Eleven months into this series, I'm finally figuring out the perfect hack for how to watch Bollywood movies while still keeping a normal schedule.
Namely, watch the first half on a weekend afternoon during what we refer to in our house as "quiet time" -- a period from about 4:30 to about 7 when the kids are allowed to be on their devices -- and then the second half that night after you and your wife go your separate ways for the evening.
Conveniently, Sholay (1975) even had an intermission to provide a line of demarcation between the two.
Yes, my 11th installment of Audient Bollywood was what I was referencing last weekend when I wrote this post about intermissions. I meant to hop on the regular monthly Audient Bollywood post in the day or two that followed, so as not to forget too much of what I wanted to say about Sholay, but this led to that and I'm only just getting to it now. I think I remember most of the salient takeaways of my viewing.
While researching the post about intermissions, I discovered they are still common in Indian cinema today -- and in Indian cinemas, referring to the locations rather than the industry, where they will insert intermissions into many longer western films that obviously don't have the when we see them. Interestingly, though, this is the first film I watched for Audient Bollywood that featured an actual intermission that was considered to be part and parcel to the film, part of the print that endured and that we watch today. And it's not like Sholay is the longest film I've watched for this series, though at 204 minutes, I suppose it's second longest only to Lagaan, which is a full 20 minutes longer.
No, I think the intermission we'd see if we were watching something in an Indian cinema nowadays is inserted after the fact and can be excised when the movie is distributed internationally. In 1975, that was not the case, and the break in Sholay came along just as I need to start making dinner for my kids.
One other funny, non-story observation to make about this film before I get into its plot. I can't tell at what point over the years this was added in, but every time a character started to smoke a cigarette -- which was not a huge number of times, maybe a half dozen over the course of the film -- a message came on screen reading "Cigarette smoking is injurious to health." It would stay on screen for the duration of the cigarette being smoked, and then it would disappear. Too funny.
I chose Sholay because a) I wanted one more older film, as in pre-1990s film (I'll be finishing with a film from the 1990s in December), and b) it was on the list of top ten Bollywood dance numbers from Time Out, which I have been consulting all year. Since my December movie is not on that list, I'll finish this series having watched exactly half of those ten movies: Sholay, Baar Baar Dekho, Lagaan, Bajirao Mastani and Dil Se. That means that Devdas, Dabangg, Khalnayak, Mr. India and Mughal-e-Azam will all have to wait for future viewings intended purely for pleasure.
(And since this is the last time I will mention this list, I should probably answer the question as to why I considered this one random list to be definitive. The answer is, I didn't and don't, especially given some of the disappointing dance numbers the list singled out. But I had to go with something, and I didn't want to overcomplicate things.)
But once I started watching Sholay I realized there was a reason to watch it beyond its supposedly superior dance number, a reason specific to me but one that should apply to any cinephile: It's kind of a loose adaptation of Kurosawa's classic Seven Samurai.
There are only two "samurai" here -- thieves Jai (Amitabh Bachchan) and Veeru (Dharmendra) -- but they fulfill a similar function to the titular samurai in Kurosawa's film. They are brought to a remote village to defend it from a band of marauders led by the wicked Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan), having proven their mettle as criminals and their abilities as sharpshooters. The jovial pair were identified by a retired police officer named Thakur (Sanjeev Kumar) when he was hunting them as part of his job. Thakur is kind of the paterfamilias of the entire village, and when the threat from Singh and his cohorts seems impossible to resolve, Thakur can think of only this pair to help quell it.
Of course, Seven Samurai engendered proper westerns, most obviously The Magnificent Seven, but likely others as well. Sholay, then, feels like a western as well, as it involves guns and horses and all the other traditional western ingredients. As such it is my first western, of sorts, in this series. And its debt not only to Kurosawa, but also to Sergio Leone, is clear. (If memory serves, there is sort of a whistling score from time to time, and at least one scene that relies on no dialogue and mostly sounds and close-ups of action, like the opening of Once Upon a Time in the West.) As if director Ramesh Sippy wanted to make every one of his allusions completely clear, the actor who plays Thakur, Sanjeev Kumar, even has a bit of a Japanese appearance to him. You look at this guy and tell me if he wouldn't look completely normal turning up in a samurai film:
Even though some of Sholay verges on theft, it ended up being yet another film in this series to exceed four stars on Letterboxd. Actually in this case I ultimately went with exactly four stars, but I was considering 4.5 for a while. It has a satisfying epic arc, and explores the central relationship between the two thieves with a nice sense of humor that offsets the moments of violence and sadism by Gabbar Singh.
A discussion of Sholay would not be complete without mentioning Veeru's love interest, a frivolous carriage driver named Basanti, played by Hema Malini. She's a self-proclaimed chatterbox and she brings a great additional energy to the movie, supporting the humor that serves as an undercurrent between the two leads. In a scene involving her that is not played for humor, Singh requires her to keep dancing in the hot sun or a sniper will put a bullet in the captured Veeru. Singh's men break glass at her feet, and she has to keep dancing even while the shards are cutting the soles of her feet.
I had hoped this was the dance number that had been singled out by Time Out, but actually, it involves an older Bollywood icon who went by the single stage name of Helen, who had become famous as a Bollywood "vamp." In a one-off scene, she also dances for Singh's men. This scene did not particularly speak to me, and I imagine the writer included it primarily to honor this Bollywood legend. It's another case where the list may have had the right movie, but had the wrong dance scene in that movie.
Jai also has a love interest, played by Jaya Bhaduri, but she doesn't sing and dance, so she doesn't get a paragraph to herself. Or at least, not a very long one.
One final note about Sholay: Every time I see the title I can't help singing "sho-lay, sho-LAY, SHO-lay, SHO-LAY!" to the tune of Dolly Parton's "Jolene."
Okay I will wrap up Audient Bollywood in December with a movie that had a minor cultural moment in 2022.
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