Sigh. I so wanted to like this film. It’s based on To Sir With Love, which is one of my all-time favorite movies (Lulu! Sidney Poitier! sixties fashions!), and Vinod Khanna stars as an earnest college professor with Tanuja as his love interest. But alas, it threw away all its potential on a bad script: the characters were nothing but caricatures, and all plot opportunities for dramatic buildup and emotional involvement were squandered.
My latest Manmohan Desai kick (triggered by the insanity of Mard) continues with this film, and it’s oodles of fun too although not nearly as unpredictable. I didn’t even mind the innocent rustic Raj Kapoor-type character, mostly because it was enacted by his son Randhir, who is much more believable in the role (not sure if that’s really a compliment or not, but I mean it as one). Rekha and her sarees and hairdos were spectacular, and Shatrughan Sinha had plenty of style—and youth—on his side as well. Ranjeet and Padma Khanna (and Faryal) also made brief but gorgeous appearances, and the plot contained plenty of separated family members and coincidences.
So: lots of eye candy and a fast-paced action-packed story equals solid Desai-style entertainment, which is only enhanced by RD Burman’s lovely songs! Plus, removable snake tattooes!
Although I could not finish watching this DVD myself [begin rant: thanks to Shemaroo’s incredibly poor quality control—about half the DVDs that I get which are manufactured by Shemaroo don’t play all the way through, and I am so done with them! end rant] it had so much going for it that I’m going to write about it anyway. Shashi at his most delicious! Pran at his coolest! Heartbreak and romance and thrills!
Maybe one of my all-knowing readers can enlighten me as to the ending (although I can probably guess).
It inspired in me a name for this type of film: dacoit-drama. Get it? Daku-drama? Okay, sorry. But up until it dissolved into random pixels it was a highly entertaining movie.
Five seconds into the film (just after the censor’s certificate) this notice appears:
Hilarious! I absolutely adore the sarcastic, essentially unrepentant tone of it, and apparently it worked just fine for the censors too. This film could be used in a directing class as an example of what can happen when you work “over-enthusiastically” without a script. Halfway through, I had to stop so that I could diagram all the criss-crossing plot threads and character relationships in an effort to keep them straight. It’s not boring! but there is a definite seat-of-the-pants feel to the story, and little things like logic and continuity are thrown right out the window.
There are only two things which give me *good* nostalgia for the 70s: ABBA music and Hindi movies. I spent the latter half of that decade wearing hideously patterned Qiana shirts, sporting feathered hair and fighting the tendency of my stomach to overhang hip-hugger bellbottoms, all the while living in rural Indiana and wishing I were dead, so that is actually saying something.
I suppose if I had cable television and thus access to reruns of the original “Starsky & Hutch” television shows that might do it too, but I don’t. I love Laxmikant Pyarelal’s music in this film, though, especially the opening title and background music (although the songs are fab too). It’s funkadelic 1970s, all the way, and reminds me of the opening themes to those 1970s cop shows.
Ahhhh masala. The very very best filmi masala has at the very very least most of these twenty-one ingredients:
Against all reason, against all logic, against all standards of film appreciation (not that mine are very high), I loved this movie. The story is a Manmohan Desai fairy tale, replete with separated children, near misses, and absurd coincidences. And best of all, the costumes and sets are a veritable Halloween party!
It’s a costume epic that doesn’t know what costume to wear; a period piece without a period! Dharmendra is dressed as a Roman gladiator, Jeetendra wears a matador outfit, Zeenat lounges in 50’s Hollywood lingerie…the list goes on and on (as do my screen shots). Let’s just get to it, shall we?
My beloved Shammi’s second (and last) directorial venture, Bundal Baaz is a fantastical fairy tale beset by really cracktastic special effects (courtesy of Babubhai Mistry, one of the pioneers of special effects photography in Hindi cinema). It’s a goofy, fun ride, although the plot wanders quite a bit. Shammi as the genie with good intentions but poor execution shows his usual mischievous flair, and the music by RD Burman is great 1970’s funk-a-delic which complements the mayhem on screen perfectly.
A cute fairy-tale of a movie, elevated by the presence of Sanjeev Kumar and Shashi Kapoor.
Durga Devi (Nadira) is a rich widow with a stepdaughter, Shanti (Vidya Sinha), and a daughter, Roopa (Moushumi Chatterjee). She treats Shanti like a servant and is so ill-tempered that she can’t keep an actual servant around for very long. So long-suffering, patient Shanti is perpetually left with all the work.
MemsaabStory 