"Sesame" was the name of the sled.

Ali Baba Aur 40 Chor (1980) is the Bollywood equivalent of those Russo-Finnish fantasy epics that occasionally pop up on Mystery Science Theater 3000.  And I mean that literally - Ali Baba is a Russian and Indian co-production based on a well-known story, but because this is Bollywood, everybody needs an extensive backstory before things can really get going.

We'll start with Fatima (Zeenat Aman).  Fatima and her merchant father (Madan Puri) are crossing the desert in a caravan when they are attacked by bandits commanded by Abu Hassan (Rolan Bykov).  The caravan guards defend themselves with gunpowder, and that gives Abu Hassan an idea.  He's a very successful bandit already, with an indeterminate number of thieves under his command, as well as a cool magic cave full of treasure, but he wants more, and gunpowder can help.  He captures Fatima and her father, forcing him to make more gunpowder and her to spy in town and perform the occasional dance number.  Fatima's father realizes that she is staying to protect him, so he takes his own life, leaving her to escape alone and plot her revenge.

Ali Baba (Dharmendra) is the son of another wealthy merchant, Yusuf (Zakir Mukhamedzhanov).  Yusuf has been away on a trading expedition for years, so long that Ali Baba can't even remember what he looks like.  Ali's brother Kasym (Yakub Akhmedov) manages the family business, while their mother (Sofiko Chiaureli) tries to keep them in line.  Yusuf is finally heading for home when his caravan is attacked by Abu Hassan (thanks to information provided by Fatima) and Yusuf is left for dead.  Fortunately, Yusuf is found by . . . well, the subtitles call him the emperor, so let's go with that.  

The emperor nurses Yusuf back to health, and sends a message to his family so that he can finally return home.  Ali sets out to collect him, but before he can get there the emperor is overthrown by the evil Shamsher (Prem Chopra), and Yusuf is forced to flee along with the princess Marjina (Hema Malini).  Ali Baba runs into the pair, and fails to recognize Yusuf, and . . . . well, it gets complicated.  They meet and separate and get captured and rescue each other in various combinations, but eventually Ali and Marjina are in love, father and son have realized their true relationship, and then Abu Hassan attacks.  Yusuf is seriously wounded, living just long enough for Ali to take him home, and Marjina is lost in the confusion.

Marjina isn't missing for long, but by the time Ali finds her, she's being sold into slavery, and he has to take a sizable loan from Kasym in order to buy her freedom.  Kasym's condition for the loan is that Ali agrees to give up his share of their father's estate, and Ali agrees without hesitation.  He leaves the family house, taking Marjina and his mother with him.  He needs money, so he finds work as a woodcutter.  Kasym, meanwhile, has teamed up with Fatima; she wants someone to help her get revenge on Abu Hassan, while he wants to find where Abu Hassan keeps his fabulous treasure.

And so, finally, Ali Baba is a poor but hard working woodcutter who stumbles across the fabulous cave of the Forty Plus Thieves (a lot of them die in various fights scenes, but they eventually get down to just forty).  Ali Baba steals some of the treasure and uses it to help the people around him, while his greedy brother Kasym learns the secret, tries to steal the treasure for himself, and meets with a grisly fate.  And when the leader of the Forty Thieves comes looking for him, Ali Baba is able to survive thanks to the help of the quick-witted Marjina, who was technically a slave for a brief period of time.  Not the most faithful retelling of the original story, but it hits all of the major points.

Despite the extensive backstory, Ali Baba Aur 40 Chor moves really quickly.  There's always something happening, and it's usually something interesting.  And the leads are engaging; Dharmendra has never been very good at "charming young scamp," but he quickly settles into "solid and implacable hero," which he is very good at.  And this is post-Seeta Aur Geeta Hema Malini, which means that while she doesn't get to beat up an entire police station this time, she does get to be an active protagonist rather than a damsel in distress for most of the movie, which is unusual for a Bollywood heroine of that era.  And Zeenat Aman's character has less agency overall, but somehow manages to be a woman in eighties Bollywood who has no romantic attachments at all.  It's an impressive achievement.

Take the last train to Chennai.

Chennai Express (2013) is a deliberate throwback to Shah Rukh Khan's early career.  In fact, it's a throwback to a very specific period in Shah Rukh's career: roughly 1997, when he was making goofy romantic action comedies with Juhi Chawla.  (Not appearing in this film: Juhi Chawla.)

Khan plays Rahul Mithalwala, a forty year old bachelor, orphaned at a young age and raised by loving, but meddling grandparents (Lekh Tandon and Kamini Kaushal).  Rahul wants to take a vacation in Goa with his idiot friends, but his plans are derailed when his grandfather dies suddenly, and his grandmother asks him to immerse part of his grandfather's ashes in Rameswaram, which is at the southern end of India and very far from Goa.

However, one of the idiot friends points out that both Goa and Rameswaram touch the ocean, so anything immersed at Goa will reach Rameswaram eventually, right?  Rahul agrees, because he's very early in his character arc, and makes plans to take the Chennai Express to nearby Kalyan, meet his idiot friends there, then drive with them to Goa.  

It's a pretty bad plan, and it crumbles almost immediately once the train reaches Kalyan.  Rahul realizes that he's left the ashes on the train.  he retrieves them, but spots a beautiful woman running for the train, so he helps her board, DDLJ style.  Then he spots four large and scary looking men running for the train so he helps them board, also DDLJ style.  (It's funny if you've seen a lot of nineties Bollywood, and is probably moderately amusing otherwise.)

The woman is Meenalochni Azhagusundaram (Deepika Padukone), or Meenamma for short.  The men work for her father, Durgeshwara "Durgesh" Azhagusundaram (Sathyaraj), a crimelord with a great deal of power and influence in South India, and they were in the process of kidnapping Meenamma and bringing her home to her father so that she can be forced to marry Tangaballi (Nikitin Dheer).  And because at this point Rahul has seen too much, he is now also kidnapped.

The pair are brought to Meenamma's home village, and paraded before her father.  Meenamma claims that she and Rahul are in love and want to get marries, so that they don't kill him immediately.  Rahul nods in agreement, because he doesn't speak Tamil.  And then . . . well, it's not a very complicated plot.  Tangaballi threatens Rahul.  They escape.  They bicker.  They spend some time posing as a newlywed couple in the Village of Nice People, which gives them the chance to really get to know one another.  And it all leads to a dramatic confrontation which is probably a bit more violent than you'd expect from a 1997 Shah Rukh  movie, but Chennai Express was directed by Rohit Shetty, who also directed Singham.  

The plot is obviously very different, but the emotional beats reminded me of Yes Boss, in which a deeply flawed man named Rahul is forced by circumstance to pretend to be married to a young woman, they fall in love and grow increasingly uncomfortable with the deception, and Rahul doesn't just get the girl in the end, he becomes a significantly better person in the process.  It's an old formula, but it works.

And Geneva. Afternoons in Lebanon and Canada.

If you choose to watch An Evening in Paris (1967), you will absolutely get to see at least one evening in Paris, along with other times of day spent in a variety of other locations.  It's a shining example of truth in cinematic advertising.

Wealthy heiress Deepa (Sharmila Tagore) has grown tired of Indian men who are only after her money, so she decides to try Paris.  Her assistant Honey (Sarita) suggests that she let love find her, since that is the magic of Paris, so Deepa wanders the streets of the city, disguised (badly) as her own servant.  She immediately attracts the attention of Sam (Shammi Kapoor).  Sam is very, very persistent, and because this is 1967, we're supposed to find that charming rather than dangerous.

Deepa has also attracted the attention of Shekhar (Pran), the son of her father's business manager (David Abraham.)  Shekhar has extensive gambling debts, and he's sure that a quick marriage to Deepa will solve all his problems.  And Honey attracts the attention of Makhan Singh (Rajendra Nath), Deepa's chauffeur.

During an interlude in Switzerland, Deepa tries to scare Sam off by flirting with Shekhar, who starts plying her with liquor.  Sam intervenes before anything can happen, and Deepa starts liking him a little better, but it still takes a water-skiing musical number in Lebanon before they become a proper couple and return to Paris to enjoy an evening.

  

Shekhar, meanwhile, has an uncomfortable reunion with Jack (K. N. Singh), the gangster he owes all that money to.  Shekhar explains the "marry Deepa" plan to pay off his debt, but Jack comes up with the much simpler "kidnap Deepa and make her rich father give me money directly" plan.

And because the plot isn't complicated enough yet, Shekhar convinces Suzy (also Sharmila Tagore), a dancer at jack's nightclub who happens to look exactly like Deepa, to take her place and marry him after Deepa is kidnapped, so that they can split the money.  (There are some flaws in this plan.)  Naturally Suzy falls in love with Sam.  And just as naturally the scam is quickly uncovered, leading to a climactic confrontation at Jack's secret base, which is underneath Niagara falls because shut up, that's why.

Like a lot of older Bollywood, An Evening in Paris shifts genre over the course of the movie.  It starts as a comedic romp, careening from comic sketch to comic sketch, with Sam shifting through a variety of silly disguises.  Once the leads become established as a proper couple, the movie shifts to straight up romance, followed by a smidgen of family drama and a larger dollop of action movie.  I don't think the film entirely succeeds at any of the genres.  The early comic plotline is just disjointed, while Kapoor is just not very convincing as an action hero.  And then there's whatever this is:

 I'm not sure that matters, though, because the real genre of the movie is "Shammi Kapoor and Sharmila Tagore wear interesting clothes and wander around various foreign locations, and Sharmila is very pretty."  I don't think I've seen an onscreen couple be so aggressively In Paris since Tom Baker and Lalla Ward.  You don't just get the Eiffel Tower in the background; there are so many lingering shots of our leads visiting all sorts of famous landmarks that the film can double as an ad for a travel agency.  And, as always, Sharmila is very pretty indeed.

An adventure in space and time. By which I mean Brazil.

Professor Shanku O El Dorado (2019) is billed as "India's First Science Fiction." It's obviously not India's first science fiction film; I know that there are earlier ones because I've reviewed a bunch of them.  However, the movie is based on the "Professor Shanku" stories written by Bengali author Satyajit Ray.  The first Shanku story appeared in 1961, narrowly beating Rocket Tarzan, but there's a long tradition of Bengali science fiction going back to at least the 1890s.

The movie opens with a framing story in which a magazine writer (Subhrajit Dutta) is given one of Professor Shanku's diaries.  This comes directly from the first Shanku story, but it has absolutely no impact on the plot of the film and is never mentioned again.  The real story starts with Shanku (Dhritiman Chatterjee) sitting at home reading the article that he wrote for Cosmos about one of his many inventions.  He's interrupted by Nakur Biswas (Subhasish Mukhopadhya), a humble villager who gained psychic powers after a close encounter with ball lightning.  Biswas warns Shanku about traveling to Brazil, then returns home.

Soon after, Shanku chats with his old friends (and sidekicks) Jeremy Saunders (Ricardo Dantas) and Wilhelm Krol (Roney Facchini), who tell him that he's been invited to present at a symposium and receive an honorary degree at an institute in Sao Paolo.  Shanku decides to attend, and to take Biswas with him as his secretary. 

In Brazil, Shanku exhibits his inventions, including a  pill that can cure any disease, and the Annihilin, an honest to goodness death ray.  Creepy American Solomon Bloomgarten (Fernando Coelho) is particularly impressed and offers to buy all the patents for the princely sum of ONE MILLION DOLLARS!, but Shonku refuses to sell, calmly explaining that his inventions can't be mass produced, they have to be hand-crafted.  (That's your objection, Shanku?  Not the fact that the obviously evil guy wants to buy your death ray?)

Bloomgarten is also intrigued when Biswas mentions the lost city of El Dorado, and even more so when Biswas carelessly reveals that he has psychic powers and can actually find the lost city.  In short order, the research for Shanku's inventions is surreptitiously stolen, and Biswas joins Bloomgarten on an expedition to El Dorado, so Shanku . . . sets off for his scheduled tour of the Amazon rain forest.

It sounds like a recipe for fast-paced, two fisted pulp adventure, but instead what we get is relaxed, meandering pulp adventure; there's an entire montage devoted to Biswas getting a passport and buying new clothes for the trip.  What it actually reminds me of is early Doctor Who storylines in which our heroes arrive at an unfamiliar location, split up and wander around for a while, tell each other interesting facts, and then the villain is undone by his own hubris.  I happen to like early Doctor Who, so that's a bonus, but  it's not for everyone.