By memsaab

Oh so unfair! This film beguiled me at the beginning with its humor, pretty songs, and lovely characters, and then sucker-punched me: ka-POW! It turns dark and depressing, full of tragic misunderstandings and a fatal lack of communication. The final message that I got out of it made me want to stick needles in my eyes (there are spoilers towards the end), although I’m pretty sure that’s not what the makers intended.

We meet gorgeous Neela (Sharmila Tagore) and painter Avinash (Rajesh Khanna) in their class at medical school. Avinash gets in trouble when the professor, Dr. Chandra (Ashok Kumar) catches him sketching Neela instead of paying attention to Chandra’s lecture. Neela and Avinash discover that they are neighbors and a friendship is quickly formed, especially when Neela discovers that Avinash isn’t well.

Neela lives with her brother, an aspiring but not very talented playwright named Kalidas (IS Johar) and sister-in-law Laxmi (Aruna Irani), and it’s not long before Avinash is making himself at home with them and vice versa.
 

I love the constant bantering and teasing that goes on between these four, with Avinash the main instigator. Even with bad subtitling it makes me laugh along with them.

Although medical school appears to be something that you can attend at will, Dr. Chandra is very fond of his young protege Neela. He gets her a job tutoring the younger brother, Monto (Mahesh Kothari), of a wealthy friend of his. Monto is not fond of studying and has managed to fail his exams spectacularly several times.

Monto is quickly won over by sweet Neela, and when his older brother Shekhar (Feroz Khan) gets a look at her, he is smitten immediately.

Avinash doesn’t go to class at all as far as I can tell, preferring to spend his time painting portraits of Neela, singing beautiful songs by Kalyanji Anandji and teasing his neighbors mercilessly. There is sadness hanging over his head though, and we find out what it is when he goes to see Dr. Chandra.

Nooooo!!!!! May I say that I am delighted to see Nadira as Shekhar’s mother although she isn’t very nice to poor Neela and thoroughly disapproves of Shekhar’s obvious feelings.

I read somewhere that at the premiere of this film Meena Kumari remarked on the fact that Rajesh Khanna looked awfully healthy for a cancer patient, a comment which Nadira promptly took back to Rajesh! Love her.

Nevertheless, Shekhar is determined to marry Neela, and talks to Chandra about it; Chandra advises him to see Neela’s brother and also Avinash. When Shekhar approaches Kalidas with his proposal, Kalidas himself tells him to take it to Avinash.

Shekhar does so, and Avinash promises to speak with Neela on his behalf. He shows her his medical report and tells her that he wants her to marry Shekhar and embrace life instead of waiting for death with him. She protests, but he refuses to listen and she finally relents. 

Kalidas shows up at the wedding eventually but Avinash does not, which puzzles Shekhar—and makes him a little suspicious.

Avinash stays at home in the dark and as the sun rises we hear a train pulling out of the station. So much of symbolism in this film!

As the days pass, Neela grows fond of her new husband but the little seed of suspicion planted at the wedding itself grows quickly into a prickly bush as Shekhar sees how much time Neela spends with Avinash (Neela of course is worried about his health). Since they don’t talk to each other about the issue, it just gets worse. Then Shekhar’s business goes bankrupt (he doesn’t tell Neela about that either—although to be fair, it is in the news) and he finds what he thinks is “proof” of Neela’s love for Avinash. This leads to a final confrontation between him and Neela.

What happens next? I’ll give you a clue: nothing very happy.

One of the best songs is pictured on a bunch of boats with boatmen singing about the river flowing with the tide and the film’s general (supposed) philosophy:

It’s even repeated early on in Neela and Shekhar’s marriage.

SPOILERS BELOW

My main problem with this film is that Neela doesn’t actually keep on moving (the story is told in flashback from a gray-haired Neela’s point of view). After Shekhar’s death, she retreats into a life of medicine and saving others—but she gives up on any chance for love and happiness in her own life. This seems to win her universal approval (I guess she’s behaving like a proper widow should) but it just makes me mad to see someone so young, vibrant, beautiful and intelligent give up on the things that make life worth living. She doesn’t even see Avinash before he dies. I want to scream at her: “Stop with the self-sacrifice already!” Sigh. It’s really my biggest cross to bear with Hindi films.

END SPOILERS

In all, it was a bit of a mixed blessing for me. The characters were flawed but likable, and there was a great deal of humor. All the actors were up to the mark; there was no scenery chewing, although there was certainly scope for it. It wasn’t melodramatic. The songs, as I said already, were lovely too. I just wish it had played out differently for Neela, and in general it felt a little rushed through the second half. But the film’s charms compensate for its bad points, and it was nice to spend some time with Feroz. What a man!

 Reviewed by our great memsaabstory :

http://memsaabstory.wordpress.com/2009/04/28/safar-1970/#comment-8905

By memsaab

Oh so unfair! This film beguiled me at the beginning with its humor, pretty songs, and lovely characters, and then sucker-punched me: ka-POW! It turns dark and depressing, full of tragic misunderstandings and a fatal lack of communication. The final message that I got out of it made me want to stick needles in my eyes (there are spoilers towards the end), although I’m pretty sure that’s not what the makers intended.

We meet gorgeous Neela (Sharmila Tagore) and painter Avinash (Rajesh Khanna) in their class at medical school. Avinash gets in trouble when the professor, Dr. Chandra (Ashok Kumar) catches him sketching Neela instead of paying attention to Chandra’s lecture. Neela and Avinash discover that they are neighbors and a friendship is quickly formed, especially when Neela discovers that Avinash isn’t well.

Neela lives with her brother, an aspiring but not very talented playwright named Kalidas (IS Johar) and sister-in-law Laxmi (Aruna Irani), and it’s not long before Avinash is making himself at home with them and vice versa.
 

I love the constant bantering and teasing that goes on between these four, with Avinash the main instigator. Even with bad subtitling it makes me laugh along with them.

Although medical school appears to be something that you can attend at will, Dr. Chandra is very fond of his young protege Neela. He gets her a job tutoring the younger brother, Monto (Mahesh Kothari), of a wealthy friend of his. Monto is not fond of studying and has managed to fail his exams spectacularly several times.

Monto is quickly won over by sweet Neela, and when his older brother Shekhar (Feroz Khan) gets a look at her, he is smitten immediately.

Avinash doesn’t go to class at all as far as I can tell, preferring to spend his time painting portraits of Neela, singing beautiful songs by Kalyanji Anandji and teasing his neighbors mercilessly. There is sadness hanging over his head though, and we find out what it is when he goes to see Dr. Chandra.

Nooooo!!!!! May I say that I am delighted to see Nadira as Shekhar’s mother although she isn’t very nice to poor Neela and thoroughly disapproves of Shekhar’s obvious feelings.

I read somewhere that at the premiere of this film Meena Kumari remarked on the fact that Rajesh Khanna looked awfully healthy for a cancer patient, a comment which Nadira promptly took back to Rajesh! Love her.

Nevertheless, Shekhar is determined to marry Neela, and talks to Chandra about it; Chandra advises him to see Neela’s brother and also Avinash. When Shekhar approaches Kalidas with his proposal, Kalidas himself tells him to take it to Avinash.

Shekhar does so, and Avinash promises to speak with Neela on his behalf. He shows her his medical report and tells her that he wants her to marry Shekhar and embrace life instead of waiting for death with him. She protests, but he refuses to listen and she finally relents. 

Kalidas shows up at the wedding eventually but Avinash does not, which puzzles Shekhar—and makes him a little suspicious.

Avinash stays at home in the dark and as the sun rises we hear a train pulling out of the station. So much of symbolism in this film!

As the days pass, Neela grows fond of her new husband but the little seed of suspicion planted at the wedding itself grows quickly into a prickly bush as Shekhar sees how much time Neela spends with Avinash (Neela of course is worried about his health). Since they don’t talk to each other about the issue, it just gets worse. Then Shekhar’s business goes bankrupt (he doesn’t tell Neela about that either—although to be fair, it is in the news) and he finds what he thinks is “proof” of Neela’s love for Avinash. This leads to a final confrontation between him and Neela.

What happens next? I’ll give you a clue: nothing very happy.

One of the best songs is pictured on a bunch of boats with boatmen singing about the river flowing with the tide and the film’s general (supposed) philosophy:

It’s even repeated early on in Neela and Shekhar’s marriage.

SPOILERS BELOW

My main problem with this film is that Neela doesn’t actually keep on moving (the story is told in flashback from a gray-haired Neela’s point of view). After Shekhar’s death, she retreats into a life of medicine and saving others—but she gives up on any chance for love and happiness in her own life. This seems to win her universal approval (I guess she’s behaving like a proper widow should) but it just makes me mad to see someone so young, vibrant, beautiful and intelligent give up on the things that make life worth living. She doesn’t even see Avinash before he dies. I want to scream at her: “Stop with the self-sacrifice already!” Sigh. It’s really my biggest cross to bear with Hindi films.

END SPOILERS

In all, it was a bit of a mixed blessing for me. The characters were flawed but likable, and there was a great deal of humor. All the actors were up to the mark; there was no scenery chewing, although there was certainly scope for it. It wasn’t melodramatic. The songs, as I said already, were lovely too. I just wish it had played out differently for Neela, and in general it felt a little rushed through the second half. But the film’s charms compensate for its bad points, and it was nice to spend some time with Feroz. What a man!

 Reviewed by our great memsaabstory :

http://memsaabstory.wordpress.com/2009/04/28/safar-1970/#comment-8905

Director: Shakti Samanta
Music: RD Burman; Lyrics: Anand Bakshi
Year: 1970
Running Time: 2 hours 40 minutes

Hold on to your hat because this film gets off to a jump-start. It begins with a sad looking Asha Parekh sitting in the midst of her wedding celebration waiting for her groom to appear. It turns out that this is an arranged marriage and that she has never even seen her prospective husband. She receives a letter from the man she truly loves declaring his affection for her. On the spur of the moment she rushes to him leaving the wedding ceremony behind. She goes to his door to declare that she is willing to break with all tradition by marrying him – only to discover that he has a disreputable woman (Bindu) coyly hiding behind his curtain.  Asha realizes immediately that he had been playing her all along in order to get a connection to the wealthy uncle who brought her up.

Asha? – what exactly did you expect! Prem Chopra who plays the fellow is probably the sleaziest character actor ever in Indian film! In the films in the 1960’s and 70’s there were two actors who almost always seemed to play the villain – oily haired Pran who tended to be the sneering type of villain who would calmly puff on his cigarette holder as he planned his evil doings and Prem who was more the leering kind of bad guy – he always looks as if he has just peeked up a girl's dress. He also generally has his shirt unbuttoned far down to show his hairy chest, gold medallions swung around his neck and sideburns sliding far down his face – a definite bad hair, bad attire sort of bad guy. He has the look of someone who would sweat oceans in an airtight freezer. So how Asha could have believed his offers of love is a bit difficult to swallow – of course we all make mistakes of the heart – but with Prem?

Anyway, she realizes what a wanker Prem is and goes home to beg her uncles forgiveness for what she has done – only to find him dead from shame. Knowing her future in this town is a dead end, she goes to the train station to leave and sees an old friend of hers named Punam. It turns out that Punam has her own tragic story to tell – her husband married her against the wishes of his parents and they were both disowned. The husband died though and she is going to see her parents-in-law for the first time with her son – a strange kid who looks like a baby Oscar Wilde! Hearing of Asha’s predicament, she asks her to come along and pose as her sister. On the way though the train crashes and Punam – now minus her legs and about to die – makes Asha promise to take her place so that her son can be brought up as the family heir. Asha seeing that her own life has little hope agrees to carry this out.

On the cab ride to her faux parents-in-law, the driver tries to rob her but she (and baby Oscar) is rescued by a forest ranger (Rajesh Khanna) who then brings her back to stay at his place for the night. His servant sorrowfully informs Asha that Rajesh has become heartbroken and a drunkard because the woman he was supposed to marry disappeared at the ceremony. Take a wild guess who that was! Talk about a small world – and it soon gets even smaller. Now how he became a drunkard since the wedding day – which seemed to be only the day before – is a little difficult to understand – did he take a crash course in “How to be an alcoholic in 24-hours or your money back”. Learn how to sing while intoxicated, dance while inebriated and spill drinks on complete strangers! Rajesh also just happens to be the best friend of Punam’s husband! Is this getting complicated or what and at this point in the film we are only at the 20-minute mark! I need to take a rest and catch my breath. There is still 140 minutes to go!

You probably see the irony headed right at you. Asha falls in love with the man she unknowingly left at the alter – he falls in love with her – but she is of course now a “widow” and the widow of his best friend. What is a couple to do? In India it is customary – or at least it was until recent times – for a widow to grieve always for her dead husband and never remarry. In the really old days of course they sometimes tossed the widow on the funeral pyre (sati) – so I guess grieving isn’t such a bad alternative. There have actually been cases in which a young girl who was in an arranged marriage but had yet to start living with her equally young husband had to take on widow status if her husband died before they even consummated the marriage – forever! On top of this very repressed love angle, good old Prem and his vamp Bindu show up and soon we have a tale of blackmail, murder and heartbreak on our hands. All good stuff!

Asha won the Best Actress Award for this performance – she is as always very appealing in a girl next-door kind of vulnerable way. The big eyes in full bloom – eyelashes so long that you could hang your laundry on them to dry and a sad and tentative smile playing around her mouth. She and Rajesh were at opposite trajectories in their careers when the film was made in 1970. Asha was a huge star in the 1960's but she was slowly winding it down at this point. Rajesh on the other hand was in the mouth of a hurricane. His film Aradhana in 1969 had made him a gigantic star with hoards of fans following him everywhere and the press detailing his every move. He is generally considered the first Indian actor who could truly be called a “Superstar” in the modern sense. 

Director: B. Subhash
Music: Bappi-Lahiri; Lyrics: Anjaan-Faruk Kaiser
Year: 1982
Running Time: 2 hours 15 minutes

If you always thought what "Saturday Night Fever" really needed to reach that next level was some high flying kung fu, chubby background dancers and killers with machine guns, this is the film for you. Actually, I think this is a film for anyone with a sense of the patently absurd and an appreciation for a movie so corny that you will think you are stuck in the middle of a greasy Philly cheese steak sandwich. It is gooey and delicious and completely fulfilling. Filled to the rooftop with bad décor, bad outfits, bad hair, bad dance steps and bad melodrama, this film is an absolute hoot – so bad and yet so satisfying.

Time has not treated the disco era with much respect – and this film will not change that perception by any means – but from a distance of twenty years this is a film that one can perhaps enjoy much more now than when it was made (or not - read note below). Not for the reasons that the filmmakers likely intended  – as they seem to treat all of this with the utmost seriousness – but from our vantage point this film is so wonderfully campy that you have to fall in love with it. It is the perfect midnight movie ala Rocky Horror Show and one can picture the audience showing up dressed in their favorite bad outfit from the film, mouthing the English lines like “Get out you bastard” and dancing awkwardly in the aisles.

It all begins with Jimmy as a little boy – performing on the streets of Bombay along with Rajesh Khanna (in what is billed as a “friendly appearance”) – their guitar and drums entertaining the whole neighborhood. From the distance a rich little girl watches the fun loving pair in envy and one day she invites Jimmy behind her compound wall to make music together. Her father comes home though and whacks the boy across the face, throws Jimmy’s mother down on the ground and has Jimmy arrested. Jeered by their neighbors, the mother and son are forced to leave Bombay in shame and settle elsewhere – but the little boy swears vengeance – his weapon of choice – disco.

Jump ahead fifteen years into the middle of disco fever and the "I am so cool it must hurt" Sam rules the disco kingdom. The adulation and success have gone to his head though as he pleasures himself with groupies, talks about himself in the third person and yells out in English ”Shut up. Sam is great you know. Sam is a music king. Sam is a star”. Unfortunately for Sam his salad days are about to end. Frustrated with Sam’s egotistical ways, his manager leaves him and goes searching for a new talent. Not surprisingly, he spots Jimmy (Mithun Chakravarti) sort of skipping and dancing on a street and immediately knows this is the next big thing! In his first appearance the crowd is filled with hostile supporters of Sam (sort of like when the Beatles came along and pissed off the Elvis fans) and Sam's sister (only billed as Kim) leads the other women in throwing their shoes at Jimmy – but our Jimmy calmly catches them and soon has the crowd eating out of his hand with his white stretch outfit and his crab like dancing – and the occasional roll on the ground. It doesn’t look great as he performs some really odd moves – but at least compared to Sam it is a marked improvement. Sam sort of moved like the Energizer Bunny – all stiff armed and mincing steps – and enjoyed jumping into and out of the frame for no reason. Soon Jimmy fever breaks out all over India and everyone is buying Jimmy T-shirts, Jimmy Perfumes, Jimmy Ice Cream and Jimmy Fabrics. He is the new disco king! Meanwhile Sam descends from bad fashion sense to heavy drinking to shooting up in heroin in his depression at having no more groupies to grope.

Of course life being the perplexing bowl of cherries it is, it incredibly turns out that the girl throwing shoes at him was the very same girl he played with so many years before! This means of course that her father is the cruel and wide tied creep that so shamed Jimmy. What a conundrum – he of course soon falls in love with the girl but the father and son are trying to kill him so that Sam can once again regain his throne. Yes, they take disco very seriously in India. So they hire a gang of thugs to beat poor Jimmy up. In a truly classic scene they surround him – each snapping their fingers in unison as they pour blow after blow on Jimmy – soon he is a bloody helpless rag doll in the dirt – until they make the big mistake of smashing his guitar. Don’t break a man’s guitar when he is down – that is simply poor etiquette. Jimmy pulls himself up – and begins SNAPPING his fingers – the hooligans pause – in fear of the snapping fingers – and Jimmy uses his astonishing kung fu skills (which he had apparently previously forgotten he possessed) and wipes them all out. Bruce Lee would be proud. Later these same hooligans beat him up with hockey sticks and throw him off a cliff – but that’s not enough to stop this Disco Dancer. He is soon throwing them through windows and kicking them across the room.

The film has many such bad but enjoyable scenes – an electric guitar that literally electrocutes, Jimmy developing discophobia and screaming in agony when he touches his guitar, Rajesh Khanna showing up out of the blue to perform a double twisting flying somersault from twenty feet away to save Jimmy and the bad guys just mowing down the audience with a machine gun. Of course, during the disco period I think a lot of us would have liked to have done the same!

Add to this, the very fun dance numbers with the flashing lights, the spinning disco balls, the wonderful background dancers in tinsel and the disco beat. The music is actually very catchy  – some seven songs and each one of them a little pop delight. I had come across the music first and enjoyed it so much that I finally had to see the film – and from nearly the first scene to the last I had a big silly goofy smile on my face that returns each time I think of Sam and his female partner (squeezed into her hotpants like an overstuffed sausage) singing “Bang Bang” or Jimmy with some weird little Batman mask around his forehead crooning “I am a Disco Dancer”.

The DVD has no English subtitles (since I wrote this review a version with subs from Bollywood Entertainment has come out) but that truly doesn’t matter a whole lot and makes the occasional English phrase really stand out – “Jimmy I hate you. You coward. I hate you Jimmy” which translated into any language means " I love you, you big lug".

Director: B. Subhash
Music: Bappi-Lahiri; Lyrics: Anjaan-Faruk Kaiser
Year: 1982
Running Time: 2 hours 15 minutes

If you always thought what "Saturday Night Fever" really needed to reach that next level was some high flying kung fu, chubby background dancers and killers with machine guns, this is the film for you. Actually, I think this is a film for anyone with a sense of the patently absurd and an appreciation for a movie so corny that you will think you are stuck in the middle of a greasy Philly cheese steak sandwich. It is gooey and delicious and completely fulfilling. Filled to the rooftop with bad décor, bad outfits, bad hair, bad dance steps and bad melodrama, this film is an absolute hoot – so bad and yet so satisfying.

Time has not treated the disco era with much respect – and this film will not change that perception by any means – but from a distance of twenty years this is a film that one can perhaps enjoy much more now than when it was made (or not - read note below). Not for the reasons that the filmmakers likely intended  – as they seem to treat all of this with the utmost seriousness – but from our vantage point this film is so wonderfully campy that you have to fall in love with it. It is the perfect midnight movie ala Rocky Horror Show and one can picture the audience showing up dressed in their favorite bad outfit from the film, mouthing the English lines like “Get out you bastard” and dancing awkwardly in the aisles.

It all begins with Jimmy as a little boy – performing on the streets of Bombay along with Rajesh Khanna (in what is billed as a “friendly appearance”) – their guitar and drums entertaining the whole neighborhood. From the distance a rich little girl watches the fun loving pair in envy and one day she invites Jimmy behind her compound wall to make music together. Her father comes home though and whacks the boy across the face, throws Jimmy’s mother down on the ground and has Jimmy arrested. Jeered by their neighbors, the mother and son are forced to leave Bombay in shame and settle elsewhere – but the little boy swears vengeance – his weapon of choice – disco.

Jump ahead fifteen years into the middle of disco fever and the "I am so cool it must hurt" Sam rules the disco kingdom. The adulation and success have gone to his head though as he pleasures himself with groupies, talks about himself in the third person and yells out in English ”Shut up. Sam is great you know. Sam is a music king. Sam is a star”. Unfortunately for Sam his salad days are about to end. Frustrated with Sam’s egotistical ways, his manager leaves him and goes searching for a new talent. Not surprisingly, he spots Jimmy (Mithun Chakravarti) sort of skipping and dancing on a street and immediately knows this is the next big thing! In his first appearance the crowd is filled with hostile supporters of Sam (sort of like when the Beatles came along and pissed off the Elvis fans) and Sam's sister (only billed as Kim) leads the other women in throwing their shoes at Jimmy – but our Jimmy calmly catches them and soon has the crowd eating out of his hand with his white stretch outfit and his crab like dancing – and the occasional roll on the ground. It doesn’t look great as he performs some really odd moves – but at least compared to Sam it is a marked improvement. Sam sort of moved like the Energizer Bunny – all stiff armed and mincing steps – and enjoyed jumping into and out of the frame for no reason. Soon Jimmy fever breaks out all over India and everyone is buying Jimmy T-shirts, Jimmy Perfumes, Jimmy Ice Cream and Jimmy Fabrics. He is the new disco king! Meanwhile Sam descends from bad fashion sense to heavy drinking to shooting up in heroin in his depression at having no more groupies to grope.

Of course life being the perplexing bowl of cherries it is, it incredibly turns out that the girl throwing shoes at him was the very same girl he played with so many years before! This means of course that her father is the cruel and wide tied creep that so shamed Jimmy. What a conundrum – he of course soon falls in love with the girl but the father and son are trying to kill him so that Sam can once again regain his throne. Yes, they take disco very seriously in India. So they hire a gang of thugs to beat poor Jimmy up. In a truly classic scene they surround him – each snapping their fingers in unison as they pour blow after blow on Jimmy – soon he is a bloody helpless rag doll in the dirt – until they make the big mistake of smashing his guitar. Don’t break a man’s guitar when he is down – that is simply poor etiquette. Jimmy pulls himself up – and begins SNAPPING his fingers – the hooligans pause – in fear of the snapping fingers – and Jimmy uses his astonishing kung fu skills (which he had apparently previously forgotten he possessed) and wipes them all out. Bruce Lee would be proud. Later these same hooligans beat him up with hockey sticks and throw him off a cliff – but that’s not enough to stop this Disco Dancer. He is soon throwing them through windows and kicking them across the room.

The film has many such bad but enjoyable scenes – an electric guitar that literally electrocutes, Jimmy developing discophobia and screaming in agony when he touches his guitar, Rajesh Khanna showing up out of the blue to perform a double twisting flying somersault from twenty feet away to save Jimmy and the bad guys just mowing down the audience with a machine gun. Of course, during the disco period I think a lot of us would have liked to have done the same!

Add to this, the very fun dance numbers with the flashing lights, the spinning disco balls, the wonderful background dancers in tinsel and the disco beat. The music is actually very catchy  – some seven songs and each one of them a little pop delight. I had come across the music first and enjoyed it so much that I finally had to see the film – and from nearly the first scene to the last I had a big silly goofy smile on my face that returns each time I think of Sam and his female partner (squeezed into her hotpants like an overstuffed sausage) singing “Bang Bang” or Jimmy with some weird little Batman mask around his forehead crooning “I am a Disco Dancer”.

The DVD has no English subtitles (since I wrote this review a version with subs from Bollywood Entertainment has come out) but that truly doesn’t matter a whole lot and makes the occasional English phrase really stand out – “Jimmy I hate you. You coward. I hate you Jimmy” which translated into any language means " I love you, you big lug".

Director: B. Subhash
Music: Bappi-Lahiri; Lyrics: Anjaan-Faruk Kaiser
Year: 1982
Running Time: 2 hours 15 minutes

If you always thought what "Saturday Night Fever" really needed to reach that next level was some high flying kung fu, chubby background dancers and killers with machine guns, this is the film for you. Actually, I think this is a film for anyone with a sense of the patently absurd and an appreciation for a movie so corny that you will think you are stuck in the middle of a greasy Philly cheese steak sandwich. It is gooey and delicious and completely fulfilling. Filled to the rooftop with bad décor, bad outfits, bad hair, bad dance steps and bad melodrama, this film is an absolute hoot – so bad and yet so satisfying.

Time has not treated the disco era with much respect – and this film will not change that perception by any means – but from a distance of twenty years this is a film that one can perhaps enjoy much more now than when it was made (or not - read note below). Not for the reasons that the filmmakers likely intended  – as they seem to treat all of this with the utmost seriousness – but from our vantage point this film is so wonderfully campy that you have to fall in love with it. It is the perfect midnight movie ala Rocky Horror Show and one can picture the audience showing up dressed in their favorite bad outfit from the film, mouthing the English lines like “Get out you bastard” and dancing awkwardly in the aisles.

It all begins with Jimmy as a little boy – performing on the streets of Bombay along with Rajesh Khanna (in what is billed as a “friendly appearance”) – their guitar and drums entertaining the whole neighborhood. From the distance a rich little girl watches the fun loving pair in envy and one day she invites Jimmy behind her compound wall to make music together. Her father comes home though and whacks the boy across the face, throws Jimmy’s mother down on the ground and has Jimmy arrested. Jeered by their neighbors, the mother and son are forced to leave Bombay in shame and settle elsewhere – but the little boy swears vengeance – his weapon of choice – disco.

Jump ahead fifteen years into the middle of disco fever and the "I am so cool it must hurt" Sam rules the disco kingdom. The adulation and success have gone to his head though as he pleasures himself with groupies, talks about himself in the third person and yells out in English ”Shut up. Sam is great you know. Sam is a music king. Sam is a star”. Unfortunately for Sam his salad days are about to end. Frustrated with Sam’s egotistical ways, his manager leaves him and goes searching for a new talent. Not surprisingly, he spots Jimmy (Mithun Chakravarti) sort of skipping and dancing on a street and immediately knows this is the next big thing! In his first appearance the crowd is filled with hostile supporters of Sam (sort of like when the Beatles came along and pissed off the Elvis fans) and Sam's sister (only billed as Kim) leads the other women in throwing their shoes at Jimmy – but our Jimmy calmly catches them and soon has the crowd eating out of his hand with his white stretch outfit and his crab like dancing – and the occasional roll on the ground. It doesn’t look great as he performs some really odd moves – but at least compared to Sam it is a marked improvement. Sam sort of moved like the Energizer Bunny – all stiff armed and mincing steps – and enjoyed jumping into and out of the frame for no reason. Soon Jimmy fever breaks out all over India and everyone is buying Jimmy T-shirts, Jimmy Perfumes, Jimmy Ice Cream and Jimmy Fabrics. He is the new disco king! Meanwhile Sam descends from bad fashion sense to heavy drinking to shooting up in heroin in his depression at having no more groupies to grope.

Of course life being the perplexing bowl of cherries it is, it incredibly turns out that the girl throwing shoes at him was the very same girl he played with so many years before! This means of course that her father is the cruel and wide tied creep that so shamed Jimmy. What a conundrum – he of course soon falls in love with the girl but the father and son are trying to kill him so that Sam can once again regain his throne. Yes, they take disco very seriously in India. So they hire a gang of thugs to beat poor Jimmy up. In a truly classic scene they surround him – each snapping their fingers in unison as they pour blow after blow on Jimmy – soon he is a bloody helpless rag doll in the dirt – until they make the big mistake of smashing his guitar. Don’t break a man’s guitar when he is down – that is simply poor etiquette. Jimmy pulls himself up – and begins SNAPPING his fingers – the hooligans pause – in fear of the snapping fingers – and Jimmy uses his astonishing kung fu skills (which he had apparently previously forgotten he possessed) and wipes them all out. Bruce Lee would be proud. Later these same hooligans beat him up with hockey sticks and throw him off a cliff – but that’s not enough to stop this Disco Dancer. He is soon throwing them through windows and kicking them across the room.

The film has many such bad but enjoyable scenes – an electric guitar that literally electrocutes, Jimmy developing discophobia and screaming in agony when he touches his guitar, Rajesh Khanna showing up out of the blue to perform a double twisting flying somersault from twenty feet away to save Jimmy and the bad guys just mowing down the audience with a machine gun. Of course, during the disco period I think a lot of us would have liked to have done the same!

Add to this, the very fun dance numbers with the flashing lights, the spinning disco balls, the wonderful background dancers in tinsel and the disco beat. The music is actually very catchy  – some seven songs and each one of them a little pop delight. I had come across the music first and enjoyed it so much that I finally had to see the film – and from nearly the first scene to the last I had a big silly goofy smile on my face that returns each time I think of Sam and his female partner (squeezed into her hotpants like an overstuffed sausage) singing “Bang Bang” or Jimmy with some weird little Batman mask around his forehead crooning “I am a Disco Dancer”.

The DVD has no English subtitles (since I wrote this review a version with subs from Bollywood Entertainment has come out) but that truly doesn’t matter a whole lot and makes the occasional English phrase really stand out – “Jimmy I hate you. You coward. I hate you Jimmy” which translated into any language means " I love you, you big lug".

Director: B. Subhash
Music: Bappi-Lahiri; Lyrics: Anjaan-Faruk Kaiser
Year: 1982
Running Time: 2 hours 15 minutes

If you always thought what "Saturday Night Fever" really needed to reach that next level was some high flying kung fu, chubby background dancers and killers with machine guns, this is the film for you. Actually, I think this is a film for anyone with a sense of the patently absurd and an appreciation for a movie so corny that you will think you are stuck in the middle of a greasy Philly cheese steak sandwich. It is gooey and delicious and completely fulfilling. Filled to the rooftop with bad décor, bad outfits, bad hair, bad dance steps and bad melodrama, this film is an absolute hoot – so bad and yet so satisfying.

Time has not treated the disco era with much respect – and this film will not change that perception by any means – but from a distance of twenty years this is a film that one can perhaps enjoy much more now than when it was made (or not - read note below). Not for the reasons that the filmmakers likely intended  – as they seem to treat all of this with the utmost seriousness – but from our vantage point this film is so wonderfully campy that you have to fall in love with it. It is the perfect midnight movie ala Rocky Horror Show and one can picture the audience showing up dressed in their favorite bad outfit from the film, mouthing the English lines like “Get out you bastard” and dancing awkwardly in the aisles.

It all begins with Jimmy as a little boy – performing on the streets of Bombay along with Rajesh Khanna (in what is billed as a “friendly appearance”) – their guitar and drums entertaining the whole neighborhood. From the distance a rich little girl watches the fun loving pair in envy and one day she invites Jimmy behind her compound wall to make music together. Her father comes home though and whacks the boy across the face, throws Jimmy’s mother down on the ground and has Jimmy arrested. Jeered by their neighbors, the mother and son are forced to leave Bombay in shame and settle elsewhere – but the little boy swears vengeance – his weapon of choice – disco.

Jump ahead fifteen years into the middle of disco fever and the "I am so cool it must hurt" Sam rules the disco kingdom. The adulation and success have gone to his head though as he pleasures himself with groupies, talks about himself in the third person and yells out in English ”Shut up. Sam is great you know. Sam is a music king. Sam is a star”. Unfortunately for Sam his salad days are about to end. Frustrated with Sam’s egotistical ways, his manager leaves him and goes searching for a new talent. Not surprisingly, he spots Jimmy (Mithun Chakravarti) sort of skipping and dancing on a street and immediately knows this is the next big thing! In his first appearance the crowd is filled with hostile supporters of Sam (sort of like when the Beatles came along and pissed off the Elvis fans) and Sam's sister (only billed as Kim) leads the other women in throwing their shoes at Jimmy – but our Jimmy calmly catches them and soon has the crowd eating out of his hand with his white stretch outfit and his crab like dancing – and the occasional roll on the ground. It doesn’t look great as he performs some really odd moves – but at least compared to Sam it is a marked improvement. Sam sort of moved like the Energizer Bunny – all stiff armed and mincing steps – and enjoyed jumping into and out of the frame for no reason. Soon Jimmy fever breaks out all over India and everyone is buying Jimmy T-shirts, Jimmy Perfumes, Jimmy Ice Cream and Jimmy Fabrics. He is the new disco king! Meanwhile Sam descends from bad fashion sense to heavy drinking to shooting up in heroin in his depression at having no more groupies to grope.

Of course life being the perplexing bowl of cherries it is, it incredibly turns out that the girl throwing shoes at him was the very same girl he played with so many years before! This means of course that her father is the cruel and wide tied creep that so shamed Jimmy. What a conundrum – he of course soon falls in love with the girl but the father and son are trying to kill him so that Sam can once again regain his throne. Yes, they take disco very seriously in India. So they hire a gang of thugs to beat poor Jimmy up. In a truly classic scene they surround him – each snapping their fingers in unison as they pour blow after blow on Jimmy – soon he is a bloody helpless rag doll in the dirt – until they make the big mistake of smashing his guitar. Don’t break a man’s guitar when he is down – that is simply poor etiquette. Jimmy pulls himself up – and begins SNAPPING his fingers – the hooligans pause – in fear of the snapping fingers – and Jimmy uses his astonishing kung fu skills (which he had apparently previously forgotten he possessed) and wipes them all out. Bruce Lee would be proud. Later these same hooligans beat him up with hockey sticks and throw him off a cliff – but that’s not enough to stop this Disco Dancer. He is soon throwing them through windows and kicking them across the room.

The film has many such bad but enjoyable scenes – an electric guitar that literally electrocutes, Jimmy developing discophobia and screaming in agony when he touches his guitar, Rajesh Khanna showing up out of the blue to perform a double twisting flying somersault from twenty feet away to save Jimmy and the bad guys just mowing down the audience with a machine gun. Of course, during the disco period I think a lot of us would have liked to have done the same!

Add to this, the very fun dance numbers with the flashing lights, the spinning disco balls, the wonderful background dancers in tinsel and the disco beat. The music is actually very catchy  – some seven songs and each one of them a little pop delight. I had come across the music first and enjoyed it so much that I finally had to see the film – and from nearly the first scene to the last I had a big silly goofy smile on my face that returns each time I think of Sam and his female partner (squeezed into her hotpants like an overstuffed sausage) singing “Bang Bang” or Jimmy with some weird little Batman mask around his forehead crooning “I am a Disco Dancer”.

The DVD has no English subtitles (since I wrote this review a version with subs from Bollywood Entertainment has come out) but that truly doesn’t matter a whole lot and makes the occasional English phrase really stand out – “Jimmy I hate you. You coward. I hate you Jimmy” which translated into any language means " I love you, you big lug".

Director: B. Subhash
Music: Bappi-Lahiri; Lyrics: Anjaan-Faruk Kaiser
Year: 1982
Running Time: 2 hours 15 minutes

If you always thought what "Saturday Night Fever" really needed to reach that next level was some high flying kung fu, chubby background dancers and killers with machine guns, this is the film for you. Actually, I think this is a film for anyone with a sense of the patently absurd and an appreciation for a movie so corny that you will think you are stuck in the middle of a greasy Philly cheese steak sandwich. It is gooey and delicious and completely fulfilling. Filled to the rooftop with bad décor, bad outfits, bad hair, bad dance steps and bad melodrama, this film is an absolute hoot – so bad and yet so satisfying.

Time has not treated the disco era with much respect – and this film will not change that perception by any means – but from a distance of twenty years this is a film that one can perhaps enjoy much more now than when it was made (or not - read note below). Not for the reasons that the filmmakers likely intended  – as they seem to treat all of this with the utmost seriousness – but from our vantage point this film is so wonderfully campy that you have to fall in love with it. It is the perfect midnight movie ala Rocky Horror Show and one can picture the audience showing up dressed in their favorite bad outfit from the film, mouthing the English lines like “Get out you bastard” and dancing awkwardly in the aisles.

It all begins with Jimmy as a little boy – performing on the streets of Bombay along with Rajesh Khanna (in what is billed as a “friendly appearance”) – their guitar and drums entertaining the whole neighborhood. From the distance a rich little girl watches the fun loving pair in envy and one day she invites Jimmy behind her compound wall to make music together. Her father comes home though and whacks the boy across the face, throws Jimmy’s mother down on the ground and has Jimmy arrested. Jeered by their neighbors, the mother and son are forced to leave Bombay in shame and settle elsewhere – but the little boy swears vengeance – his weapon of choice – disco.

Jump ahead fifteen years into the middle of disco fever and the "I am so cool it must hurt" Sam rules the disco kingdom. The adulation and success have gone to his head though as he pleasures himself with groupies, talks about himself in the third person and yells out in English ”Shut up. Sam is great you know. Sam is a music king. Sam is a star”. Unfortunately for Sam his salad days are about to end. Frustrated with Sam’s egotistical ways, his manager leaves him and goes searching for a new talent. Not surprisingly, he spots Jimmy (Mithun Chakravarti) sort of skipping and dancing on a street and immediately knows this is the next big thing! In his first appearance the crowd is filled with hostile supporters of Sam (sort of like when the Beatles came along and pissed off the Elvis fans) and Sam's sister (only billed as Kim) leads the other women in throwing their shoes at Jimmy – but our Jimmy calmly catches them and soon has the crowd eating out of his hand with his white stretch outfit and his crab like dancing – and the occasional roll on the ground. It doesn’t look great as he performs some really odd moves – but at least compared to Sam it is a marked improvement. Sam sort of moved like the Energizer Bunny – all stiff armed and mincing steps – and enjoyed jumping into and out of the frame for no reason. Soon Jimmy fever breaks out all over India and everyone is buying Jimmy T-shirts, Jimmy Perfumes, Jimmy Ice Cream and Jimmy Fabrics. He is the new disco king! Meanwhile Sam descends from bad fashion sense to heavy drinking to shooting up in heroin in his depression at having no more groupies to grope.

Of course life being the perplexing bowl of cherries it is, it incredibly turns out that the girl throwing shoes at him was the very same girl he played with so many years before! This means of course that her father is the cruel and wide tied creep that so shamed Jimmy. What a conundrum – he of course soon falls in love with the girl but the father and son are trying to kill him so that Sam can once again regain his throne. Yes, they take disco very seriously in India. So they hire a gang of thugs to beat poor Jimmy up. In a truly classic scene they surround him – each snapping their fingers in unison as they pour blow after blow on Jimmy – soon he is a bloody helpless rag doll in the dirt – until they make the big mistake of smashing his guitar. Don’t break a man’s guitar when he is down – that is simply poor etiquette. Jimmy pulls himself up – and begins SNAPPING his fingers – the hooligans pause – in fear of the snapping fingers – and Jimmy uses his astonishing kung fu skills (which he had apparently previously forgotten he possessed) and wipes them all out. Bruce Lee would be proud. Later these same hooligans beat him up with hockey sticks and throw him off a cliff – but that’s not enough to stop this Disco Dancer. He is soon throwing them through windows and kicking them across the room.

The film has many such bad but enjoyable scenes – an electric guitar that literally electrocutes, Jimmy developing discophobia and screaming in agony when he touches his guitar, Rajesh Khanna showing up out of the blue to perform a double twisting flying somersault from twenty feet away to save Jimmy and the bad guys just mowing down the audience with a machine gun. Of course, during the disco period I think a lot of us would have liked to have done the same!

Add to this, the very fun dance numbers with the flashing lights, the spinning disco balls, the wonderful background dancers in tinsel and the disco beat. The music is actually very catchy  – some seven songs and each one of them a little pop delight. I had come across the music first and enjoyed it so much that I finally had to see the film – and from nearly the first scene to the last I had a big silly goofy smile on my face that returns each time I think of Sam and his female partner (squeezed into her hotpants like an overstuffed sausage) singing “Bang Bang” or Jimmy with some weird little Batman mask around his forehead crooning “I am a Disco Dancer”.

The DVD has no English subtitles (since I wrote this review a version with subs from Bollywood Entertainment has come out) but that truly doesn’t matter a whole lot and makes the occasional English phrase really stand out – “Jimmy I hate you. You coward. I hate you Jimmy” which translated into any language means " I love you, you big lug".

Director: Umesh Mehra
Music: R.D. Burman; Lyrics: Anand Bakshi
Year: 1982
Running Time: 2 hrs 41 minutes

A one-legged cop, two dead mothers and three kung fu kicking babes. No, not a Bollywood Christmas carol, but just some of the fun bits in this crazy action film from 1982. It’s my firm opinion that Bollywood has neither enough dead mothers nor fighting femmes so it’s quite rewarding to come across so much of it in one film. In the world of Indian movies mothers are elevated to a state of godliness in which they can do no wrong and that can get so annoying after a while - so getting the opportunity to watch two of them kick the bucket under unusual melodramatic circumstances made my day.  But nothing compared to the pleasure of seeing three females doing spins, somersaults, karate chops and kicks to the heads of lots of bad guys.

Having immersed myself in Hong Kong films over the past five years, one of the aspects of them that I have really come to appreciate are the very strong female characterizations whether it be a Brigitte Lin as the imperious Asia the Invincible or Carina Lau as a tough bar hostess who would just as soon bust a bottle over your head as not in “Girls without Tomorrow”. But what really sets cinematic women apart in Hong Kong from any other film industry is their willingness to let them go toe to toe physically with any man or group of men – a genre that took on the name of “Girls with Guns” in the 1980’s but which had roots going back to the 1930s and has consisted of literally hundreds of films that spawned many female action stars such as Michelle Yeoh, Angela Mao, Moon Lee and Yukari Oshima.  Bollywood has no such tradition sadly. Women characterizations can certainly be strong – but they generally fall into stereotypical roles such as the strong-willed mother, the conniving vamp or the heroine who will sacrifice for her man – but rarely does a woman take a bottle to a man’s head. They would rather dance than fight. There are a few exceptions that I have come across – Zeenat Aman as a revenge seeking babe in “Don” and Kareena Kapoor as a warrior queen in “Asoka” – but they are few and far between and certainly no actresses train specifically for action films or use them as an entrée into the industry as they did in Hong Kong. But here we have the pleasure of three lovely actresses doing their best to be nearly convincing in this action mayhem film – with the help needless to say of many stunt doubles!

Four men break into a bank and take off in car and start giving each the high fives when they notice that police officer Rajesh Khanna is right behind them. After a pretty terrific car chase through the streets of Bombay, he forces their car to turn over and chases one of them into a game arcade where Rajesh does a pretty good Dirty Harry imitation and beats the fellow senseless and turns to the onlookers and says “you heard him confess right”. The bad guys get back at him though by having the beautiful Shabana Azmi show up at his house – with his mother happily assuming this is his fiancé – to try to bribe him into letting the guy he captured go – when he of course declines, she plants some of the bank loot behind his couch. Later the cops show up, find the money, arrest him and send him off to jail for three years. Oh, and his mother keels over from a heart attack and dies when he is charged. One mother down.

Three years later he has grown a beard and is still pissed about his dead mom and starts going after the gang that set him up – torturing one guy by electrocuting him – but when he tracks them down at a junk car lot – he makes the mistake of having a car dropped on top of him and crushing his leg. With one leg useless, the bad guys must assume he is no longer a danger – big mistake – they clearly don’t realize that a crutch can do double duty as a rifle and that an artificial leg can be used to club a man to death – he is more lethal than ever – though to my disappointment unlike the Japanese film, "Gun Crazy", the artificial leg wasn’t really a bazooka! Really angry that he now won’t be able to dance in the musical sequences, he drags himself out of the hospital bed and goes looking for one-legged justice – with his leg often falling off – and he tracks down Shabana. She helps him retrieve his leg – the darn thing fell off again – and tells him how sorry she was but that she had no choice – they had drugged her and taken pictures of her nude body and forced her to do this dastardly deed – after asking first to see the pictures Rajesh recruits her to get back at these men.

Let’s bring the two other females into the story. Zeenat Aman is a nightclub performer whose boyfriend sells cocaine for this same group of thugs – but one night they think he is double-crossing them and so come for the both of them. Fortunately for her, Rajesh and Shabana knock her out first and gag her – but the gang tracks down the boyfriend to the house of a buddy’s and take them both prisoner. On to this scene creeps the buddy’s sister, Parveen Babi, who starts a ruckus by knocking out some of the bad guys, but in the ensuing mêlée both guys are shot and Parveen is chased down the beach by the legendary bad guy Bob Christo! She actually has his number until he uses a tranquilizer dart to her posterior. She is saved only by a drunk, Mithun Chakravorty, who is annoyed by all the noise. He carries her back to his shack and passes out in a stupor with her in his bed – and the next morning is angry to find Parveen sleeping there next to him! What the hell – angry to find her in his bed and kicks her out – clearly he has a major drinking problem – most men spend much of their lives trying to figure out ways to get women like Parveen into their beds! Later she goes back to her house to find her brother dead – and when her mother comes down the steps she too sees her dead son and naturally falls down the stairs and dies! Dead mother number two! A bad day for Parveen though – first waking up next to Mithun, then being rejected by a drunk and then finding a dead brother and a soon to be dead mother. Normally you would say she should have stayed in bed that day - but not with Mithun in it!

She too joins the band of Rajesh, Shabana and Zeenat – and after a whole week of training in fire arms and karate, they are ready to go after the band of bad guys. Soon Mithun joins them and oddly a group that consists of a one legged man, a drunk and three voluptuous women throw fear and dread into the gang. First they take on a kitchen full of transvestite cooks, then battle the bad guys in a warehouse to rescue two kids – in which at one point Zeenat jumps from the third level on to a high bar down below, does a few flips around to gain velocity and throws herself through a glass plate window to knock down one guy – just think if she had practiced for two weeks! Later the three babes dress up in traditional garb to perform at an outdoor fair in hopes of being sold into prostitution – in which they sing provocatively:

Even if you eat me a little
You will be in difficulty
Don’t say I didn’t warn you
I am a chilly from Kolhapur

They all manage to find themselves in the castle of the major baddie – played with his usual subtle eye-popping badness by Amrish Puri who is intent on spreading chaos in India because they took his kingdom away from him. Another major brouhaha follows. A lot of this isn’t that well executed but its so much silly fun. During the fight Rajesh takes off his leg to use to hit someone, but somehow still manages to walk - a mysterious third leg perhaps?

It is an interesting cast made of newcomers who were to make it big and stars that were very much on the wane. Rajesh was a huge star in the early 70’s – the first to be anointed as a super star by the media – but by the 80’s he was grasping for any role and making friends with the bottle. Both Zeenat and Parveen were teetering at the far edge of their careers as well as new younger actresses were coming into film. During the 1970’s Zeenat and Parvani had been rivals of a sort – both with the same sultry looks and both often playing characters who broke the traditional good female role by being part vamp and part heroine and all sex. They also often co-starred with Amitabh Bachchan in his less serious outings like "Shaan", "Don" and "The Great Gambler". Parveen never quite made it to the star status that Zeenat did – sometimes referred to as a poor man’s Zeenat – but they both had their fan base who had nothing nice to say about the other actress and at one point she made it to the cover of Time magazine. Though Zeenat is a favorite of mine I have to admit by the time of this film, she was starting to lose her luster and appears a bit bloated with way too much rouge applied while Parveen still looks great. To read more about Parveen check out this page.

Mithun’s career was just taking off and in this same year he was to reach stardom with the classically bad film, “Disco Dancer” that created a disco rage at the time. The stunning Shabana actually never made it that big in Bollywood but has had a legendary career in what is termed the “parallel” cinema – i.e. serious non-musical films – in 2002 the New York Film Festival paid tribute to her – and she has gained much acclaim (and criticism from the power structure) for her work for social justice – crusading for the poor, for women rights and for religious tolerance. Why she choose to appear in this film in the same year she made the classic “Aarth” is perplexing (but I am glad she did!) but certainly many actors in the parallel cinema often jump occasionally to Bollywood for the high salaries so that they can afford to act in theater and serious fare.

I don’t want to mislead anyone into think this is a good film per se – but many of these action films made in Bollywood during the 70’s and 80’s are simply over the top fun in which every punch has the sound of a firecracker, people constantly are flying in all directions and in the end the good guys are always victorious. This is one of those. Though this is an action film, there is always time to stop the killing and dance and this has five musical interludes but the music from R.D. Burman isn't up to his usual standards and won't stick in your mind for long.

Director: Umesh Mehra
Music: R.D. Burman; Lyrics: Anand Bakshi
Year: 1982
Running Time: 2 hrs 41 minutes

A one-legged cop, two dead mothers and three kung fu kicking babes. No, not a Bollywood Christmas carol, but just some of the fun bits in this crazy action film from 1982. It’s my firm opinion that Bollywood has neither enough dead mothers nor fighting femmes so it’s quite rewarding to come across so much of it in one film. In the world of Indian movies mothers are elevated to a state of godliness in which they can do no wrong and that can get so annoying after a while - so getting the opportunity to watch two of them kick the bucket under unusual melodramatic circumstances made my day.  But nothing compared to the pleasure of seeing three females doing spins, somersaults, karate chops and kicks to the heads of lots of bad guys.

Having immersed myself in Hong Kong films over the past five years, one of the aspects of them that I have really come to appreciate are the very strong female characterizations whether it be a Brigitte Lin as the imperious Asia the Invincible or Carina Lau as a tough bar hostess who would just as soon bust a bottle over your head as not in “Girls without Tomorrow”. But what really sets cinematic women apart in Hong Kong from any other film industry is their willingness to let them go toe to toe physically with any man or group of men – a genre that took on the name of “Girls with Guns” in the 1980’s but which had roots going back to the 1930s and has consisted of literally hundreds of films that spawned many female action stars such as Michelle Yeoh, Angela Mao, Moon Lee and Yukari Oshima.  Bollywood has no such tradition sadly. Women characterizations can certainly be strong – but they generally fall into stereotypical roles such as the strong-willed mother, the conniving vamp or the heroine who will sacrifice for her man – but rarely does a woman take a bottle to a man’s head. They would rather dance than fight. There are a few exceptions that I have come across – Zeenat Aman as a revenge seeking babe in “Don” and Kareena Kapoor as a warrior queen in “Asoka” – but they are few and far between and certainly no actresses train specifically for action films or use them as an entrée into the industry as they did in Hong Kong. But here we have the pleasure of three lovely actresses doing their best to be nearly convincing in this action mayhem film – with the help needless to say of many stunt doubles!

Four men break into a bank and take off in car and start giving each the high fives when they notice that police officer Rajesh Khanna is right behind them. After a pretty terrific car chase through the streets of Bombay, he forces their car to turn over and chases one of them into a game arcade where Rajesh does a pretty good Dirty Harry imitation and beats the fellow senseless and turns to the onlookers and says “you heard him confess right”. The bad guys get back at him though by having the beautiful Shabana Azmi show up at his house – with his mother happily assuming this is his fiancé – to try to bribe him into letting the guy he captured go – when he of course declines, she plants some of the bank loot behind his couch. Later the cops show up, find the money, arrest him and send him off to jail for three years. Oh, and his mother keels over from a heart attack and dies when he is charged. One mother down.

Three years later he has grown a beard and is still pissed about his dead mom and starts going after the gang that set him up – torturing one guy by electrocuting him – but when he tracks them down at a junk car lot – he makes the mistake of having a car dropped on top of him and crushing his leg. With one leg useless, the bad guys must assume he is no longer a danger – big mistake – they clearly don’t realize that a crutch can do double duty as a rifle and that an artificial leg can be used to club a man to death – he is more lethal than ever – though to my disappointment unlike the Japanese film, "Gun Crazy", the artificial leg wasn’t really a bazooka! Really angry that he now won’t be able to dance in the musical sequences, he drags himself out of the hospital bed and goes looking for one-legged justice – with his leg often falling off – and he tracks down Shabana. She helps him retrieve his leg – the darn thing fell off again – and tells him how sorry she was but that she had no choice – they had drugged her and taken pictures of her nude body and forced her to do this dastardly deed – after asking first to see the pictures Rajesh recruits her to get back at these men.

Let’s bring the two other females into the story. Zeenat Aman is a nightclub performer whose boyfriend sells cocaine for this same group of thugs – but one night they think he is double-crossing them and so come for the both of them. Fortunately for her, Rajesh and Shabana knock her out first and gag her – but the gang tracks down the boyfriend to the house of a buddy’s and take them both prisoner. On to this scene creeps the buddy’s sister, Parveen Babi, who starts a ruckus by knocking out some of the bad guys, but in the ensuing mêlée both guys are shot and Parveen is chased down the beach by the legendary bad guy Bob Christo! She actually has his number until he uses a tranquilizer dart to her posterior. She is saved only by a drunk, Mithun Chakravorty, who is annoyed by all the noise. He carries her back to his shack and passes out in a stupor with her in his bed – and the next morning is angry to find Parveen sleeping there next to him! What the hell – angry to find her in his bed and kicks her out – clearly he has a major drinking problem – most men spend much of their lives trying to figure out ways to get women like Parveen into their beds! Later she goes back to her house to find her brother dead – and when her mother comes down the steps she too sees her dead son and naturally falls down the stairs and dies! Dead mother number two! A bad day for Parveen though – first waking up next to Mithun, then being rejected by a drunk and then finding a dead brother and a soon to be dead mother. Normally you would say she should have stayed in bed that day - but not with Mithun in it!

She too joins the band of Rajesh, Shabana and Zeenat – and after a whole week of training in fire arms and karate, they are ready to go after the band of bad guys. Soon Mithun joins them and oddly a group that consists of a one legged man, a drunk and three voluptuous women throw fear and dread into the gang. First they take on a kitchen full of transvestite cooks, then battle the bad guys in a warehouse to rescue two kids – in which at one point Zeenat jumps from the third level on to a high bar down below, does a few flips around to gain velocity and throws herself through a glass plate window to knock down one guy – just think if she had practiced for two weeks! Later the three babes dress up in traditional garb to perform at an outdoor fair in hopes of being sold into prostitution – in which they sing provocatively:

Even if you eat me a little
You will be in difficulty
Don’t say I didn’t warn you
I am a chilly from Kolhapur

They all manage to find themselves in the castle of the major baddie – played with his usual subtle eye-popping badness by Amrish Puri who is intent on spreading chaos in India because they took his kingdom away from him. Another major brouhaha follows. A lot of this isn’t that well executed but its so much silly fun. During the fight Rajesh takes off his leg to use to hit someone, but somehow still manages to walk - a mysterious third leg perhaps?

It is an interesting cast made of newcomers who were to make it big and stars that were very much on the wane. Rajesh was a huge star in the early 70’s – the first to be anointed as a super star by the media – but by the 80’s he was grasping for any role and making friends with the bottle. Both Zeenat and Parveen were teetering at the far edge of their careers as well as new younger actresses were coming into film. During the 1970’s Zeenat and Parvani had been rivals of a sort – both with the same sultry looks and both often playing characters who broke the traditional good female role by being part vamp and part heroine and all sex. They also often co-starred with Amitabh Bachchan in his less serious outings like "Shaan", "Don" and "The Great Gambler". Parveen never quite made it to the star status that Zeenat did – sometimes referred to as a poor man’s Zeenat – but they both had their fan base who had nothing nice to say about the other actress and at one point she made it to the cover of Time magazine. Though Zeenat is a favorite of mine I have to admit by the time of this film, she was starting to lose her luster and appears a bit bloated with way too much rouge applied while Parveen still looks great. To read more about Parveen check out this page.

Mithun’s career was just taking off and in this same year he was to reach stardom with the classically bad film, “Disco Dancer” that created a disco rage at the time. The stunning Shabana actually never made it that big in Bollywood but has had a legendary career in what is termed the “parallel” cinema – i.e. serious non-musical films – in 2002 the New York Film Festival paid tribute to her – and she has gained much acclaim (and criticism from the power structure) for her work for social justice – crusading for the poor, for women rights and for religious tolerance. Why she choose to appear in this film in the same year she made the classic “Aarth” is perplexing (but I am glad she did!) but certainly many actors in the parallel cinema often jump occasionally to Bollywood for the high salaries so that they can afford to act in theater and serious fare.

I don’t want to mislead anyone into think this is a good film per se – but many of these action films made in Bollywood during the 70’s and 80’s are simply over the top fun in which every punch has the sound of a firecracker, people constantly are flying in all directions and in the end the good guys are always victorious. This is one of those. Though this is an action film, there is always time to stop the killing and dance and this has five musical interludes but the music from R.D. Burman isn't up to his usual standards and won't stick in your mind for long.

Director: Umesh Mehra
Music: R.D. Burman; Lyrics: Anand Bakshi
Year: 1982
Running Time: 2 hrs 41 minutes

A one-legged cop, two dead mothers and three kung fu kicking babes. No, not a Bollywood Christmas carol, but just some of the fun bits in this crazy action film from 1982. It’s my firm opinion that Bollywood has neither enough dead mothers nor fighting femmes so it’s quite rewarding to come across so much of it in one film. In the world of Indian movies mothers are elevated to a state of godliness in which they can do no wrong and that can get so annoying after a while - so getting the opportunity to watch two of them kick the bucket under unusual melodramatic circumstances made my day.  But nothing compared to the pleasure of seeing three females doing spins, somersaults, karate chops and kicks to the heads of lots of bad guys.

Having immersed myself in Hong Kong films over the past five years, one of the aspects of them that I have really come to appreciate are the very strong female characterizations whether it be a Brigitte Lin as the imperious Asia the Invincible or Carina Lau as a tough bar hostess who would just as soon bust a bottle over your head as not in “Girls without Tomorrow”. But what really sets cinematic women apart in Hong Kong from any other film industry is their willingness to let them go toe to toe physically with any man or group of men – a genre that took on the name of “Girls with Guns” in the 1980’s but which had roots going back to the 1930s and has consisted of literally hundreds of films that spawned many female action stars such as Michelle Yeoh, Angela Mao, Moon Lee and Yukari Oshima.  Bollywood has no such tradition sadly. Women characterizations can certainly be strong – but they generally fall into stereotypical roles such as the strong-willed mother, the conniving vamp or the heroine who will sacrifice for her man – but rarely does a woman take a bottle to a man’s head. They would rather dance than fight. There are a few exceptions that I have come across – Zeenat Aman as a revenge seeking babe in “Don” and Kareena Kapoor as a warrior queen in “Asoka” – but they are few and far between and certainly no actresses train specifically for action films or use them as an entrée into the industry as they did in Hong Kong. But here we have the pleasure of three lovely actresses doing their best to be nearly convincing in this action mayhem film – with the help needless to say of many stunt doubles!

Four men break into a bank and take off in car and start giving each the high fives when they notice that police officer Rajesh Khanna is right behind them. After a pretty terrific car chase through the streets of Bombay, he forces their car to turn over and chases one of them into a game arcade where Rajesh does a pretty good Dirty Harry imitation and beats the fellow senseless and turns to the onlookers and says “you heard him confess right”. The bad guys get back at him though by having the beautiful Shabana Azmi show up at his house – with his mother happily assuming this is his fiancé – to try to bribe him into letting the guy he captured go – when he of course declines, she plants some of the bank loot behind his couch. Later the cops show up, find the money, arrest him and send him off to jail for three years. Oh, and his mother keels over from a heart attack and dies when he is charged. One mother down.

Three years later he has grown a beard and is still pissed about his dead mom and starts going after the gang that set him up – torturing one guy by electrocuting him – but when he tracks them down at a junk car lot – he makes the mistake of having a car dropped on top of him and crushing his leg. With one leg useless, the bad guys must assume he is no longer a danger – big mistake – they clearly don’t realize that a crutch can do double duty as a rifle and that an artificial leg can be used to club a man to death – he is more lethal than ever – though to my disappointment unlike the Japanese film, "Gun Crazy", the artificial leg wasn’t really a bazooka! Really angry that he now won’t be able to dance in the musical sequences, he drags himself out of the hospital bed and goes looking for one-legged justice – with his leg often falling off – and he tracks down Shabana. She helps him retrieve his leg – the darn thing fell off again – and tells him how sorry she was but that she had no choice – they had drugged her and taken pictures of her nude body and forced her to do this dastardly deed – after asking first to see the pictures Rajesh recruits her to get back at these men.

Let’s bring the two other females into the story. Zeenat Aman is a nightclub performer whose boyfriend sells cocaine for this same group of thugs – but one night they think he is double-crossing them and so come for the both of them. Fortunately for her, Rajesh and Shabana knock her out first and gag her – but the gang tracks down the boyfriend to the house of a buddy’s and take them both prisoner. On to this scene creeps the buddy’s sister, Parveen Babi, who starts a ruckus by knocking out some of the bad guys, but in the ensuing mêlée both guys are shot and Parveen is chased down the beach by the legendary bad guy Bob Christo! She actually has his number until he uses a tranquilizer dart to her posterior. She is saved only by a drunk, Mithun Chakravorty, who is annoyed by all the noise. He carries her back to his shack and passes out in a stupor with her in his bed – and the next morning is angry to find Parveen sleeping there next to him! What the hell – angry to find her in his bed and kicks her out – clearly he has a major drinking problem – most men spend much of their lives trying to figure out ways to get women like Parveen into their beds! Later she goes back to her house to find her brother dead – and when her mother comes down the steps she too sees her dead son and naturally falls down the stairs and dies! Dead mother number two! A bad day for Parveen though – first waking up next to Mithun, then being rejected by a drunk and then finding a dead brother and a soon to be dead mother. Normally you would say she should have stayed in bed that day - but not with Mithun in it!

She too joins the band of Rajesh, Shabana and Zeenat – and after a whole week of training in fire arms and karate, they are ready to go after the band of bad guys. Soon Mithun joins them and oddly a group that consists of a one legged man, a drunk and three voluptuous women throw fear and dread into the gang. First they take on a kitchen full of transvestite cooks, then battle the bad guys in a warehouse to rescue two kids – in which at one point Zeenat jumps from the third level on to a high bar down below, does a few flips around to gain velocity and throws herself through a glass plate window to knock down one guy – just think if she had practiced for two weeks! Later the three babes dress up in traditional garb to perform at an outdoor fair in hopes of being sold into prostitution – in which they sing provocatively:

Even if you eat me a little
You will be in difficulty
Don’t say I didn’t warn you
I am a chilly from Kolhapur

They all manage to find themselves in the castle of the major baddie – played with his usual subtle eye-popping badness by Amrish Puri who is intent on spreading chaos in India because they took his kingdom away from him. Another major brouhaha follows. A lot of this isn’t that well executed but its so much silly fun. During the fight Rajesh takes off his leg to use to hit someone, but somehow still manages to walk - a mysterious third leg perhaps?

It is an interesting cast made of newcomers who were to make it big and stars that were very much on the wane. Rajesh was a huge star in the early 70’s – the first to be anointed as a super star by the media – but by the 80’s he was grasping for any role and making friends with the bottle. Both Zeenat and Parveen were teetering at the far edge of their careers as well as new younger actresses were coming into film. During the 1970’s Zeenat and Parvani had been rivals of a sort – both with the same sultry looks and both often playing characters who broke the traditional good female role by being part vamp and part heroine and all sex. They also often co-starred with Amitabh Bachchan in his less serious outings like "Shaan", "Don" and "The Great Gambler". Parveen never quite made it to the star status that Zeenat did – sometimes referred to as a poor man’s Zeenat – but they both had their fan base who had nothing nice to say about the other actress and at one point she made it to the cover of Time magazine. Though Zeenat is a favorite of mine I have to admit by the time of this film, she was starting to lose her luster and appears a bit bloated with way too much rouge applied while Parveen still looks great. To read more about Parveen check out this page.

Mithun’s career was just taking off and in this same year he was to reach stardom with the classically bad film, “Disco Dancer” that created a disco rage at the time. The stunning Shabana actually never made it that big in Bollywood but has had a legendary career in what is termed the “parallel” cinema – i.e. serious non-musical films – in 2002 the New York Film Festival paid tribute to her – and she has gained much acclaim (and criticism from the power structure) for her work for social justice – crusading for the poor, for women rights and for religious tolerance. Why she choose to appear in this film in the same year she made the classic “Aarth” is perplexing (but I am glad she did!) but certainly many actors in the parallel cinema often jump occasionally to Bollywood for the high salaries so that they can afford to act in theater and serious fare.

I don’t want to mislead anyone into think this is a good film per se – but many of these action films made in Bollywood during the 70’s and 80’s are simply over the top fun in which every punch has the sound of a firecracker, people constantly are flying in all directions and in the end the good guys are always victorious. This is one of those. Though this is an action film, there is always time to stop the killing and dance and this has five musical interludes but the music from R.D. Burman isn't up to his usual standards and won't stick in your mind for long.

Ajanabee (Ajnabee)

Director: Shakti Samanta
Music: RD Burman Lyrics: Anand Bakshi
Year: 1974
Duration: 139 minutes

By the early 1970’s there were no hotter stars than Rajesh Khanna and Zeenat Aman in the business and one expects romantic fireworks in their pairing here, but it never quite erupts into more than a mild sizzle. Rajesh was one of the last of the quiet wistful romantics that were the fiber of Bollywood heroes in the 1950’s and 60’s. They tended to be urbane, poetic, gentlemanly and somewhat passive in those days – but exactly what young women in the audience found to be desirable as good material for husbands. Those days were coming to an end though and a more masculine hero was on its way with stars like Dharmendra and Amitabh Bachchan beginning to take center stage with more action oriented rough hewed personas. Interestingly, a similar thing was occurring in Hong Kong film with the scholarly effete male leads making way for a more hard edged action male hero. Soon Zeenat was to become a mainstay in the arms of Amitabh in numerous films and actors like Rajesh were shunted to the side. While watching this film, one can almost feel the frustration some in the audience must have had in the passive victimized character that Rajesh plays and found themselves wanting someone who would fight back with his fists ala Amitabh.

The film begins with a young woman dressed fashionably in high boots and a lime green raincoat rushing into a small out of the way train station to buy a ticket to Bombay. Sonia (Yogita Bali) just misses the train and asks the stationmaster Rohit (Rajesh Khanna) if he can lock her briefcase in the station safe and he does so. Since the next train will not be until the next morning, he also offers her his modest home to sleep in where she will be safe while he remains working in the station. Later she calls him to ask for cigarettes and hopes that he doesn’t think her a wanton woman for smoking and they get into a conversation that brings old memories back to Rohit like a shot to the head. He tells Sonia that he is married but his wife no longer lives with him and describes her as “a fragrance that lingers but cannot be possessed” and as he lights her cigarette, he muses “Unlike a cigarette that gets burnt, love burns the lover”.  Depressed and broken on the pillar of love, his mind flashes back in time.

Rohit is a carefree young man just out of school and looking to make his way in the world, but coming from a lower middle class family with no social connections he has few prospects and few hopes. Driving along a country road in a reddish orange jumpsuit that matches the color of his motorcycle, he gets into a flirting duel with a beautiful woman behind the steering wheel of her convertible. He quickly falls victim to her stunning looks and her English phrases such as “Oh shut up” and “You stupid old so and so” and when it turns out they are going to the same wedding ceremony he sings her a song that wins her heart. That old Bollywood bugaboo raises its ugly head though – she is the daughter of a wealthy father with vast landholdings and she has a lecherous widowed brother-in-law (the always vile Prem Chopra) who wants her and the inheritance. Rashmi (Zeenat) is able to get a job for Rohit working for the brother-in –law, Mr. Moti, but when he discovers that money is missing and that Mr. Moto is likely responsible he is framed for attempted rape by the lovely Bijli (Chandra Sekhar) and is horsewhipped and thrown out of town as Rashmi looks on in silence.

She soon learns the truth though and rather than telling her father what’s going on she jumps on the train with Rohit and they do a mini-Dil Se by singing and dancing on the top of the moving train. Life is good. Love is good. They get married. She sings and dances in her nightgown in the rain thus speeding up male heartbeats all over the world.  She cooks badly in an adorable polka-dotted dress. What could go wrong? Money, that’s what. Rohit has a mid-level job in a publicity firm working for the hideously dressed badly color co-coordinated Mr. Puri (Madan Puri) and brings home a measly 400 rupees a month – barely enough to pay for her fingernail polish and mascara and certainly no more polka-dot dresses in her future. So she decides to become a model – not just a model – but the biggest model in Bombay – the talk of the town with men ogling her with lust in their loins. This doesn’t sit well with Rohit and things quickly go downhill and he soon finds himself alone and trying to escape his past and his heavy heart by banishing himself to the hinterlands – and he soon finds himself framed yet again – this time for murder!

None of this is particularly compelling and the lovers don’t have much chemistry together except during the throbbing rain dance duet. For Zeenat fans though there is plenty to enjoy as she looks great and has lovely fashion sense for all occasions. The same can't be said for the men in the film and one can only hope and pray that these clothes fashions never make a comeback! The music from RD Burman is as usual quite good with a couple standout songs to the voices of Lata, Asha and Kishore. The character of Rajesh is just a bit of a sullen sod and he never really fights back – he is the antithesis of the soon to come “angry young man” – perhaps the “somber young man” - he acts as if this is his fate in the world because he wasn’t born privileged and so accepts it with a kick me in the pants look on his face. Bring on Amitabh, who would have shot Mr. Moti with a smile on his face, had Zeenat over his knee and begging for more and strung up the men who try and frame him.

Ajanabee (Ajnabee)

Director: Shakti Samanta
Music: RD Burman Lyrics: Anand Bakshi
Year: 1974
Duration: 139 minutes

By the early 1970’s there were no hotter stars than Rajesh Khanna and Zeenat Aman in the business and one expects romantic fireworks in their pairing here, but it never quite erupts into more than a mild sizzle. Rajesh was one of the last of the quiet wistful romantics that were the fiber of Bollywood heroes in the 1950’s and 60’s. They tended to be urbane, poetic, gentlemanly and somewhat passive in those days – but exactly what young women in the audience found to be desirable as good material for husbands. Those days were coming to an end though and a more masculine hero was on its way with stars like Dharmendra and Amitabh Bachchan beginning to take center stage with more action oriented rough hewed personas. Interestingly, a similar thing was occurring in Hong Kong film with the scholarly effete male leads making way for a more hard edged action male hero. Soon Zeenat was to become a mainstay in the arms of Amitabh in numerous films and actors like Rajesh were shunted to the side. While watching this film, one can almost feel the frustration some in the audience must have had in the passive victimized character that Rajesh plays and found themselves wanting someone who would fight back with his fists ala Amitabh.

The film begins with a young woman dressed fashionably in high boots and a lime green raincoat rushing into a small out of the way train station to buy a ticket to Bombay. Sonia (Yogita Bali) just misses the train and asks the stationmaster Rohit (Rajesh Khanna) if he can lock her briefcase in the station safe and he does so. Since the next train will not be until the next morning, he also offers her his modest home to sleep in where she will be safe while he remains working in the station. Later she calls him to ask for cigarettes and hopes that he doesn’t think her a wanton woman for smoking and they get into a conversation that brings old memories back to Rohit like a shot to the head. He tells Sonia that he is married but his wife no longer lives with him and describes her as “a fragrance that lingers but cannot be possessed” and as he lights her cigarette, he muses “Unlike a cigarette that gets burnt, love burns the lover”.  Depressed and broken on the pillar of love, his mind flashes back in time.

Rohit is a carefree young man just out of school and looking to make his way in the world, but coming from a lower middle class family with no social connections he has few prospects and few hopes. Driving along a country road in a reddish orange jumpsuit that matches the color of his motorcycle, he gets into a flirting duel with a beautiful woman behind the steering wheel of her convertible. He quickly falls victim to her stunning looks and her English phrases such as “Oh shut up” and “You stupid old so and so” and when it turns out they are going to the same wedding ceremony he sings her a song that wins her heart. That old Bollywood bugaboo raises its ugly head though – she is the daughter of a wealthy father with vast landholdings and she has a lecherous widowed brother-in-law (the always vile Prem Chopra) who wants her and the inheritance. Rashmi (Zeenat) is able to get a job for Rohit working for the brother-in –law, Mr. Moti, but when he discovers that money is missing and that Mr. Moto is likely responsible he is framed for attempted rape by the lovely Bijli (Chandra Sekhar) and is horsewhipped and thrown out of town as Rashmi looks on in silence.

She soon learns the truth though and rather than telling her father what’s going on she jumps on the train with Rohit and they do a mini-Dil Se by singing and dancing on the top of the moving train. Life is good. Love is good. They get married. She sings and dances in her nightgown in the rain thus speeding up male heartbeats all over the world.  She cooks badly in an adorable polka-dotted dress. What could go wrong? Money, that’s what. Rohit has a mid-level job in a publicity firm working for the hideously dressed badly color co-coordinated Mr. Puri (Madan Puri) and brings home a measly 400 rupees a month – barely enough to pay for her fingernail polish and mascara and certainly no more polka-dot dresses in her future. So she decides to become a model – not just a model – but the biggest model in Bombay – the talk of the town with men ogling her with lust in their loins. This doesn’t sit well with Rohit and things quickly go downhill and he soon finds himself alone and trying to escape his past and his heavy heart by banishing himself to the hinterlands – and he soon finds himself framed yet again – this time for murder!

None of this is particularly compelling and the lovers don’t have much chemistry together except during the throbbing rain dance duet. For Zeenat fans though there is plenty to enjoy as she looks great and has lovely fashion sense for all occasions. The same can't be said for the men in the film and one can only hope and pray that these clothes fashions never make a comeback! The music from RD Burman is as usual quite good with a couple standout songs to the voices of Lata, Asha and Kishore. The character of Rajesh is just a bit of a sullen sod and he never really fights back – he is the antithesis of the soon to come “angry young man” – perhaps the “somber young man” - he acts as if this is his fate in the world because he wasn’t born privileged and so accepts it with a kick me in the pants look on his face. Bring on Amitabh, who would have shot Mr. Moti with a smile on his face, had Zeenat over his knee and begging for more and strung up the men who try and frame him.

Director: Rishi Kapoor
Music: Nadeem Shravan
Year: 1999
Running Time: 2 hours 56 minutes

I have clearly not been spending enough time in Time Square or Seaside Heights or the South Street Seaport because that’s where Bollywood is happening in New York! This is little more than a trifle of a film and apparently it did so badly at the box office that it seems to have brought the RK Studios to a hiatus, but being a New Yorker I have to say I took more pleasure than perhaps I should have just seeing Aishwarya Rai dancing down the boardwalk on the Jersey shore and strutting up Broadway. Now where the heck was I when this was all taking place!

The film begins in India where Akshaye Khanna (who also starred in the same year with Aish in the far superior Taal) is unable to find a job and is enticed by a childhood friend to go to America to strike it rich. Once there though, Akshaye discovers this friend runs a cheap pay by the hour hotel and is unwilling to help Akshaye in the least bit. He is adopted though by members of the Indian community – a Muslim (Kadar Khan) and a Sikh (Jaspal Bhatti) allow him to move in and within hours Akshaye is driving a taxicab! If you live in New York, you could easily believe this. One of his first fares is Aish who has just arrived from India – and much to Akshaye’s surprise he discovers that Aish is Indian – “you don’t look Indian”.

It soon turns out that Aish also has no place to stay and so Akshaye invites her to come stay at the already crowded apartment and the foursome become a homey little unit. Until that is Akshaye is tempted by the dark side – NRI money! He meets a somewhat depraved but extremely sexy Americanized NRI (Suman Ranganathan) with loads of money in the family and Akshaye sees his future and Aish isn’t in it. There are a lot of unbelievable things in Indian films – but someone ignoring Aish for money? I didn’t buy it for a second. The love story/triangle really doesn’t amount to much here – it is a second thread related to Akshaye’s long dead father (Rajesh Khanna) that contains most of the melodrama and has the most interest. The other enjoyable elements of the film are the many supporting roles that are well played by a number of various character actors – my favorites being Kadar and Jaspal who both reminded me of Captain Haddock from Tin Tin!

The music is not really all that memorable – the first song doesn’t hit the platter until the forty-minute mark – but there are a number of songs after this. The best part about them is simply their settings. All of them are shot around New York I believe – a few in New Jersey, a couple in the city and one in upstate. The one in Seaside Heights is great fun as Aish does her best to break up the couple by dancing and singing up and down the boardwalk and into the skeeball arcades. Another number in and around Central Park and Time Square is enjoyable as well – but what is so strange is how little attention the passersby seem to be giving these little dance and song routines in the middle of the city – in New York I guess anything goes.

Raaste (1969)By memsaab

Raaste (1969)By memsaab

Raaste (1969)By memsaab

Raaste (1969)By memsaab

Raaste (1969)By memsaab

Raaste (1969)By memsaab

Pyaar Ki Duniya (World of Love) was the name of a zoo that changed the lives of the protagonists of a film in which elephants Damu, Ramu, Mahesh, and Ganesh were the unlikely heroes. Haathi Mere Saathi (1971) will likely remain a favorite of most young movie watchers of the 1970s and 1980s. Its target audience is hardly just the children, though, and there's plenty grown-ups can enjoy. This was confirmed with my recent viewing of the film, which, as far as I can recall, was among the very first couple of Hindi movies I saw (it was in the mid-1980s, and the very first was this or Amar Akbar Anthony (1977)). All I remembered of it was one song, a group of loyal elephants, a beautiful but foolish woman wearing red, and a zoo. Watching the film after a little over two decades was a lot of fun, and somewhat validated these elements as the most memorable.

Raj Kumar a.k.a. Raju was saved from a cheetah by a bunch of elephants. He was orphaned at an early age, but not before his father's last wish instructed him to protect these elephants, which he did. A grown-up Raju (Rajesh Khanna) was as fond of the friendly animals, but was tested and emerged victorious after his accountant cheated him of his estate in hope he'd sell his elephants to rival Sarwan Kumar (K. N. Singh). Not all was rosy for Raju, though. His wife Tanu (Tanuja) -- the couple overcame the opposition of Tanu's father Ratanlal (Madan Puri) to unite -- presented him with a tough proposition related to his elephants for no fault of theirs. How dumbfounded would the result leave us?

1. First, the things I remembered going in. The title song by Kishore Kumar (watch it at the Bollywood Food Club at this post, through which we learn the film's appeal transcends people -- Sita-ji's pet found it engaging, and so did Gemma, who occasionally provides us with invaluable filmy insight at MemsaabStory)...


...the loyal elephants...


...the beautiful but foolish (this has since changed to paranoid) woman in red...


...and the zoo.


2. The film clearly belonged to the elephants and other animals including lions, tigers, a porcupine, bear, and goat. Was it too much to expect horses? I enjoyed watching the monkeys too, I must admit. South Asia is full of these shows, and they tend to be a lot of fun.


The scenes involving the friendly animals, which constituted the vast majority of the scenes, were very well done. Three decades after its release, the sequences maintain an element of realism to them that is quite remarkable. So it might not be too far-fetched after all to expect an elephant to 'hand' over a phone...


...or play soccer.


How cool must it be to invite lions to dinner?


3. Loved this frame!


4. Rajesh Khanna was brilliant. Conveying messages through the plot required a convincing performance, and he was more than up to the task. Tanuja was very good too, about the only thing about her that bothered me was the make-up she wore in her first scene.


5. Full of some touching moments for which the elephants deserved as much credit as did the actors and filmmakers, the film was engaging. There was always something interesting going on, and always something new the animals would teach the humans, proving, as a key piece of the effective dialogue suggested, that 'the worst kind of animal walks on two feet' (read: humans). If that was the primary message the film set out to convey, it did so easily, courtesy the antagonists and their often varying degrees of wretchedness at various points.

The flaws were easy to overlook, and putting them in the perspective of the era, they hardly took much away. The soundtrack (Laxmikant-Pyarelal) was decent, Dilbar Jaani stood out in addition to the title song, and the background score was delightfully in sync with the screenplay (Salim-Javed). In trying to incorporate several elements consistent with cinema of its era, there was the misunderstanding complete with a surplus of tears, the unexplained and deliberate endangering of a life, the father opposed to a marriage, the deceitful confidant, the merciless villain, and a surprising spunky item number.

Thankfully, these elements yielded center stage to the animals and their friend, which was what made the film work rather well. It could have directed more emphasis to the World of Love as a symbol for a greater good we must all work toward, e.g. more references such as this, to why the Mahatma Gandhi favored simple attire.


But it was always more about friendship and loyalty any way, and let that not take anything away from the end result. Four stars for a novel entertaining film that has stood the test of time, is packed with some of the most unlikely stars, and that incorporates some familiar elements for anything but a familiar product of film. I highly recommend you see it, if only for the enthusiasm Raju shows to his guests!


Yes, Ramu, take a bow... :)



Movie rating: 4/5 (Excellent!)

Music rating: 3/5 (Good)

My classification: U/G (suitable for all viewers)
I'm curious to see how children of the twenty first century react to it, and cannot wait to try it on my little nephew! ;)

REVIEWED BY:
http://thebollywoodfan.blogspot.com/2008/10/haathi-mere-saathi-and-world-of-love.html#comment-form

Zamana brings two romantic actors together - Super Star Rajesh Khanna and Rishi Kapoor. The movie has been written by Salim Javed and is a tale of two lost brothers and their taking revenge for their father's murder. The movie has better than average music by Usha Khanna but the turning point in the movie is the performance of Rajesh Khanna. He delivers in a very smooth way the character of a police officer who is misunderstood by his brother. The movie is well supported by performances of Rajesh Khanna, Rishi Kapoor, Ompuri, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Poonam Dhillon and Ranjeeta. The movie may have took a long time in making and the plot was a little old by the time the movie got released. However, it is a must see as it is a clean entertainer with good performances by both Rajesh Khanna and Rishi Kapoor.

This movie is one the biggest hits of Super Star Rajesh Khanna and is a movie which made him popular with kids who grew up seeing his future movies. This movie is about the relationship/bondage between man and animal. Elephants play an equally important role with Rajesh Khanna in the movie and the movie revolves around them. Tanuja playing the heroine also contributes. The movie has excellent music by Laxmikant Pyarelal who have composed some great hits for this movie sung by Kishore Kumar. One song of Mohammad Rafi is a class. The movie is a must see for movie watchers of all ages and especially the kids will enjoy this classic.