial story to tell to waste very much time on tension-breaking digressions.) Channo and Mangal's romance is somewhat shallowly motivated, the standard-issue filmi trope in which Channo's affections bloom after Mangal saves her from a pack of would-be rapists. But the facility of that is more than made up for by Vijay and Sudha's arc, which unfolds delicately and cerebrally. Sudha responds subtly and nonverbally to hints that Vijay is not what he appears to be - an outburst in perfectly cultured English, for example, that signals his educated, upper-class background. And it is genuinely moving as Vijay begins to make himself vulnerable to her, finally telling the story that haunts his disturbed sleep and allowing her to see "mere dil mein kamra ... jis mein main khud bhi nahin jaata" ("the place in my heart where I my myself don't even go").
I have already run out of space without mentioning so much else that makes Kaala patthar rich enough to reward multiple viewings - a super supporting cast, some terrific songs, Ravi's shiny moral certitude, Channo's slight tinge of melancholy even when she is providing naach-gaana and cheerfulness to everyone in the mining town. Instead of gushing further, I think I'll go watch it again, and recommend that you do the same.
After the surprisingly unviolent Ram Lakhan, watching the excessively violent Ghulam ("slave") was - dare I say it - a slap in the face. This frustrating movie is the proverbial "little girl with a little curl" - when it's good, it's very good, but its weaker moments are horrid indeed.
Siddhu (Aamir Khan) is a sometime amateur boxer, a petty criminal, and a layabout, haunted by troubling memories of his father (Dalip Tahil), a one-time freedom fighter who died a violent death when Siddhu was a boy. Siddhu's Dongri neighborhood is terrorized by the hot-headed extortionist entrepreneur Raunak Singh, or "Ronnie" (Sharat Saxena), for whom Siddhu performs occasional thug-duty, delivering messages and roughings-up to anyone reluctant to do Ronnie's bidding. After winning the heart of a sad young woman named Alisha (Rani Mukherjee), Siddhu meets a social worker named Hari (Akshay Anand), who is trying to galvanize beleaguered members of the community into legal action against Ronnie. After he unwittingly delivers Hari into a trap laid by Ronnie, Siddhu is inspired to take up Hari's cause. But Siddhu's brother Jai (Rajit Kapoor) reminds Siddhu that their father might not have been the great man Siddhu remembers, and calls into question the very foundation of Siddhu's righteous beliefs.
The worst parts of Ghulam are so bad that they are hard to watch. The motorcycle gang that features an embarrassing squealy caricature of an effeminate man is bad enough, and the gang's reappearance toward the film's end is particularly stupid. The violent scenes are too numerous, and too interminable - Siddhu's showdown with Ronnie at the movie's climax is especially improbable and egregious. And if I gave star ratings to movies, any movie that features a boxing match would automatically be docked at least one star. (At least in Ghulam, the boxing match is merely gratuitious, rather than a proxy for real achievement - or worse, redemption - as it in that unbearable genre of movies that are actually about boxing.)
Ghulam is redeemed somewhat by the contrast in its well-wrought characterization of the two brothers. Jai is the clean-cut, educated brother in spectacles and khakis. He contrasts sharply with Siddhu's leather and chains, and rough Tapori dialect - to all appearances, he is far more like Siddhu's idealized memory of their father, the "bespectacled master." Yet Jai puts all that class and education to work as Ronnie's accountant, cooking the tyrant's books and laundering his extortionate earnings. Siddhu, for all his thuggish affectation, proves to have the stouter heart and the purer conscience, in a pleasing (if somewhat facile) turnabout of stereotype. Even Alisha, clearly attracted to bad boys who feed her fantasy of liberation from her penthouse prison, only falls for Siddhu after he demonstrates his true nature by saving a rival's life. Siddhu is the descendant of both the Angry Young Man character perfected by Amitabh Bachchan in the 1970s, and the sort of Tapori trickster embodied by Anil Kapoor in Ram Lakhan.
And so it is fitting, and in hindsight not at all surprising, that Siddhu's great triumph is not that he musters the courage to testify against Ronnie in court - Hari's righteous quest turns out to be a bit of a red herring - but rather that he incites his neighbors to riot in a physical and violent defeat of Ronnie and his gang. To me and my ordered, Western perspective, the violence of this victory is unsatisfying. But I have to acknowledge, as I often do as a student of Indian movies, that I am not the target audience, and what I personally think is the correct course would not be the most effective course for people menaced by the likes of Ronnie. In the movie, Ronnie's case is adjourned for a weekend, setting up his climactic confrontation with Siddhu; I know that in real life, a more likely outcome would be for the slow wheels of justice to creep along for a decade or more while he continues his reign of terror. And so the violent solution is perhaps the only solution that would ring true to Ghulam's Indian audience.
The appeal of the stars carries the movie a long way too. Aamir Khan's performance is, as usual, both physical and soulful, and Rani Mukherjee, while still very young, is thoroughly cute. Their appeal is highlighted in the movie's best song, "Aati kya Khandala," which features Aamir singing his own part, and which is adorable; I especially love it when they dance next to the Buddha sculpture. Somewhat less effective, but still pleasant, are the two - not just one - romanticsongs with scenes shot in Switzerland. Of the minor characters, I particularly liked Akshay Anand as Hari, as well as Sharat Saxena as Ronnie (he does quite well with a character whose vein-popping apoplexy is a bit overdone). I also enjoyed Siddhu's lawyer (Mita Vasisht). Her performance makes me wonder whether they offer "Shabana Azmi" classes in acting school; if so, she appears to have studied very hard.
Listening to the Masala Zindabad podcast on movies of the 80s reminded me how little I know of that era in Hindi film. Fears of gratuitous rape and violence have led me to steer clear, except for artier films and the occasional delicate social. But the podcast roused my curiosity about some of that decade's better-regarded mainstream movies, and so I gritted my teeth and dug into Subhash Ghai's Ram Lakhan. Three hours, no rapes, and only a little excessive violence later, I was very happily surprised to have seen a rich, excellent masala movie that I thoroughly enjoyed.
Pratap (Dalip Tahil) and Sharda (Rakhee) are delighted at the birth of their second son, Lakhan, who grows up close to his brother Ram. But a dubious family friend Bishambhar (Amrish Puri) cheats Pratap out of his inheritance and later murders him, leaving Sharda and her sons disgraced and destitute. Sharda vows that her sons will be her weapons of revenge against Bishambhar. The boys grow up close, but very different - Ram (Jackie Shroff) is a stern and serious police inspector, while Lakhan (Anil Kapoor) is a gadabout and a bit of a con man with big dreams of big riches. To prove his worth to Ram and Sharda - not to mention to his childhood love Radha (Madhuri Dixit) and her father Devdhar (Anupam Kher) - Lakhan joins the police force himself. But he is quickly seduced by the bribes of Bishmbhar and the gang of smugglers he treats with, the peculiar Kesariya (Gulshan Grover) and imperious Sir John (Raza Murad). Ram is disgusted when he learns of Lakhan's abuse of the uniform. Sharda despairs at the wedge this drives between her two sons, and fears that she will never see Pratap's cruel death properly avenged.
What I expected from Ram Lakhan was a very male, very violent revenge fantasy. What I got was a fun, well-crafted masala ride, packed with religious allegory, real laughs, and some great songs to boot. There is some excessive violence, but it only goes over the top in the movie's climax, after more than two and a half fully engaging hours. And while the brothers and their relationship are clearly the focus of the story, the female characters are strong and satisfying too. Madhuri Dixit is at her best in Radha's two wonderful songs, the pleading "O Ramji", and the cathartic, rageful "Bekadar, bekhabar." I sometimes lament the bad timing of Madhuri's career, such that her talents are largely wasted in mediocre movies that she elevates with her magnetic presence. Here, though she has a relatively small part to play (albeit with a generous helping of songs), she adds delight to an already strong movie.
The other women in Ram Lakhan offer more substance than I might have expected. Ram and Lakhan's mother, Sharda, can only be described as the fiercest of masala maa characters - when she grows angry, thunder peals and lightning flashes. Rakhee is amply suited to this role - she brings the perfect blend of mainstream melodramatic style and serious acting chops, and so there is some nuance in her face, even as the bombast of her dramatic scenes swells to true masala proportion. Ram Lakhan is a movie that any Rakhee fan should see.
The men, too, bring quite a lot to the table - and go a long way to helping me understand why they are stars. Anil Kapoor is adequately cute and convincing in the mischief-maker role, highlighted in his introductory song "My Name is Lakhan." (Any actor who gets that many drums to herald his first appearance in a movie is clearly already a larger-than-life star.) Jackie Shroff is at times a little too stern and overbearing - he lays it on especially thick in the scenes that make the Ram-Lakshman allegory explicit. But this is amply balanced by his tenderness in emotional scenes with Anil, and especially in his romantic song with Ram's love interest Geeta (Dimple Kapadia), "Tera naam liya". This superbly filmed song is perhaps the biggest surprise and my favorite song of the movie. Jackie and Dimple are well-matched in age and gravitas; the song has a mature feel that is unusual for masala romance, and is yet utterly romantic.
Ram Lakhan is not without weaknesses, but it's difficult to make a 3-hour movie without taking some missteps. The most egregious of these is the terrible "Main hoon Hero" song, in which an utterly charisma-free villain (Bishambhar's son Deboo) challenges Lakhan to a dance-off. The script also leans too heavily on irritating catchphrases, such as Kesariya's annoying "Bad man!", and Deboo's mind-crushingly stupid "India is greeeeaaaat." But the teeming cast of over-the-top villains is a masala stand-by, and their bombast is appropriate to the movie's overall tone. Even some of the comedic moments offer real laughs. Anupam Kher gives the best of these - Lakhan tricks him into sitting on some eggs, and he lets out a whimper that sounds for all the world like the clucking of a hen. In short, Ram Lakhan is masala done right, not nearly as violent as I feared, and thoroughly paisa vasool.
Like their later script Deewaar, Salim-Javed's Zanjeer ("chain") attempts to fit a tense, gritty story into masala clothes. Unfortunately, Zanjeer is less successful - rather than delivering an intense, visceral experience, Zanjeer lurches(*) like a movie that can't decide how to present itself.
Inspector Vijay Khanna (Amitabh Bachchan) is a brooding man, with deep-seated anger that even he doesn't understand. Haunted by dreams that stem from a repressed memory of his parents' murder, he throws himself into the work of bringing criminals to justice - even, sometiems, exceeding the bounds of justice to do so. When Vijay tries to break the illegal liquor-brewing and smuggling ring of Teja (Ajit), Teja arranges to have Vijay sent to prison on trumped-up corruption charges. Disgraced and stripped of his badge and authority, Vijay vows vigilante justice against Teja. Mala (Jaya Bhaduri), an itinerant girl whom Vijay rescued and fell in love with, fears for Vijay's life. She prevails on him to give up the vendetta. But without that purpose in his life, Vijay is lost. Mala and Vijay's friend Sher Khan (Pran) have to find a way to help him, before his seething rage consumes him from within.
Zanjeer is not by any stretch a bad movie. The script is less taut than Deewaar and the result far less tense and engaging, but at least Amitabh delivers as the roiling Vijay, struggling to contain his anger and venting it in tense, explosive bursts. Zanjeer is at its best a close psychological study of this troubled man, and the effects of his anger on the people who care about him. But a close psychological study is not the stuff of masala films, and over-the-top masala trappings need larger-than-life masala themes to hang on, else the movie sags and bends under their weight. Zanjeer hints vaguely in the direction of some social statement or the other, but never hoists any of the great masala banners like brotherhood, family, democracy, communalism, et al.
And so, with Amitabh's strong performance as its foundation, Zanjeer could have been so much better that it's difficult not to be hard on it for its inability to decide whether it is masala or not. For example, it's great fun to see Pran in a good-guy role, and he is as charming and sweet as Sher Khan as he is creepy and villainous in his many blackguard roles. (He even has a marvelous song, the qawwali "Yaari hai imaan mera".) But the way Sher Khan becomes Vijay's best friend just doesn't fit the somber tone that Zanjeer otherwise aims to set - after taking a beating from Vijay, whom he calls the first man with guts he's ever met, Sher Khan immediately casts aside his illegal gambling empire and pledges his eternal friendship. This sort of over-the-top twist works well in out-and-out masala, but only lends a split personality to Zanjeer.
Mala's arc is frustrating as well, another microcosm of the sharp zig-zags taken by the script. She starts the film as a feisty, independent gypsy girl, and it's delightful to see Jaya Bhaduri taking a Hema-esque turn in the song "Chakku chhuriyan". But Vijay sprinkles Mala with some kind of magic dust that instantly transforms her into seedhi-saadhi boring ladki. The magnificent qawwali during which they tenderly realize their love ("Deewane hai diwaanon ko", picturized on Sanjana and the movie's lyricist, Gulshan Bawra) is a highlight of the movie - Vijay and Mala don't speak and hardly move, and yet convey an entire world of emotion with subtleties of body language and facial expression. In the circumscribed context of the song, Mala's delicate shyness is touching - but the larger personality transplant that turns the spirited gypsy into the picture of demure domesticity just doesn't work overall, and disrupts the tone of the movie. Instead of a meeting of two rageful independent souls, Zanjeer gives us a quivering and fretting Mala who steps into a premature sort of "ma" role. It leaves me wondering what happened to the girl who put a guy in a headlock at the beginning of the film, just for questioning her honor.
Despite its warts, Zanjeer is worth a look, especially for fans (like me) of the young, pre-stardom Amitabh. This is one the roles that defined the "angry young man" of the 1970s, and even if this Vijay's story lacks the polish of later incarnations, the best moments of the film are gems that shine in the rough substrate. And besides, you get Pran in a wig that is spectacularly orange even by Pran standards, giving him a look that is eerily prescient of a character who comes some 30 years later:
(*) Heartfelt thanks to Beth for suggesting the magnificent phrase "tone lurch" when I told her about this movie.
Text (c) 2006-2013, Carla Miriam Levy
The ideas and opinions expressed in this weblog are mine alone, and do not represent the views of my employer or of any other organization with which I may be associated.
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