Near the beginning of Don (1978), Interpol officer Malik (Om
Shivpuri) meets with the Bombay police to discuss an international gang
of smugglers who have recently moved into town. Local DSP D’Silva
(Iftekhar) reads off a long list of names, but it’s very clear that the
most dangerous member of the gang is Don (Amitabh Bachchan), a man who
is apparently too cool to bother with such mundane details as having a
name rather than a title. The film promptly cuts to Don in action, and
we see that yes, he is that cool. In fact, he’s so ferociously cool
that he comes off as a suave, sexy badass while dressed as Orville
Redenbacher.
Gang member Ramesh (Sharad Kumar) decides that he wants out.
Naturally, Don kills him. Just as naturally, the women in Ramesh’s life
take objection to this, and decide to seek vengeance. His fiance
Kamini (Helen) capitalizes on her natural shimmying abilities by
leading Don into a trap set by DSP D’Silva, but when Don realizes what
she’s up to, all the shimmying in the world won’t save her.
With two deaths to avenge, Ramesh’s sister Roma (Zeenat Aman) takes a
more traditional approach, quickly learning karate and judo and then
using her amazing fighting skills to infiltrate Don’s gang. Soon she’s a
part of the inner circle, patiently waiting for her chance to strike.
Don is shot in a confrontation with the police, and dies soon after.
DSP D’Silva (and I’m going to start calling him the DSP, because he’s
almost never referred to by name in the movie) is the only person who
witnesses his death, and comes up with a plan to take down the whole
syndicate. Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan), a street performer, happens to
look exactly like Don, so the DSP quietly buries Don, and then trains
Vijay to impersonate him. When Vijay is ready, the police get an
anonymous tip about where to find the injured “Don”, who is then rescued
from the hospital by Roma. Vijay feigns amnesia as he learns who is who
in the syndicate, but it isn’t long before he’s in charge and rocking
the bow tie. Only the DSP knows that Don is dead and Vijay is actually
Vijay; there’s no way that plan could possibly go wrong, right?
Before going undercover, Vijay had been taking care of Munni (Baby
Bilkish) and Deepu (Alankar Joshi, who I see from the IMDB was also in Sholay and Seeta Aur Geeta),
a pair of sassy urchins with a dead mother and a missing father; in
fact, the DSP secured Vijay’s cooperation by enrolling the children in a
boarding school. The missing father is Jasjit (Pran), also known as
J.J., your basic former safe cracker turned tightrope walker, lured into
one last job in order to pay for the operation to save his injured
wife. He’s caught at the hospital, moments before he can hand over the
money, and since the hospital has a very strict “cash in advance” policy
they let her die. J.J. is sent to jail, and his children are tossed
out into the street. (Do they not have social services in
Bollywood-land?) Upon his release form jail, he swears vengeance on the
man who put him there - DSP D’Silva!
And that is the simple version of the plot. Despite the song-and-dance, Don
isn’t really a masala film; nobody has a mother, blind or otherwise,
and even the romance track is used to further the plot. And that’s the
real difference between Don and a lot of Bollywood: The plot
matters. Rather than throwing in random disconnected elements that seem
cool at the time, the film chooses the (admittedly complex) story that
it wants to tell, and then tells it.
That’s not to say that Don is free of crazy Bollywood goodness. The songs have a great, funky 70’s vibe, and there are two
separate songs in which a main character sings to the assembled
villains that “You don’t realize it, but I’m actually in disguise and
will take you all down.” While the fight choreography is the typical
sloppy Bollywood fair, there’s a great energy to the fights, and our
heroes flip around for no adequately explained reason. And above all,
there is Amitabh, as cool and charismatic as he has ever been.
Simply put, Don is twenty pounds of awesome in a ten pound sack.
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