On August 13th, 2004 (or next Friday, as we say in these parts) Sholay will be back in Indian theatres. Sholay
premiered in August, 1975, and has become the most successful Indian
film ever; it ran in one Bombay theatre for five years straight. This
film is as well known and as frequently referenced in India as, say, the
original Star Wars is here in the U.S. To be blunt, if you consider yourself a Bollywood fan and you haven’t yet seen Sholay, you are legally and morally obligated to go see it right now, as a simple matter of cultural literacy.
(I could probably end this review right there. After all, greater minds than mine have analyzed Sholay over the years, and does the world really need to know what a 32 year old unemployed schoolteacher from Utah thinks about Bollywood’s all-time greatest hit? Yes. Yes it does.)
Sholay is often called a “curry Western”, and that’s a pretty good description. The film takes the tropes of a Western epic, and effortlessly transposes them onto then-contemporary India. Still, this is Bollywood, so they aren’t satisfied with just one genre; there are elements of screwball romantic comedy, 70’s funk, and just a dash of Shaw Brothers style chop-socky here as well. The plot is remarkably straightforward. Petty criminals Jai (Amitabh Bachchan) and Veeru (Dharmendra) are recruited by former police inspector Thakur Baldev Singh (Sanjeev Kumar) to capture notorious bandit Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan). Along the way, both men fall in love: Jai with Baldev Singh’s widowed daughter-in-law Radha (Jaya Badhuri), Veeru with spunky village horse cart driver and chatterbox Basanti (Hema Malini).
Fortunately, Sholay is not just a classic film, it’s also a very watchable movie. The strong performances help. All of the leads are very clearly and distinctly drawn. Veeru is the charming but none-too-bright rogue that’s so beloved of Bollywood, but Jai is something else entirely - sullen, sarcastic, brutally charismatic, and at once both the most outright criminal and the most honorable of the pair. Sadly, Hema Malini doesn’t get to beat anyone senseless with a ping-pong paddle this time, but she does credibly transition from annoying village eccentric to a woman worth risking your life for. There’s some impressive chemistry between Hema and Dharmendra. (How impressive? Actress Esha Deol is their daughter.) The Jai-Radha romance, by contrast, is very understated, and communicated mostly in longing glances. (And Jaya Bhaduri is, of course, Amitabh Bachchan’s real life wife. They were married at the time; in fact, Jaya was pregnant during the filming.) Sanjeev Kumar invests his role with a tragic dignity. And Amjad Khan as Gabbar Singh . . . well, Gabbar Singh deserves his own paragraph.
Gabbar Singh is a decidedly unglamorous villain. He’s not handsome. He has bad teeth and a goofy laugh. He doesn’t have a code of honor, twisted or otherwise; after giving three of his own men a fair chance to escape punishment for their failure, he gets annoyed and shoots them anyway. While he may have a tragic backstory, Sholay doesn’t care. Gabbar Singh is a bad, bad man in desperate need of a good killing (especially considering what he did to Baldev Singh and family.) Gabbar’s one virtue is that he’s very quotable; during Sholay’s original release, you could buy separate cassettes of Gabbar’s dialogue so that you could practice quoting him. It is a great performance and, again, any Bollywood fan must see it as a matter of cultural literacy.
The film is shot beautifully, with plenty of sweeping desert landscapes. The action sequences evoke the better Westerns, with the obligatory train robbery, the post-Holi gun battle, and the sequence with Jai making his final bullet count being particular standouts. And speaking of Holi, the Holi dance number is my favorite of the songs, though I also enjoyed the cameo by Helen (the period’s answer to Urmila Matondkar.)
In all fairness, I have to say that while the film as a whole has held up well, certain parts . . . haven’t. An early sequence set in a prison with a Hitler-esque warden is more bizarre than funny. And the final fight sequence - well, I’m going to have to spoil a bit of the film here, so if you’re worried about me ruining the ending of a 29 year old film, you should probably skip down to the next paragraph. It’s probably possible today, with the aid of modern special effects technology and Yuen Wo Ping, to film an effective sequence in which a man with no arms kicks someone to death. To a jaded modern viewer, though, the sequence in Sholay seems a little silly. Also, Rosebud is the name of a sled, and Darth Vader is Luke’s father.
Despite these flaws, though, Sholay is a very entertaining film. I’m not really qualified to say whether it deserves its classic status; all I can say is that I enjoyed it, along with millions of other people.
(I could probably end this review right there. After all, greater minds than mine have analyzed Sholay over the years, and does the world really need to know what a 32 year old unemployed schoolteacher from Utah thinks about Bollywood’s all-time greatest hit? Yes. Yes it does.)
Sholay is often called a “curry Western”, and that’s a pretty good description. The film takes the tropes of a Western epic, and effortlessly transposes them onto then-contemporary India. Still, this is Bollywood, so they aren’t satisfied with just one genre; there are elements of screwball romantic comedy, 70’s funk, and just a dash of Shaw Brothers style chop-socky here as well. The plot is remarkably straightforward. Petty criminals Jai (Amitabh Bachchan) and Veeru (Dharmendra) are recruited by former police inspector Thakur Baldev Singh (Sanjeev Kumar) to capture notorious bandit Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan). Along the way, both men fall in love: Jai with Baldev Singh’s widowed daughter-in-law Radha (Jaya Badhuri), Veeru with spunky village horse cart driver and chatterbox Basanti (Hema Malini).
Fortunately, Sholay is not just a classic film, it’s also a very watchable movie. The strong performances help. All of the leads are very clearly and distinctly drawn. Veeru is the charming but none-too-bright rogue that’s so beloved of Bollywood, but Jai is something else entirely - sullen, sarcastic, brutally charismatic, and at once both the most outright criminal and the most honorable of the pair. Sadly, Hema Malini doesn’t get to beat anyone senseless with a ping-pong paddle this time, but she does credibly transition from annoying village eccentric to a woman worth risking your life for. There’s some impressive chemistry between Hema and Dharmendra. (How impressive? Actress Esha Deol is their daughter.) The Jai-Radha romance, by contrast, is very understated, and communicated mostly in longing glances. (And Jaya Bhaduri is, of course, Amitabh Bachchan’s real life wife. They were married at the time; in fact, Jaya was pregnant during the filming.) Sanjeev Kumar invests his role with a tragic dignity. And Amjad Khan as Gabbar Singh . . . well, Gabbar Singh deserves his own paragraph.
Gabbar Singh is a decidedly unglamorous villain. He’s not handsome. He has bad teeth and a goofy laugh. He doesn’t have a code of honor, twisted or otherwise; after giving three of his own men a fair chance to escape punishment for their failure, he gets annoyed and shoots them anyway. While he may have a tragic backstory, Sholay doesn’t care. Gabbar Singh is a bad, bad man in desperate need of a good killing (especially considering what he did to Baldev Singh and family.) Gabbar’s one virtue is that he’s very quotable; during Sholay’s original release, you could buy separate cassettes of Gabbar’s dialogue so that you could practice quoting him. It is a great performance and, again, any Bollywood fan must see it as a matter of cultural literacy.
The film is shot beautifully, with plenty of sweeping desert landscapes. The action sequences evoke the better Westerns, with the obligatory train robbery, the post-Holi gun battle, and the sequence with Jai making his final bullet count being particular standouts. And speaking of Holi, the Holi dance number is my favorite of the songs, though I also enjoyed the cameo by Helen (the period’s answer to Urmila Matondkar.)
In all fairness, I have to say that while the film as a whole has held up well, certain parts . . . haven’t. An early sequence set in a prison with a Hitler-esque warden is more bizarre than funny. And the final fight sequence - well, I’m going to have to spoil a bit of the film here, so if you’re worried about me ruining the ending of a 29 year old film, you should probably skip down to the next paragraph. It’s probably possible today, with the aid of modern special effects technology and Yuen Wo Ping, to film an effective sequence in which a man with no arms kicks someone to death. To a jaded modern viewer, though, the sequence in Sholay seems a little silly. Also, Rosebud is the name of a sled, and Darth Vader is Luke’s father.
Despite these flaws, though, Sholay is a very entertaining film. I’m not really qualified to say whether it deserves its classic status; all I can say is that I enjoyed it, along with millions of other people.
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