Remembering Deven Varma

[A tribute to one of my favourite actors, who passed away yesterday, and whom I had the good fortune of meeting – very briefly – in January. Did a version of this for The Hindu]

Deven Varma looked frail as he walked slowly down the stairs and I worried again that my visit was an intrusion. I had come to his Pune home, and though both he and his wife Rupa had been warm and inviting on the phone, the latter did emphasise that he needed rest and there was only a small window of time available. Evening was best; climbing upstairs was an effort for him, which meant that if he came down to the living room, he had to stay there till after dinner.

Given these circumstances – as well as all those stories about famous comedians being reticent in real life – it seemed too much to expect him to be cheery. Within a few minutes of our introduction though, the old spark was visible, and as he reminisced about his film career, images came flooding back. The pleasant-looking youngster from the Shashi Kapoor-Manoj Kumar generation who might have, with a slight change in fortune, become a matinee idol, but instead settled into respectable second-lead parts in films like Devar. The talent that made him one of Hindi cinema’s finest and most atypical funny men in the 1970s and 1980s, most memorably in the work of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Basu Chatterji and Gulzar – films where Varma provided a counterpoint to the louder comedy elsewhere in the industry. People who haven’t seen the best of those movies closely, who look at them from a distance or only have hazy impressions of them, think of the “Middle Cinema” as safe, bland and non-transgressive, but that’s an unfair assessment. And while I won’t discuss that subject in detail here, it’s telling to look at the function Deven so often performed in those films: sutradhaar, vidushak, naatak-rachita rolled into one.

When I think of Deven Varma, this is the image that first comes to mind. He is standing near the edge of the frame, one hand raised, mouth half-open as if he forgot what he was going to say at the exact moment his lips parted. He seems worried that he may be interrupting something important. He is not the “cool” guy in the picture, especially when the others populating it include the likes of Dharmendra, Sharmila Tagore, Rekha, or even Utpal Dutt. He is the sidekick, the hero’s friend, the jovial brother-in-law.

But then he speaks, and what he says is so casually outrageous you feel you have been plucked out of the universe of this sweet middle-class film and deposited on the border of Groucho Marx Land. If you can imagine a roly-poly Groucho with an earnest look on his face, saying subversive things as if accidentally.

“Ghisi-hui, purani, bekaar si cheezen – jaise tumhare pitaji” (“Old, faded, useless things – like your father”) he goes in Kissi se na Kehna, explaining the meaning of “antique” to a girlfriend. In Bemisaal, he congratulates a doctor who has opened a new clinic with “Bhagwaan se praarthana karta hoon ke shahar mein beemaari phaile aur aapka nursing home safal ho.” (“I pray to God that illness spreads in the city and your nursing home is very successful.”) And in Naukri, to a lover demanding a compliment: “Tum woh noton ki gaddi ho jinn pe income-tax waalon ki nazar nahin padi.” (“You are a stack of currency notes that has eluded the gaze of the income-tax officials.”) But it isn’t enough to put these lines down on paper, where they can seem like PJs: you have to watch him say them in such an effortlessly genial tone that you want to pinch his cheeks and give him a Parle G biscuit. The “jaise tumhare pitaji” comes out as if the analogy has just occurred to him and it is perfectly natural, not rude at all, to voice it. As Raakesh Roshan once noted, “When Deven says something, it automatically becomes funny. But when one of us says exactly the same thing, no one laughs.”

There are too many other films and scenes to recount here, but I keep thinking of the little moment in the comedy of errors Angoor where the thoroughly frazzled Bahadur – beset by over-familiar behaviour from women whom he has never seen before – responds with childlike delight to the one question he definitely knows the answer to. “Bhang!” he exclaims, beaming like the sun, when Moushumi Chatterjee asks him what he put in the pakoras the previous night. Bhang in a tea-time snack - it could be a symbol for what Varma brought to so many of the films he acted in.


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When he was young, his family was involved in film distribution and exhibition, but he developed an interest in acting – particularly in the work of such performers as Raja Gosavi, and in the Marathi theatre tradition built on wordplay, shabd-phenk and deadpan expressions rather than physical comedy. These qualities, he said, chimed well with the sensibilities of directors like Hrishi-da and Basu-da. “The quality of comedy in a film depends on a director’s tastes. I can’t imagine those men saying ‘Gadhe pe baith jao, ya chhoti chadhi pehen ke bhaago, ya cake mein baith jao’, and I too was very clear about the things I wouldn’t do in the name of comedy. We were on the same wavelength.”

It was pleasing to find that even at age 77, his sense of humour, his shabd-phenk, was intact. When talking about his own directorial ventures, for example, and his run-ins with money-minded distributors who wanted films to have generous doses of “punch” and preferably an action scene involving a snake, “which the whole country can understand – there are no language barriers, it’s a pan-Indian scene”. Mentioning his 1978 film Besharam, he said, “Oh, that was a failure”, but then added, sotto voce, widening his eyes in that trademark style that made him both Fool and foil in so many fine films, “Still, it probably got seen by more people than this new Ranbir Kapoor Besharam did.” Talking about another film he had directed, the Asha Parekh-starrer Nadaan, he recalled being told by some Punjabi distributors – crass, lowest-common-denominator types – to please “put some sex” into the film to help its prospects. Varma looked at me, his face a mask. “Maine socha, ab sex kaise daalein? Asha Parekh! Kuch samajh mein nahin aaya.”

That can sound like it’s in poor taste, but it was really just an aside in the midst of a larger conversation about the compromises demanded of you in the film industry. And even Asha-ji may have tee-hee-heed at Deven’s delivery. You had to be there.

A memory of Farooque Shaikh

Less than a week before I heard the saddening – and most unexpected – news of Farooque Shaikh’s passing, an SMS written in a familiar style lit up my phone screen. “Adaab,” it said. “Wish u a Merry Christmas, a Joyous New Year and a v happy life ahead. Best luck, always.” A few minutes later, the same message arrived again. This could have been a network glitch, but having seen Mr Shaikh (or Farooque saab, as it seems more apt to call him) a few weeks earlier, wrestling with and frowning at his handset – something I can often relate to – I could picture him having re-sent it accidentally.

Either way, I had become used to the courtliness of his SMSes (even when written in shorthand) in the previous two months, ever since I first contacted him in connection with a writing project. In mid-October I had texted him – in the supplicating tone of a journalist seeking a few minutes of an Important Person’s time – asking if we could speak for a short while; on the phone would be fine. He replied with an “Adaab sir”, adding that he happened to be coming to Delhi at the end of the week, and it “wd be a plzre” to meet then “at a mutually cnvnnt time”.

We met, and it was a pleasure – for me, at least – even though the conversation was short and unexceptional. He was everything you’d expect from his screen persona, warm and unfailingly polite in his direct addresses, though he did get a little agitated when he spoke more generally about falling standards in popular culture. I had a couple of specific talking points to cover, but we were quickly done with those, and for the next half-hour he talked mainly about how commerce had completely taken over the film world, and expressed annoyance about the hegemony of the Rs 200-300-crore cinema. “Vaahiyaat filmein agar 300 crore ka business kar rahe hain, toh aur log aa jaayenge, and they will go down the same route.”

Much of what he said – if you simply transcribed it – would read as relentless complaining, and I didn’t agree with all of it. Some of it mixed deep idealism, a yearning for a fabled past where things were always so much better than today, and a narrow, subject-oriented view of “good” and “bad” cinema. There were capricious asides: while making the (reasonable) point about Hollywood’s technical excellence masking deficiencies in content and not allowing any other type of film to get breathing space, he suddenly brought up films “jiss mein spaceship yun zor zor se awaaz karti hai, phir girne lagti hai – whereas it is a basic fact of zero gravity that a spaceship will not fall like that even if it breaks up.” And he clearly wasn’t a fan of Jaws and the summer-blockbuster culture it spawned: “Ya toh ek machli aisi hai jo logon ko khaamakhaa marne lagti hai. This kind of stupidity has to stop.”

But the discontent came from his strong views on the relationship between a society and its popular culture, and his keenness to fix responsibility. “Cinema is a willing or unwilling appendage to society, so we may as well have some quality in it. Otherwise it’s like saying ‘Naashta toh mujhe karna hi hai, sada hua bhi chalega.’ But why not have a good meal, even if it is a small one? You risk your health if you eat chaat all the time. And then we complain ‘hamaaray society mein auraton ke saath yeh hota hai.’ You can’t pretend that cinema doesn’t have an effect on our minds – it’s a big thing.”
 
It wasn’t all about venting though. The meeting reminded me of conversations I had had with other, very likable men of integrity of his generation, Kundan Shah and the late Ravi Baswani – a tone that combined irritation and frustration with the ability to step back after a while and crack a quiet joke about one’s own irritability. And a genuine, boyish curiosity about what the younger person sitting in front of them felt about these things. (I have memories of Kundan, Ravi and Farooque saab – separately, of course – pausing for breath after a rant, then chuckling and asking a version of the question “Do you agree with any of this? Or could it be that I feel this way only because main budhaa ho gaya hoon?” And the question was asked sincerely, not rhetorically.)

Farooque saab spoke with pragmatism (“it is unreal, and perhaps even unfair, to expect that a filmmaker is going to do good to society at a loss to himself”) but perhaps had an unrealistic view of the power wielded by the “thinking” audience (“...and so the discerning viewer has to make his presence felt. With the internet you can get back to the filmmaker immediately if he has made a bad or bawdy film, and tell him off. He will take that seriously. He depends on the ticket that the viewer buys.”) He moved between optimism and cynicism (“But as is the norm all over the world, the major audience is males aged between 15 and 25 years. They are the ones who decide whether a film will run or not”) and used humorous analogies: “Aaj kal ke movie reviews mein star ratings aise bikhte hain jaise langar mein khaana bikh raha ho.” And “You know the Sea Link in Mumbai? It cuts down travel time dramatically while you are on it – but when you exit it you’re in trouble again. That’s how the industry today is. Film toh complete ho jaati hai but then the intelligent, sincere filmmaker is in a surrounding that he cannot control: agar 3,500 screen kisi big-budget film ne le liye hain, then you get the one or two remaining shows, and the show time is such that your own wife won’t go for it.”

Near the end of our chat, he – consciously or otherwise – used an analogy closely linked to the plot of one of his most beloved movies. “There are two people in the race – the sprinter and the evening walker,” he said, marking the difference between money-obsessed filmmakers and the ones with a social conscience. “The promenade walker will not get ahead because he isn’t in it for the race, he’s out for a stroll – the sprinter is the one who wants to get ahead, and he will always win.”

In Sai Paranjpye’s Katha, based on the hare-and-tortoise fable, he was cast against type as the wily hare (or the sprinter). I alluded to the film and he merely nodded and gave a quick smile, not pursuing the point – he wasn’t much interested in talking about his own movies, or at least his contribution to them. When he brought up Listen…Amaya – as another low-budget film that was released in only a couple of halls – this is what he said: “Recently ek film thi, Listen... Amaya, jiss mein Deepti ji aur Swara Bhaskar thay...” No mention of himself. 

Which may be a reminder that he wasn’t “in it for the race” himself. I have no doubt that he took a project seriously once he had committed to it, but he came across as being blasé about his own career, unconcerned with such things as staying in the public memory. Still, he had done some fine work in the past couple of years – in Shanghai, Listen…Amaya, even in his short part in Yeh Jawani hai Diwani – and there may have been more to come. 

I don’t usually get too affected by the deaths of public figures, even those whose work or achievements I admired. But this was a little different, because of the immediacy of having met him so recently, and because he was too young. Notwithstanding his own indifference to fame or plaudits, with the right mix of subject, writer and director he might easily have had a notable second innings as a screen actor. For now, we have the past work: old favourites like Chashme Buddoor and Katha, of course, but also films like Gaman (now available in a restored NFDC print) and Saath Saath, which deserve to be revisited and rediscovered. And I have the rueful knowledge that despite having had opportunities, I never got around to seeing a performance of Tumhari Amrita.

[Related posts: a tribute to Ravi Baswani, Shaikh’s co-star in Chashme Buddoor; a review of Sai Paranjpye’s Katha; a piece about Listen Amaya, and about watching Shaikh and Deepti Naval on screen together after all these years. And on two excellent films in which Shaikh had small parts, 40 years apart: Garm Hava and Shanghai]

A tribute to Balraj Sahni as he nears his 100

(Did a version of this for my DNA column)

With the birth centenary of one of Hindi cinema’s most respected actors just around the corner – May 1 is the date – I came across an amusing little anecdote about Balraj Sahni. In his biography Balraj: My Brother, Bhisham Sahni recalls a Bombay producer saying the young Balraj resembled the Hollywood legend Gary Cooper. “Balraj took this as a compliment, but it was meant to convey that he had grown too lean and thin for the role of a hero in Hindi films; the Indian audiences preferred chubby and round-faced heroes.”

There were other ways in which Balraj would confound expectations of the Indian movie star in the 1940s and 50s. Having trained as a BBC announcer in England, and also being familiar with a relatively “realistic” stage tradition – compared to the Parsi theatre that gave Hindi cinema many of its florid conventions – he had a knack for understatement that recalled the best work of such American star-actors as Spencer Tracy ... or Gary Cooper for that matter, of whom Orson Welles once said: “You’d see him working on the set and you’d think my god, they’re going to have to retake that one! He almost didn’t seem to be there. And then you’d see the rushes, and he’d fill the screen.”

Those who observed Sahni may have felt similarly. Watching him as the idealistic Dr Nirmal in the 1960 film Anuradha, I was most struck by his performance in the scenes where the doctor, doing his rounds on his bicycle, casually chats with patients. Nothing very important or purposeful is happening here in terms of the narrative, but so much lies in the way Sahni listens and responds; you feel that the character has a life and personality that extends beyond the restricted world of the film.

We sometimes label acting as subtle or loud, quiet or exaggerated, but there are variances even within those categories. Dr Nirmal represents a different sort of understated performance from the one Sahni gave in Garm Hava, where you can see that Salim Mirza (losing family and status but holding on to personal dignity as the hot winds of Partition blow around him) is constantly suppressing his feelings; that a reservoir of emotion lies behind the stiff posture, the pursed lips and even the way he grips his cane. For contrast, watch him as the large-hearted Pathan in Kabuliwala: the role is marked by flourishes (for this is a flamboyant man, especially when he is trying to impress children with his wares) and by an accent that draws attention to itself. But though the film sometimes comes close to caricature in its depiction of boisterous Afghanis rolling their eyes and singing jolly songs together in an alien land, Sahni's performance has an internal consistency that transcends the role’s superficial trappings – and everything important about the character comes together brilliantly in his brief look of terror at the end when he realises that his beloved “Mini bacchha”, now grown up, may not have recognised him.

None of this came easily to the actor, if Bhisham Sahni’s book is to be believed. It reveals things about Balraj’s many struggles with film acting and his realisation that even the so-called “natural” performer needed to switch gears when the lights came on; you didn’t simply go in front of the camera and continue to be yourself, the process was more complicated than that. There are descriptions of his fear of the camera (“it was like going before the gallows”), of having to shake off stiffness, even wetting his pants in nervousness between shots – all indicative of how much it mattered to him that he did the best possible job. But there is also a story about how he became less self-conscious after a conversation with a real-life rickshaw-puller whom he met while shooting Do Bigha Zamin; the encounter helped him to stop obsessing about acting methods and to relax into his role, by seeing it as an opportunity to pay tribute to real people undergoing real hardships.

Sahni’s career was not exactly sprinkled with classic films, and most fans will agree that the three movie roles he will be best remembered for are Shambu the farmer who moves to the city to earn money in Do Bigha Zamin; the kabuliwala who travels from Afghanistan to Hindustan for similar reasons and forms a bond with a little girl; and the beleaguered Salim Mirza. These are all men in debt, separated from the people they love, adjusting to new things, watching the way of life they knew passing them by – in other words, tragic heroes. Yet they are also vibrant and multidimensional. Do Bigha Zamin is often thought of a relentlessly bleak film, but Shambu is a cheerful, upbeat sort at heart. Even after he is reduced to a wreck in front of his greedy landlord, he is optimistic enough to think that it doesn’t matter that he knows no one in the big city; he can make friends after getting there. (“Jaan pehchaan wahaan jaane par hee hogi, bapu.”) In a film with a somewhat overblown reputation for De Sica-like realism, Sahni grounds the edifice by playing the character as a well-rounded individual rather than just a victim or a symbol.

Here and elsewhere, it is also worth noting what a fine, attentive lover Sahni could be on screen. His latter-day role as the elderly Lala Kedarnath ardently singing “Ae Meri Zohra Jabeen” to his wife in Waqt is well known (perhaps too well known; it sometimes invites annoyingly patronising attitudes about old people), but he was equally moving in less demonstrative romantic parts. An undervalued aspect of Do Bigha Zamin is the depiction in its early scenes of the love between Shambu and his wife, the playfulness of their banter, which makes onlookers say “They’ve been married for 10 years, why does he still keep whispering to her?” The humour and affection stays intact even in times of stress (“Tujhe khareedne ki himmat hai kissi mein?” he jokes when his wife complains that he should sell her too, along with their other valuables), and much of the film's power comes from watching the gentle smile erased as circumstances become much worse.

It may be a mistake though to judge Sahni only by his work in “respectable” cinema. “He seemed to lend his gravitas to many films that did not seem worthy settings for his talent,” sniffed Leela Naidu in her memoir, but I’m not sure this is a bad thing. Recently I saw him in a tiny, inexplicable part as Rajendra Kumar’s father in Aman, a film that also has a famous special appearance by the then 94-year-old Bertrand Russell. In his one big scene, Sahni – who is chummily credited only as “Gautamdas’s dad” in the IMDB credits – tries to persuade his doctor son to stay in India instead of going to Japan to help nuclear-radiation victims. He then masterfully keeps a straight face - and continues speaking his own pain-soaked lines with conviction - when Kumar likens himself to a sweet-smelling flower whose sugandh isn’t meant only for the maali who tended it.

The scene is a reminder that the measure of actors can lie not just in their obviously great roles, but in their ability to make the best of preposterous situations. A continuing joy for any true Balraj Sahni fan is discovering his performances of integrity in dozens of “unworthy” roles, a reminder that acting in a commercial medium isn’t just an ivory-tower pursuit, and that the true artiste can achieve big things across a range of canvases.

About a brief encounter with Roger Ebert

Sad to hear of the passing of Roger Ebert. I hadn't read much by him in the past few years (no particular reason - my online reading in general has thinned out), but his reviews were staples in my early years of net-surfing, circa 1998-2000 (when the Chicago Sun-Times site was one of the first pages I opened each time I got online) and I particularly enjoyed his Great Films essays. In a somewhat surreal turn of events, I found myself in correspondence with him around six years ago, after he mailed to say he liked something I had written in Business Standard. This begat a comical email exchange because, although his ID and the tone of his mail seemed authentic, my blog had been plagued by some inventive troll activity around the time, and this seemed a little too good to be true. So I sent "Ebert" a very cautious, split-personality response expressing my happiness if the mail really was from him, but also being careful not to get too fulsome, and repeatedly using the phrase "assuming this really IS you". Then he would reply trying to convince me. He used faux-philosophical lines like "How can I prove I'm me?" He even sent across two photos from the 1999 Calcutta Film Festival, which I knew he had attended; the subject line of his mail was "Would an imposter have this?"

Even then I continued to be a little wary (the photos did seem to be insider views of the fest, but he wasn't in either of them). The pleasing clincher came a few weeks later when I was browsing through an entry on his blog and saw his response to this comment. (Yes, I'm showing off. Deal with it.)

At which point I mailed him back, apologising for my earlier reserve and saying the fanboyish things I had held back from saying earlier. He replied, sounding amused and relieved (and possibly also wondering if I was missing a few bulbs in the old chandelier). After that, however, we were only sporadically in touch - this was also around the time that his health problems were escalating.

As a very small tribute, here is a link to an Ebert piece that I often returned to in the old days, his review of Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel. No idea why this review in particular struck such a chord (partly perhaps because I had just seen the film and was trying to collect my own thoughts about it), but the quality and the passion of the writing left a big impression on me during a difficult, depressing period when I was wondering if it was possible to pursue a career writing about the things I was interested in. (Or if I even knew what I was interested in.) On some level, this and dozens of other Ebert pieces helped me decide, though back then it was beyond imagining that I would one day get an email from the man himself, saying "We are similar in having strong interests in both film and literature."

P.S. I first came across Ebert's writings on my Cinemania 95 CD-ROM in the pre-Internet days (that was also where I discovered this fascinating new concept of the hyperlink). Hard to believe it's been nearly 20 years.

Literary heroes, fathers and ghosts: Pico Iyer on Graham Greene

[Did a version of this for my Sunday Guardian column]

We run and run from who we are – this was Greene’s theme from the beginning – only to discover that this is precisely what we can never put behind us.

The title of Pico Iyer’s The Man Within My Head seems straightforward if you know beforehand that this book is about Iyer’s longtime obsession with the English writer Graham Greene. Almost from the first page, we learn that Iyer feels constantly haunted by the author – not just because of the themes of self-discovery and foreignness in Greene's work but also the little coincidences that seem to link their lives together: watching a fire burn his house down, just as Greene had done decades earlier; discovering that Greene’s son had gone to the same elementary school as he, Iyer, did. “I began to feel I was just a compound ghost that someone else had dreamed up,” he writes.

But continue reading and it becomes clear that the man Iyer is searching for – the man within his head – isn’t just Greene. This book, written by one of the major travel writers of our time, is in many ways a voyage of self-discovery.

At one point Iyer quotes from Edward Thomas’s poem “The Other”, about a man following someone like himself. The lines go: “I pursued / To prove the likeness, and, if true / To watch until myself I knew.” This seems an obvious reference to Iyer as a Greene-stalker, but there’s a deeper layer: the poem was a favourite of Greene’s himself, and in the epilogue to his ambiguous memoir Ways of Escape he described a mysterious doppelganger – someone he never met – who passed himself off to people as “Graham Greene the writer”.

If all this sounds a little complicated, it is. Real life and fiction continually inform each other in Iyer’s book, and the narrative contains many sets of doubles. (Early on, we learn that Greene’s maternal uncle was Robert Louis Stevenson, who created Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.) One remarkable passage is an account of an “Englishman always on the move”, who is referred to from one sentence to the next only as “he”. (“His travels seemed to awaken in him an ineradicable sense of mystery ... Hollywood continues to make films out of even his lesser works, and suspicion attaches to him because of all the work he did for British Inelligence; he wrote spy novels as well as exotic entertainments.”) The natural assumption is that it is Greene being discussed; only after two pages does one realise that the passage is about Somerset Maugham, whose life was uncannily similar to Greene’s in many ways.

But this isn’t just a playful connecting of dots. Iyer uses the similarity to comment on Greene’s own stated disavowal of Maugham’s influence, “the way some of us stress how different – how very different – we are from our fathers, the ones we’ve spent our lifetimes defining ourselves in opposition to.” The relationship between fathers and sons (real and notional, biological and literary) soon emerges as another major theme, with Iyer’s reflections on his “adopted father” (Greene) moving alongside his attempts to understand his own real father.

Real parents have lives to attend to, lives beyond our understanding, and they commit, most of all, the sin of being real; they’re human and distractible and fallible ... But the parents we construct in our minds – the ones we enlist for our purposes – are more like the people we want to be ... Someone says you look like your father and you wince, or recoil; the great project of self-creation has clearly failed. Someone says you sound like that eminent novelist, and you’re flattered. You’ve followed intuition, or yourself.

Mesmerising in parts but also, by its very nature, uneven, self-indulgent and meandering, The Man Within My Head is many books in one. It is a tribute to (even a part-biography of) an enigmatic writer. It is an affectionate work of literary criticism, full of observations like this: “What makes one weep and what makes one break out laughing are identical twins in Greene’s work, and it sometimes seems almost a freak of fate, pure randomness, whether a character picks one or the other.” It is a travelogue – as all Iyer’s earlier books have, to some degree or other, been – as well as a contemplation of the relationship between readers and their cherished writers, and between writers and the world. [“The man who bares a part of his soul on the page soon finds that his friends are treating him as strangers, bewildered by this other self they’ve met in his book. Meanwhile, many a stranger is considering him a friend, convinced he knows this man he’s read, even if he’s never met him. The paradox of reading is that you draw closer to some other creature’s voice within you than to the people who surround you (with their surfaces) every day.”]

But it is also, alongside all these, a sort of autobiography written by a man who can only approach the subject of himself tangentially. “I’d never had much time for memoir,” Iyer writes in a telling passage, “It was too easy to make yourself the centre – even the hero – of your story and to use recollection to forgive yourself for everything.” By making someone else the ostensible hero of his story, he has written one of the most unusual memoirs you’ll read.

A tribute to Bob Christo

Anyone who remembers mainstream Hindi movies of a certain vintage knows about the eye-popping sets that served as villains’ dens. In these hotbeds of vice, rogues and molls alike wore colourful futuristic outfits and behaved in ways that made Return of the Jedi look like a stark kitchen-sink drama. They connived, clinked Scotch glasses and rakshasa-laughed at regular intervals – and face it, you and I would have done much the same in their place, for the set decor included any combination of the following: spiky walls, quicksand, silhouettes of dancing girls just behind the curtains in the background, and floors that would part at the snap of a finger to reveal either a pink pool of boiling acid or hungry sharks swimming in a water tank (but never both at the same time; hungry sharks in pink boiling acid would mean a waste of valuable resources, and there had to be a certain underlying logic to the interior decoration).

The Australian-born actor Bob Christo, who died last week, was a vital part of this world, the classic looming henchman. He was a bit like the giant “Jaws” in those garish Roger Moore-James Bond films of the late 1970s - looking at this hefty man, it seemed impossible that he could ever be thwarted, but he always was. “My chief memory of Christo,” a friend tells me on email, “is snippets of him getting beaten up by much smaller, brown men.” And that’s his career in a nutshell.

Checking Christo’s filmography on the Internet Movie Database reminded me of the assembly-line 1980s movies that my generation still thinks so fondly of (even when we grudgingly accept how bad most of them were). The very titles of some of his films read like answers to questions posed by the titles of earlier, unrelated films (thus Insaaf Kaun Karega, 1984; Insaaf Main Karoonga, 1985). In many of them, Christo played a character designated merely as “Bob” – though he was occasionally promoted to “Inspector Bob”, “Terrorist Bob” and even “Commander Bob”. He was also “Henchman (Baldy)” in Satte ka Bol Baala, “British Man” (Sarfarosh), “Second Rapist to be Shot Dead” (Humshakal), “Boat organiser” (Gupt) and, quite impressively, “Mr Goodmark, Gold Smuggler” (Toofan).

Compared to all this, “Mr Wolcott” (in Mr India) almost sounds dignified - someone on the set took the trouble of thinking up a name for the character during a cigarette break! - though my only memory of Christo in that film is of him getting clunked over the head by a Hanuman statue wielded by the invisible hero. (There was probably something subtextual going on here, what with an evil gora being taught a lesson by an Indian God. Perhaps it was to balance things out that Christo played a character named “Ram” in the Kamal Hassan-Amitabh Bachchan starrer Geraftaar.)

But possibly my favourite Christo role was in B Subhash’s cult classic Disco Dancer, where he played “International Hit Man”, named so because he has bumped off seven people – including a world-famous singer – in London. Indeed, when we first see him, he looks like he might just have emerged from the English Channel; he's walking menacingly towards the camera dressed in what looks very much like a scuba diver's outfit (the setting is a hotel bar), but it turns out to be just a tight-fitting black shirt over tight-fitting black trousers.

International Hit Man has been hired to dispose of the guitar-wielding Jimmy (Mithun Chakraborty) and he commences this mission by landing a punch that knocks the hero flat. Given their respective sizes, that should have been the end of that, but of course Jimmy rallies and thrashes the big guy to within an inch of his life. So Christo stoops to sneaky saazish. After outlining a scheme to electrocute the disco dancer with a 5,000-volt current, he delivers the deadpan line “Phir hamaara dushman ud jaayega” (“Then our enemy will be blown away”) and makes a sweet little popping sound with his mouth. It’s an incongruous gesture coming from such a large man, though it wouldn't make a list of even the 1000 strangest things you'll see in this movie.

But of course the plot is foiled (Jimmy’s mother grabs the tampered guitar instead, which results in the most electrifying – and, it must be said, most enjoyable – death scene of a Hindi-movie ma you’ll ever see), and there is a final fight where International Hit Man is reduced to a quivering mass beneath the brown hero’s white shoes. Happy ending. 

In Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb, Jerry Pinto suggested that the reason for Helen's success in Hindi films was that "she almost always failed...In failing she kept the moral universe intact". Bob Christo wasn't anywhere near as significant (or nuanced) a personality as Helen, but on his much smaller scale he played a similar role. As I write this, the Indian cricket team is about to win their World Cup quarter-final against a bigger, brawnier set of fair-skinned athletes (who just happen to be of Christo’s nationality), and watching the chest-thumping reactions of the Indian spectators gives me a better understanding of the part that someone like Christo must have played in wish-fulfilment for our moviegoers all those years ago. R.I.P. Bob the Morale Builder, the big white guy who got beaten up so we could feel good about our own heroes.


[Did a version of this for my Business Standard film column]

Villain's den photo courtesy here. My own post on Manmohan Desai's Parvarish is here

A tribute - of sorts - to Dharmendra

[Originally did a version of this for my Yahoo! film column, but the columns are on a hiatus because of some design changes, so I decided to pull this one back]

Dharmendra turned 75 this month. (So did Woody Allen, by the way, but that’s no surprise; he’s been 75 for decades.) Pause for a bit and let that sink in. Think of the exuberant Veeru in Sholay, the idealistic Satyakam, the hunk who took off his shirt in Phool aur Patthar, the matinee idol who calmly deflected a schoolgirl’s adoration in Guddi. How could any of these people be a septuagenarian? It defies belief.

But now flip a decade or two forward to the bad, bad 1980s, where a fifty-plus actor played the red-eyed revenge-seeker in a series of assembly-line potboilers, growling “Kutte, kaminey” every now and again, and generally marking himself out for caricature. It isn’t so difficult to imagine that old hamster passing gracelessly into his retirement years, is it? The Dharmendra of movies like Insaaf Kaun Karega (in which he tickled a lethargic tiger during an unconvincing fight scene in the villain’s den) and Watan ke Rakhwale is a universe removed from the melancholy young man showing guests around a ramshackle film set in Guddi, recalling that some of Bimal Roy’s greatest movies had been shot here, and look at the state the place is in now.

Even a casual glance reveals that Dharmendra’s many-phased career spanned some of the most memorable high points of mainstream Hindi cinema as well as some of its most embarrassing excesses. From the 1980s onwards, he made career choices that eventually turned him into the butt of SMS jokes. (Question: Why are Indian dogs so thin? Answer: Dharmendra has drunk up all their blood.) But at his best, and in the hands of directors who knew how to channel his strengths, he was one of Bollywood’s finest physical comedians, as well as one of its most soulful romantic heroes.

As a child, I didn’t care about any of that; I thought of him purely as a man of action. Watching Amitabh Bachchan’s death scene in Sholay, I was mesmerised by how Jai’s entire head seemed to fit into Veeru’s huge palm. It’s my first Dharmendra memory.

Those giant hands also helped me develop one of my earliest movie-related theses. If you’ve seen the two-hero films of the 1970s and 80s, you’ll know it was mandatory for the leads to exchange fisticuffs at some early point in the film – after which their misunderstandings are sorted out and they team up against the bad guys. The idea was to give the audience the thrill of watching two heroes beating each other up, and of course most such fights ended in an honourable draw (star egos being at stake). But Amitabh and Dharmendra never fought in any of the films they did together (the mediocre Ram Balram, in which they played brothers on opposite sides of the law, would have been an obvious candidate), and as a child who liked to analyse these things I decided that the reason was that Dharmendra was so obviously a he-man (much more so than Amitabh’s other male co-stars like Vinod Khanna and Shashi Kapoor) that even a lazy scriptwriter couldn’t get away with a scenario where he came off second best in a fight with the lanky AB. And AB was, of course, the Superstar – he couldn’t get beaten up. So it was best to keep their characters on amicable terms throughout.

In any case, I had a one-dimensional perspective on garam Dharam until my mother gave me an unexpected insight. In the late 1960s, she told me, her school was overrun by giggly, giddy-headed girls who wrote letters in blood to the Rajesh Khannas and the Jeetendras, but Dharmendra was the serious woman’s crush; the sensitive, gentlemanly hero who appealed to the mature schoolgirl. Hearing this, Jaya Bhaduri’s obsession in Guddi suddenly made sense. Try imagining that film with the callow young Rajesh Khanna as the girl’s idol!

****

Later, watching Sholay again in my teens, I came to the uneasy conclusion that I preferred Dharmendra’s Veeru to Amitabh’s Jai. This was sacrilegious on more than one front: AB was my favourite actor and he played an author-backed role, the quiet, understated guy who sacrifices himself for the larger cause and wins the audience’s sympathy. Besides, I shared my name with his character. Why would anyone prefer a boisterous, buffoonish hero who prances about with Hema Malini? But the more I watched Sholay, the more I felt that Dharmendra’s performance was the beating heart of the film, giving it a positive energy that offset its gloomier elements (Gabbar’s relentless evil, the Thakur’s morbid waiting about for revenge, the doomed relationship between the widow and the harmonica-playing Jai). The temple scene where Veeru plays God, the classic “suicide” scene atop the water tank, even the scene where he lasciviously tries to teach Basanti to shoot down mangoes ... these are superb examples of physical comedy. He’s the clown prince and the hero rolled into one, and he balances the two parts flawlessly.

None of this is to suggest that Dharmendra was a consistently good performer (least of all in dramatic roles), but there’s no question that even in the blemished later stages of his career he was capable of doing interesting things when encouraged. I think in particular of his role in J P Dutta’s intelligently written (and sadly under-seen) gangland movie Hathyar (1989). As a middle-aged don guilt-stricken about his relationship with a disapproving younger brother, he shows signs of what could have been if better scripts had come his way. It’s – dare one say it – a subtle performance that shows a genuine feel for the character’s internal conflict, his yearning for an earlier time and his knowledge that one can never return to innocence.

Strangely, this aspect of the Hathyar role reminds me of Dharmendra playing “himself” in Guddi, especially the scene where he says that despite having become a popular actor he’s still a young village boy at heart. With any other actor, that line would seem disingenuous and self-serving, but when paaji says it, you believe him. To my mind these two performances, 20 years apart and in very different types of roles, sum up the appeal of this very transparent – but also, in his own way, enigmatic – actor.

[Guddi pic courtesy this post on MemsaabStory]

Robin Wood

Just heard belatedly that Robin Wood has died. I was a big fan of his writings: back when I first started taking movies seriously and reading about cinema, his Hitchcock’s Films Revisited was a personal Bible (along with V F Perkins’ Film as Film, Danny Peary’s three Cult Movies books and Joy Gould Boyum’s Fiction into Film) – and later I came to discover his incredibly literate yet personal and sensitive readings of the films of Howard Hawks, Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman and others. More than anyone else, his writings showed me what a complex organism a great film is, and how form and content are inseparable in the work of the true movie artists. His essays on Vertigo and Rio Bravo are among the most insightful film pieces I’ve ever read.

Some sites with Wood tributes and links: The Auteurs, Glenn Kenny’s blog, Girish Shambu. Also, this nice long feature.

K K Mahajan, behind the scenes

Wanted to share some photos as a tribute to K K Mahajan, the wonderful cinematographer who began his career in the late 1960s and shot a number of films for such directors as Mrinal Sen (including Bhuvan Shome and Ek Di Pratidin) and Basu Chatterjee (including the delightful Rajnigandha and Chhoti si Baat), and won four National Awards for his work. (Full filmography here.) I’ve been corresponding with K K’s wife Praba, who tells me he’s extremely unwell. She has shared a few old pictures from his work in the 1970s and kindly given me permission to put them up here. These are all from the shooting of Sen’s movies, and I like the impression they create (however true or not) of the rigours of filmmaking at a time when sophisticated technology was unavailable (look at some of these cameras!). Also, of course, the behind-the-scenes candour.

In the first pic, Mrinal Sen is on the left (which is as it should be, if you know anything about his work and his affiliations), with K K next to him.
Daredevilry in Calcutta: Spider-Man had nothing on this.

Not sure what Mr Sen is doing here; looks like a fake-snow set. Maybe Praba can elucidate.
Bell-bottoms rock!
This one is probably from Padatik, since that looks like Simi Garewal in the centre (I haven't seen the film).
And finally, this caricature of K K, drawn by cartoonist Mario Miranda. (Praba tells me K K is a fine gourmet cook; the dish he’s carrying here contains one of his specialties, mutton chops in milk.)[Click photos to enlarge]

P.S. More here from Uma.