The Man Who Wasn't There

 Mr. India is easily the most famous movie about an invisible hero, but it's far from the only one.  Elaan (1971) also features the hero given a high-tech invisibility ring by a friendly scientist, but while Mr.India is a superhero movie at heart, Elaan feels like a spy movie. Specifically an Italian Bond knockoff from the sixties.

Naresh (Vinod Mehra) isn't a superspy with an eye for the ladies, though. As the film opens,he's a freelance journalist with an eye for one particular lady: Mala (Rekha). They meet on the beach, and Malais offended at having her picture taken, so she rides off on a horse and in a huff. The horse promptly gallops out of control, giving Naresh a chance to ride to the rescue. That doesn't impress Mala, because she's unconscious, but it does impress her father, newspaper publisher Mehta (Brahm Bhardwaj), who offers him a job. After further humorous misunderstandings, Mala falls for Naresh as well, and they're soon a happy couple.

Mehta assigns Naresh and comic relief sidekick Shyam (Rajendra Nath) to investigate an apparently haunted island.  It turns out that the island is the base for an international syndicate of unspecified evil, and after a little torture to establish that Naresh and Shyam aren't police officers, the Boss (M. B. Shetty) sends Lily (Helen) to perform an item number and then recruit them into the organization. Shyam does have an eye for the ladies, so he distracts Lily and the other femmes fatale, while Naresh sneaks off and gets captured again.

 Naresh is thrown into a cell with violent criminal Ram Singh (Vinod Khanna) and an ailing scientist (Ratan Guarang).  Naresh is kind to the scientist, who gives him his hidden atomic ring, which can be used toi turn invisible when placed in the mouth, though only if the user is completely naked.  Ram Singh just gives Naresh punches. With the help of the ring, Naresh and Shyam flee the island.

The Boss sends Lily and Ram Singh to kill Naresh and retrieve the ring,  as well as to collaborate on a counterfeiting scheme with shady hotel owner Verma (Madan Puri doing his best Adopho Celi impression) and his hypnotist sidekick, the Professor (Jankidas.)  (Verma's gang is largely made up of beautiful women who may or may not have been hypnotized.)  

 Along the way, Mehta is murdered, and Naresh, Shyam and Mala all wind up under the protection of the Central Bureau of Investigation.  In the day or so since her father's death, Mala has become a trained and certified CBI agent ("People change," as she explains to Naresh) and she's sent undercover as "Mary" to infiltrate the counterfeiting scheme, while Naresh and Shyam are sort of deputized and given silly disguises and sent to verify that yes, that is Lily performing at Verma's nightclub.

In a proper Bond movie, or even a high end knockoff, the characters would be traveling the world at this point, bouncing from one beautiful city to the next; even Operation Kid Brother managed to include visits to Malaga, Morocco, and Munich.  Not here, though.  Mala hangs around Verma's place waiting to be shown the counterfeiting machine, Naresh alternates between acting as Mala's invisible guardian angel and bumming around Bombay in a series of silly disguises, and the Boss, Verma and Ram Singh all compete to see who can betray the others first.

This is Bond on the cheap, with an equally budget friendly sci-fi twist; the fact that the ring only works when the user is naked means that the producers don't have to spend any money on partial invisibility effects. It's all very slight and very silly, and nobody ever dresses up as Charlie Chaplin, but it's reasonably entertaining, there are multiple Helen dance numbers, and Young Rekha is adorable.

 

We could've been anything that we wanted to be.

Bugsy Malone (1976) doesn't sound like a real movie. The premise is ridiculous on its face; it's a G-rated gangster melodrama set in Prohibition-era New York, with a cast made up entirely of child actors. Oh, and it's a musical!  However, this is a movie that commits completely to the bit, and it has a couple of secret weapons hiding up  its sleeve.

The young cats present themselves as adults, and some of the boys are even sporting period appropriate mustaches, but everything is presented through a child-friendly lens; the vintage cars are pedal-powered, the liquor racket is replaced by the sarsaparilla racket, and most importantly, nobody gets shot, they get splurged.  Traditionally this takes the form of an old-fashioned pie to the face, but Dandy Dan (Martin Lev) has armed his gang with splurge guns, which are basically Tommy guns that use whipped cream instead of bullets.  However you're splurged, though, the effects are the same. You don't die, but you're washed up, out of the game, and out of the movie.

Dandy Dan's gang are the only ones with splurge guns,which means they're cutting a swathe through the businesses run by Dan's rival, Fat Sam (John Cassisi), who owns the speakeasy where much of the action takes place.  Sam controls a gang of mostly lovable incompetents, most notably Knuckles (Sheridan Earl Russell), who earned his name by constantly cracking his knuckles.  Sam is also dating the film's family friendly femme fatale, Tallulah (Jodie Foster), who is the speakeasy's star performer.

Tallulah is not the speakeasy's only performer, though, so singer and aspiring Hollywood actress Blousey Brown (Florrie Dugger) arrives to audition for a role in the chorus,only to be told that Sam is busy and she should "come back tomorrow."  At the speakeasy she also meets Bugsy Malone (Scott Baio), a struggling boxing promoter, and she finds him reasonably charming.  The pair strike up a low-key friendship.

Things are getting worse and worse for Sam. Dandy Dan is squeezing his business dry, and most of his men are lured into an ambush and splurged. Sam desperately tries to pretend that it's business as usual, and hires Looney, a hitman from out of town, to take down Dandy Dan.  He's going to need a driver, though, and Knuckles can't drive.

 Blousey is auditioning across town to replace diva Lena Morelli (Bonnie Langford), with Bugsy there to give moral support,but before she can sing a note Lena strolls in and takes her old job back.  Bugsy takes her back to Sam's place for another audition, and this time she gets her shot. She also spots Bugsy with Tallulah,and while there's really nothing going on there Tallulah still plants a chaste kiss on Bugsy's forehead.  (G-rating, remember?)  Blousey has had enough.

Bugsy needs to win Blousey back. He wants to take her to Hollywood, but to do that he'll need money. The good news is that Fat Sam is looking for a driver for a special job. And so begins Bugsy's G-rated spiral into a life of crime. The movie's only 93 minutes long, so there isn't much actual criming involved,and what little criming there is is directed at dandy Dan and his gang.

So, the movie is mostly a harmless ball of fluff with a bizarre premise. Why watch it today?  First, the songs, written and largely performed by Paul Williams, range from (in my highly scientific and impartial opinion) pretty good to great.

And then there's the acting. The assembled child actors are, for the most part, fine.  They're clearly having a good time, and that sense of fun counts for a lot, but they can't help but be overshadowed when they're standing next to Jodie Foster, who at this point had spent years honing her craft on TV and the Disney family film treadmill, as well as a few months of personal acting lessons with Robert De Niro on the set of Taxi Driver, which came out earlier in 1976.  Tallulah is a relatively small part, but it's a good part, and Foster's careful craft shines next to the talented amateurs around her. I've never seen an actor stand out from the rest of the cast that much before.

 

All the monsters are metaphorical.

 Dharam Veer (1977) is not a movie that fits into neat genre categories. It's a sprawling mess of a movie, really,but it's got it all - fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles, and a dubious grasp of historical accuracy.

I'll start at the beginning.  No,it's too much - let me sum up.  Princess Meenakshi (Indrani Mukherjee) lives in a small kingdom in a poorly defined historical period.  One day while out hunting she kills a tiger, only to be attacked by ruffians who are secretly employed by her evil brother Satpal (Jeevan); Satpal was warned by a prophecy that he will be killed by his oldest nephew, and figures that the easiest way to avoid it is to kill his sister before she can have any children.  However, she's saved by Jwala Singh (Pran), a humble woodsman who happens to be an expert fighter and "master of Samurai," according to the subtitles, who roams the land with his twin katanas and a well trained falcon named Sheroo (played by Sheroo the Wonder Bird, and sometimes a puppet.). Jwala takes the princess back to his cabin to recover, and she promises him anything to repay him for saving her life.  And that's when Jwala tells her the truth: he's loved her from afar for a long time,and the only thing he wants is her hand in marriage. She can marry him on the spot,or return to the palace knowing that she's broken her vow. 

She marries him on the spot. They spend the night together, but they are interrupted by a prowling tiger which Jwala announces is trying to avenge its mate.  He goes out tiger hunting, katana in hand, and discovers a man who had been tiger-killed,so he drapes his shirt over the man and drops his katana, only to be attacked by the tiger and falls with it into the river and an uncertain fate. Meenakshi discovers the body shrouded in her new husband's shirt, and because this is the Kingdom of People Who Jump to Conclusions, she stumbles home in a catatonic daze and is married to the only king who is willing to take her in this condition.  By the time she emerges from her fugue, she's married.  She explains that she was already married,and her new husband turns out to be really understanding; he promises to treat her as a queen in public and as a widow in private, and when he learns that she's pregnant he promises to raise her son as his heir.

He may be a little too understanding, though. Satpal was exiled because of the whole "plotting to murder his sister" thing, but when he turns up at her door apparently repentant, he's welcomed and charged with protecting his sister when her husband goes off to war. Meenakshi and Satpal's wife give birth on the same night, and Satpal sneaks off with his nephew and throws him from the wall of the castle, only to see Sheroo the falcon swoop down and carry the baby away.  When it turns out that Meenakshi had twins, Satpal switches his son with his younger nephew so that his son will be the heir, but when everyone is asleep his wife swaps the babies back without telling him.

Sheroo carries the baby to his master,who was in a coma for the last nine months and being tended to by a kindly blacksmith (Hercules) and his wife.  Jwala wakes up and discovers that Meenakshi left after the tiger attack,and because this is The Kingdom of People Who Jump to Conclusions, he wanders off to mope for the next twenty years.

The Blacksmith names the baby Dharam , and raises him until he grows up enough to be played by Dharmendra.  Dharam is a natural hero, strong and virtuous, and he's best friends with Prince Veer (Jeetendra), who is secretly Prince Veer.  Everyone dotes on him, especially his uncle Satpal. Veer and Dharam sing a song about how their friendship is one of the wonders of the world and can never be broken as they wander the land being generally heroic.

While wandering the land being generally heroic, Dharam and Veer stumble into a large arena where the evil Princess Pallavi (Zeenat Aman) hosts jousting competitions. naturally  Dharam decides to joust, and naturally he's brilliant at it, but it's really an excuse to get close to Pallavi. He wins and she promises him anything he wants.  He asks for her hand, and she orders her men to kill him. 

Dharam and Veer escape the assorted guards and gladiators trying to kill them, but Dharam goes back so that he can hit on Pallavi while she tortures him.  Meanwhile Veer takes refuge with a band of Banjara, and plots a rescue with the help of the dancer Roopa (Neetu Singh).  After the escape Dharam goes back again, this time kidnapping Pallavi and winning her heart through his inherent manliness. It's a sequence that has not aged at all well and drags on a bit too long, but eventually it ends and Pallavi loves Dharam, Roopa loves Veer, and Dharam is learning the art of Samurai from Jwala, who is still alive and has become an embittered hermit with two katanas and a trained falcon named Sheroo.  (Sheroo is remarkably spry for a bird of his age.)

Everybody is happy, but there is a closet full of shoes that are waiting to drop. When Satpal finds out that Veer isn't his son after all, he gathers an Injustice League made up of all the enemies Dharam and Veer have made in the movie so far: his actual son, Pallavi's brother, Pallavi's fiance, and Roopa's fiance, who was also the leader of the Banjara band until Dharam overthrew him. The first order of business is to drive a wedge between Dharam and Veer, and that turns out to be surprisingly easy when you live in the Kingdom of People Who Jump to Conclusions and you're not worried about massive collateral damage.

Dharam and Veer are manipulated into a duel, secrets are revealed, and all the characters get on ships because now it's a swashbuckling pirate movie.  It's exciting but confusing,which kind of sums up the movie as a whole. The good news is that Pallavi and Roopa get to join in on the swashbuckling fun.