Up above the world so high...

One of the many pleasing things about Hindi cinema’s multi-starrer culture in the 1970s was the phenomenon of the “And Above All” in the title credits. This was fuelled by ego clashes and by a general tendency to fawn and mollycoddle: when two or more stars were equally popular and had been in the industry for around the same length of time, who would get top billing?

Such insecurity wasn’t peculiar to Bollywood, of course. In his book Tracy and Hepburn, Garson Kanin observed: “Billing appears to be as important as breathing to some actors and actresses. Important films with ideal casts have fallen apart on this issue.” Old Hollywood came up with inventive methods to keep prima donnas happy – for example, two names might be lettered in the shape of an “X” so that neither star could be said to have taken precedence. (If “Humphrey” was placed above “Ingrid”, at least “Bergman” was above “Bogart”.)

But in our movie industry “Above All” was the preferred solution, and if that failed it was always possible to proclaim a “guest” or “friendly” appearance – even when the actor in question had a substantial role. For a good example of title credits gone awry, I offer you Raj Kumar Kohli’s magnificent horror film Jaani Dushman, about a werewolf-like Shaitan with chest hair that would make Anil Kapoor look like the Glaxo baby.

The film’s title sequence begins well enough with straightforward “starring” credits for Sunil Dutt, Sanjeev Kumar and Shatrughan Sinha (the hierarchy of seniority being apparent enough in this trio), but then things get murky. The next credit has Vinod Mehra with a parenthetical “Special Appearance” next to his name, almost as if he were reluctant to get too deeply involved. Likewise Rekha and a bevy of starlets including Neetu Singh, Bindiya Goswami and Sarika (all playing village belles ripe for abduction). But doing a solo number in the middle of all these special appearances is poor Reena Roy, whose name appears without any qualifiers at all. Possibly her agent failed to read the fine print?
 
Then comes a “Guest Artists” series – Yogita Bali, Aruna Irani and suchlike – followed by one of the more intricate credits I’ve seen:

And Above All
Jeetendra
(Special Appearance)

And so it goes. Briefly, here is a movie whose opening titles could be the subject of a thesis. (You can see them halfway through this video, but to get there you’ll have to watch Amrish Puri reading “The Sixth Pan Book of Horror Stories” and making a monstrous transformation. The scene gives new meaning to the phrase “that book made my hair stand on end”.)

Come to think of it, Jeetendra had quite a romance going with special titles; his “Above All” billing in The Burning Train conjures images of the actor sitting mournfully by himself on the roof of the train compartment while the rest of the cast travels in comfort. (Alas, the credits of this film were so preoccupied with the male stars that they turned the luscious Parveen Babi into a man by spelling her name “Praveen”. Unforgivable.)

In that awful decade commonly referred to as the 1980s, some films exhausted all their creativity within the opening five minutes. Watching something called Do Qaidi on TV, I discovered the title “Dynamic Appearance by Suresh Oberoi” imposed on a still of the thus-honoured actor (who played a fairly inconsequential part in the film). What, one wonders, were these performers and their families thinking as they watched preview screenings? Did little Vivek Oberoi beam with delight when he saw daddy’s name appear on the screen? Did he tell himself, “I’ll grow up and become a movie star too, and then everyone in the whole wide world will call me Dynamic Vivek?” If so, think of the human tragedy unleashed by five words that appeared ever so briefly in a long-forgotten film. It gives new meaning to Larkin's verse about man handing on misery to man.

P.S. Here is Kanin on the subject of Spencer Tracy’s name always appearing before Katharine Hepburn’s in the films they did together:

Tracy’s position as a Metro superstar meant that there was nothing to discuss [...] It was always “Tracy and Hepburn”.

I chided him once about his insistence on first billing.

“Why not?” he asked, his face all innocence.

“”Well, after all,” I argued, “She’s the lady. You’re the man. Ladies first?”

“This is a movie, chowderhead,” he said, “not a lifeboat.”

Slow brain turning

I have Zee Cinema to thank for renewed acquaintance with many cherished classics from my misspent childhood – such as The Burning Train, which used to be my favourite non-Amitabh film as a seven-year-old (in fact it’s still my favourite non-Amitabh film as a seven-year-old).

Dharam paaji and Vinod Khanna are childhood buddies who serenade Hema Malini and Parveen Babi by cycling after them and singing one of the most instantly forgettable songs of the 1980s (I forget what it was called). This comes on the heels of an elaborate gag where each one pretends to eve-tease the other guy’s girl so that each of them gets to play hero in turn; these shenanigans will provide useful practice for the scenes much later in the film when they have to clamber about the side of the train dressed in smart silver-foil outfits (fuzzy pic below), fighting Danny Denzongpa.

After much coquettish wiggling of noses by the ladies, the two couples settle into happy domesticity and produce a brood of younglings, played by intolerable child actors who make horrible ululating sounds whenever they have to cry (making the viewer want to smack them on the head so they might do some impromptu Method acting instead). The plot of this movie, set a few years after the cycle-serenade episode, ensures there will be plenty for them to cry about.

The best thing about The Burning Train is that the title isn’t an obscure metaphor-ish thingie, as in those movies made by Bresson and suchlike – the film really is about a burning train, or more accurately, a train that is burning. There’s plenty of (intended) metaphor in the story though, with the imperiled chook-chook and its disparate passengers representing the Many Colours of India. Clad in elegant white (a terrifying portent of things to come on satellite television 20 years later) is Simi Garewal as a Catholic schoolteacher escorting a tribe of wailing little monsters. There’s a Hindu priest and a Muslim maulvi who initially squabble but later, faced with certain Death, smile sadly at each other and agree that when you’re being roasted alive in an unstoppable moving oven, religion suddenly doesn’t seem so hot. A loud-voiced but genial Sardarji rounds off this touching panorama. (He will volunteer to unravel his turban later for the Greater Good, just as a lady passenger will remove her sari.) There’s even a pregnant woman, though surprisingly her presence doesn’t lead to any of the “kindly give berth” variety of jokes that I would certainly have incorporated into the script.

Best of all there’s Jeetendra, who shows up halfway through the movie and, without prelude, performs an elaborate dance with Neetu Singh, for once dressed in something other than her favourite fisherwoman outfit (regardless of what she’s playing). When the train starts to burn, Jeetu teams up with Dharam and Veenu and they all change into those silver-foil costumes that people in sci-fi films wear to prevent alien beings from sucking out their mojo.

Jeetu’s white shoes go very well with the foil outfit, and Dharam and Veenu are envious – but they put these differences aside to save the train by doing a series of complicated things (which even they don’t fully understand) in the boiler room, and by kicking Danny off the roof. There is much cheering as Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims embrace: the crisis has united them and never again will there be riots or race-killings. Hema looks appreciatively at Dharam’s silver-foil suit as he gets off the train. “This film is dedicated to the courage of the people, and the soul of India which has remained uncorrupted” says a closing credit. Audiences were courageous enough to stay away from theatres in droves, and The Burning Train was an uncorrupted flop.

[P.S. This film really does have an enormous cast – including Paintal and Keshto Mukherjee, both credited as “Passenger in toilet” on the IMDB page. I must’ve missed that bit.]

Revisiting Deewar

It’s sad when the films you’ve grown up with, the ones that form some of your earliest memories, turn out to be disappointing, even a little embarrassing, when you return to them. It’s like going back to that big family bungalow you remember vaguely from your childhood and discovering it was just a little cottage all along, with a smallish courtyard.

Bachchan films from the mid/late 1970s and early 1980s are the points of reference in my movie mythology, but I saw almost all of them as an immature viewer, too young for much to register - which means there’s plenty of scope for disappointment on a second viewing 20 years later. I saw some of Silsila on TV recently and while it’s still lovely in parts I was irked by some of the forcedness of the first half -- A.B. and Shashi Kapoor (one nearly 40 when the film was made, the other a couple of years over 40) trying too hard to be young frat-boys; Rekha a little too heavily made up; Sanjeev Kumar a little too constipated, as he so often was, the yellow tulips in the field a little too yellow. Rant rant.

More traumatic was a viewing of one of my most beloved childhood movies, Amar Akbar Anthony, which revealed that it was a rambling, episodic film with a narrative structure that fell victim to a cardinal principle of mainstream Hindi cinema: that screen time, action, romance, comedy must be equally divided between the three heroes.

I’m not claiming to have suddenly discovered that these are bad films, just that some of them have been inflated by our memories. Which is why it’s a solace to turn to the few movies that do come through the prism of time and memory intact. Sholay is the obvious example and I’ve written about it a couple of times, but another such film, one I think always gets short shrift, is Deewar, a movie that has been stereotyped endlessly, and is consequently all but lost today in a sea of parodies.

If you haven’t seen Deewar in a long time and are asked to prepare a list of associations, I imagine it will look something like this: A brooding Bachchan. Dramatic pealing of bells in a temple, followed by a prolonged death scene. Nirupa Roy in yet another teary mother act. Shashi Kapoor bleating “Bhai” and, of course, with nostrils flaring self-righteously, “Mere Paas Ma Hai.” Bachchan’s confrontation with the Shiva statue. “Mera baap chor hai” inscribed on his arm. A litany of familiar images and dialogues that have, with time, turned into cliches.

But watch the film without all this baggage and you might be surprised at how powerful and mature it is - and how its most effective scenes are the quieter ones, the ones that haven’t been handed down to us as typical “Deewar moments”. One scene that sticks with me is when Ma is unwell and the fugitive son Vijay (Bachchan) can’t see her because police have been posted around the hospital. He waits in a van parked a few blocks away while his girlfriend (Parveen Babi) goes to check on the level of security. She returns, shakes her head, tells him it’s impossible for him to go there; and Bachchan (who’s wearing dark glasses - a chilling touch in this scene) says in a completely deadpan voice, face devoid of all emotion, “Aur main apne Ma ko milne nahin jaa sakta hoon.” No overt attempt at irony, pathos or hysteria (and how many other Indian actors would have, or could have, played the scene this way?), just the calm acceptance of a man who is taking the last steps towards his destiny and knows it. The fatalism and despair that mark Deewar’s final scenes is rarely ever commented on, because it wouldn’t fit too well with the popular image of the film as a pro-active, “angry young man” story.

Another scene that comes to mind is the one where Bachchan hesitantly calls his mother on the phone, arranges to meet her at the temple, then tries to say something more but can’t get the words out and just puts the phone down instead. The movie’s power draws as much from its silences as from its flaming dialogue, and the writing of Salim-Javed, in conjunction with Bachchan’s incomparable performance, take it to heights Indian cinema has rarely touched since.

Even the Bachchan performance, though iconic, remains mis-appreciated in my opinion, since it’s remembered for all the wrong reasons - for the flashing eyes rather than the dark glasses, for the booming monologues rather than the quieter moments. Rarely again would he ever be so understated; superstardom took over and he fell into the image trap, playing to galleries, playing inside moth-eaten palimpsests. Salim-Javed split up and the writing in the later Bachchan films was never as subtle as it had been in the earlier ones. Contrast the understated beauty of Deewar‘s best moments, for instance, with some shamelessly overwrought scenes in his later movies - in Sharaabi, for instance, when, glycerine firmly in eye, lump in throat, he tells his father (played by Pran) “Aapne meri hansi dekhi, lekin uske peeche chipe aansoo nahin dekhe”. Everything spelt out by a mediocre screenplay.

The power of Deewar, on the other hand, lies in its ability to make us feel the tragedy rather than present it to us all gift-wrapped on a platter. Watch it again and see for yourself.

R.I.P. Parveen Babi

Tears mist my computer screen as I write this. (No wait, that’s the condensation from the coffee cup.) Parveen Babi, the first love of my life, is dead. Some of my earliest movie memories, mainly from Sunday evening Doordarshan telecasts and the occasional movie-hall visits, centre on her. (This was in the early 1980s, for anyone who was born late and doesn’t know that Doordarshan was once the only TV channel.)

It says heaps about PB’s personality that she managed to be cool, classy and always beautiful despite the often-terrible, flouncy outfits she wore in that sartorially execrable age. But she was also in my opinion one half of Hindi cinema’s best romantic couple ever, the only actress of her generation (and most other generations) who could stand up to Bachchan on screen -- by which I mean match his intelligence and sophistication, at a time when these were rare qualities in actors and actresses alike. Sure, Zeenat Aman’s screen persona may have been similar in some ways, but I thought – how to put this – that there was greater depth in Parveen B’s lambent eyes and far superior chemistry between her and AB. (It might have helped that she worked with him in some of his better/more seminal films, notably Deewaar and Amar Akbar Anthony.)

Consider Bachchan’s other leads. The supposed magic of the Rekha-AB pairing I’ll never get, except for the obvious vicarious thrill that audiences felt, with their knowledge of all the offscreen bonking. Okay, I’ll concede Silsila was interesting but otherwise she was never really in the same league as AB (and besides, the much-documented idol-worshipping actually showed in Rekha’s eyes when she acted opposite Him). Hema Malini … ha ha, let’s just say I didn’t think of her as being classy enough even for Dharamendra paaji (not joking; Dharam’s best pairing was with Meena Kumari in his young, sensitive days). Among the others, Smita Patil probably came closest in her two films with AB, especially Shakti, but the line between “commercial” and “parallel” cinema was so sharp at the time, it felt like she had walked in from another movie.

I’m not pretending Parveen B’s magic had to do with intelligence taking precedence over cool beauty or pure sexiness. After all, even Raakhee occasionally gave the impression of being intelligent (notwithstanding her demented Bengali “Ammeeeet!”). But Babi was, in addition to everything else, Va-Va-Voomish, and I knew that even at the age of four. Try beating that.

(Bloggers have their own deadlines. Had to finish this before Shamya – also a Parveen Babi-lover – got around to writing another obit, just because he’s sitting in the Headlines Today office with nothing to do.)