Bairaag (1976)

Let me begin by confessing that I have a weakness for what I call "temporary blindness movies". Maybe this is why I like "Deedar" so much. So when I heard of a movie with Dilip Kumar in a triple role involving blindness I was very keen to watch it. I have to say, I was not disappointed.

The movie begins by introducing us to a well-to-do couple Kailash (Dilip Kumar) and Pushpa (Saira Banu).

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He is a workaholic with some eye-problems which he never finds the time to have treated properly and he also forgets the wedding-anniversary. One day while driving along a rather scenic road the two have an accident which leaves him blind.





His wife doesn't take the news very well and only recovers her will to live when she finds out that she is expecting. It seems a bit odd that she looses the will to live given that it is Kailash who ends up blind, but there you are. This is not the only odd thing in this movie.




Pushpa delivers twins; however one of the boys is born blind and Kailash can't cope with the idea of having a blind son and asks the Doctor to kill they boy. The Doctor, who is a family friend, is shocked, but agrees in the end to take the child away. He puts the baby in front of a temple where he is picked up by a kindly priest.

You want me to do what to your son?


Not the best start in life:


Meet the kindly priest:



During the following credit sequece we learn that the abandoned boy, Bola, has been taken in by the family of Thakur Chandraban, who is overly fond of alcohol and has a grand-daughter about the same age as Bola. Bola basically runs the household and is very devout, only the grandmother of the family dislikes him because he is an orphan. Bola is also very good friends with the temple snake.

There is a real snake as well, but I thought its stone-replica would do:



Worhship gives an opportunity for filmi irony:




Kailash on the other hand, is tormented by what he did. He is still under the impression that his son was killed. Pushpa worries about her husband and in the end he tells her what happened. She can't bear it and falls ill.

Pushpa worries:


Her worry seems to have affected her choice of cloth for her husband, too (though they do match the wallpaper):


Their son Sunjay grows up to be badly-behaved and disrespectful to his parents (now, why doesn't that come as a surprise). Pushpa dies while he is still quite young.

Sunjay grows up into a fairly irresponsible playboy. He has a fiance,Sonia, who is very cute, and also an affair with Helen. This isn't too good as Helen is also the girl-friend of a gangster.

Sunjay (and a mace????!)


His fiance:


Conversations which might make you want to reconsider your commitment to your engagement:



Payer-meeting, yes, sure:



All this running around with Sunjay makes Helen's boyfriend's hair stand on end:


Back in the village, Tara is rather interested in Bola, who she teases in a couple of songs. Bola however is too aware of his humble position as a servant and of the disadvantage of his disability to realise what is rather obvious to the viewer. In any case, Tara's grandmother has other plans and she brings a proposal from a city-person. Tara then makes it more than clear to Bola that she would rather marry him (she waylays him in the temple with a garland), but he is shocked and refuses.

Tara looking earnest


Tara and Bola in a swimming saucer:


She really has her work cut out:


and now he is getting worried:




Now, we know that the city-person is Sonia's no-good brother, who needs money. He demands a large sum in dowry. While the family doesn't have that much money, Bola has been saving up, and keeps his money in the temple guarded by the snake. However, when he tries to give the money to Sonia's brother he is bitten by the snake. Miraculously this leads to him gaining his eyesight. He sees this as a command to go and recover the money.



So, Bola ends up in the city, while at the same time his brother is still flirting with two women at once. However, things are about to get complicated for Sunjay as well. He decides to skip his own birthday party; and instead elope with Helen, who is pregnant with his child. Now, Helen is practical and takes some of her gangster friends money to help them in their new life, and possibly also as revenge for him beating her up. Anyway, the next morning, Helen is dead, and Sunjay faced with a murder-charge. However, Bola had turned up at Sonia's brothers house and was forced into impersonating Sunjay at his birthday party where he got very drunk, being unused to alcohol and got into a fight with Helen's gangster friend. So, he has an alibi as he was at home nursing his wounds when Helen was killed.

Poor Helen:



Poor Sonia is rather confused by her fiance's sudden change in behaviour and dress:


In order to keep Sunjay safe, Sonia's brother comes up with the brilliant plan to make him go back to the village as Bola. Everybody is happy to have Bola back, and the family even agrees to his marriage with Tara. Tara, however, is the only one who suspects that Bola isn't who he claims to be.

Will the two brothers end up married to the correct girls? Will the family every be re-united? Who killed Helen? And what part does the this gentlemen play?



I did like the movie, especially because it gave Dilip a chance to be both tormented and suffering, as Kailash, and goofy, as his two sons. I preferred Bola to Sunjay, but they were both well done characters. The girls are mainly there for decorative purposes, which is okay. I felt bad for Sonia, but I suspect this is at least partly due to the fact that I liked the actress better and would have preferred to see more of her and less of Tara. However, Tara was impressive in her insistence on marrying the one she loved, never mind his is a blind orphan of unkown parentage.

There is also a very young Kader Khan:


some quirky interior decoration:



as well as a novel approach to laundring money:

Bargain Bin Beauties II : Shehzada (1972)

It was with some trepidation that I started to watch this movie. I had never seen a movie with Rakhee where she hadn't been a long-suffering mother, sometimes with the variation of a long-suffering, mentally imbalanced mother. I had grown somewhat weary with her doing this, especially as to me she appeared to acting just the same in the flashbacks which were meant to show happier days.

However, she really surprised me in Shehzada. Yes, she does turn on the waterworks on more than one occassion, but she also a plays a very charming and in some ways quite feisty young girl, and she does it very well.

The movie certainly has an impressively colourful start:



The film tells the story of the titular Shehzada (Rajesh Khanna), but it actually opens his grandmother (Veena) making a great entrance into her palatial mansion. We learn swiftly that she has a sickly son (Karan Deewan) (suffering from a mysterious disease which makes him cough a lot and leads to liver failure), who lives separated from his wife and child.



This child has grown up to be a truck-driver. He is happy with his lot and ones nothing to do with his grandmother as she isn't willing to accept his mother (Pandri Bhai) as her daughter-in-law.

Meet our dashing hero:



He is also friends with Chanda (Rakhee), who runs a small stall.



She has an evil uncle who tries to get her married to somebody old enough to be her grandfather, and she is saved by Rajesh's intervention. He takes her home to meet his mother, and we then learn why she is estranged from her in-laws: During the struggle for independence, her father, who was a freedom fighter, shot her father-in-law who was working for the British government. Rajesh's grandmother was unwilling to have her husband's killer's daughter stay in the house and his father had insufficient backbone to insist that his wife be allowed to stay.

Here we have the ideological conflict:


I have to say, grand-father looks rather dashing in his picture:



The rest of the movie deals with how this situation is resolved, and involves Rajesh stating repeatedly that his home is where his mother is, while his grandmother insists that her house is his home, and his father's health takes a turn for the worse. While the story is quite interesting, it is not what makes watching this movie so enjoyable. That is the interaction between Rajesh, Chanda and Rajesh's mother, Janki. The young couple is very cute together, and they are very sweet with Janki in a non-cloying way. Especially, since they take some time to own up to the fact that they have feelings for each other, and Mum is just waiting for them to tell her and finds their evasions quite funny. I really had great fun with the first ninety minutes or so. Towards the end there were too many impassioned speeches for my taste, and I enjoyed Rajesh Khanna much more when he was not giving speeches. He just seemed to be a bit wooden when he declared for the umpteenth time that his home is where his mother is. It was nevertheless interesting to see the same choice, namely staying with your mother, once presented as a paragon of filial duty and once as an act of spineless cowardice. Context obviously is important here, but Rajesh attitude to his grandmother does feel a bit harsh on occasion. It is a great strenght of the film that the grandmother is not portrayed as evil. She is stern but clearly fond of her son and grandson and her antipathy towards her daughter-in-law is at least comprehensible. It was certainly an enjoyable movie and to me a revelation as far as Rakhee was concerned.

The young couple being cute:


Mother and son:


Couply cuteness at night:



and in wet:


Bienen und Bluemchen:


The other thing that is rather fascinating is that somebody is doing interesting stuff with the camera work. Lots of shots in unexpected angles and perspectives.

Maybe he got bored during the fight-scenes:







Sitting pretty:


The slightly different flashback:


There are also a lot of stripes:


possibly a sunset too many, but rather nice sunsets nevertheless:


and an awesome carpet:


And last but not least, the comic relief, who is actually quite funny:


I have to say, that I generally find these sorts of characters less irritating in older movies.

Zameen Aasman (1984)

Zameen Aasman starts with Sanjay (Sanjay Dutt) and Anita (Anita Raaj) meeting and him taking an instant dislike to her. He is not entirely unjustified, as she first pours coffee over his suit, then bumps her car into his car, and finally causes him injury while roller skating. However, their fighting soon leads to romance and they are rather cute together.

The not very promising first meeting:


Thinks are looking up (and how did she overlook him in that shirt)


Young love:



She tries to make him jealous by pretending that her father send the picture in that envelope. He isn't buying it:


However, Anita is only staying for the holidays and soon it is time for her to return to Bombay. Before she leaves, Sanjay meets her aunt Kanchan (Rekha) who likes him a lot. She also remembers meeting she a Dr. Kailash Goyal (Shashi Kapoor), and her friendship with him which ended when he got married to somebody else, without ever realizing that she had developed feelings for him (Men, what can you do). This is a bit puzzling, as we know that Dr. Kailash is Sanjay's father, who is no longer in this world, as they say in the movies.

Their first meeting:






He is quite oblivious to her feelings:


We also find out that a very unpleasant if rather good looking man who was black-mailing Kavita is in fact Kanchan's step-brother.



Sanjay's mother Kavita (Rakhee) also has noticed his son's interest in Anita. She allows him to travel to Bombay, after he has moped around the house love-sick for a while.



His mother also comes to Bombay and everything seems to move along smoothly;

We get more young love, this time with added flowers:


until the point when Kavita comes to Anita's father's house to discuss they proposal, and he refuses, as he doesn't believe that Sanjay is her son. We then see another flashback, which explains, why he is so convinced that Sanjay isn't her son and what Kanchan's part is in the whole story.

The second flashback starts of happily enough:



But then there is shock:


and much angst:







and just as things are looking up:



this happens:



and all that remains is a photo:



The two young lovers are very unhappy about Anita's father withholding his permission for their marriage and plan to elope,

Waiting for the partner in "crime"


He wasn't expecting her:


but Kanchan stops them and much drama follows until we arrive at the wedding.



I bought this because it has Sanjay in it, but even though is story is important for the plot, and very sweet, the movie really belongs to Rakhee and Rekha. They both play their parts with great dignity or fire, when required, and while I have my problems with Rakhee as the long suffering mother, she was very good in this. Shashi appears only in the flashbacks, but he and his actions are very important for the blood and he is most enjoyable to watch while he is on screen.

The movie also has one of my favourite narrative devices, nested flashbacks.

And no, she isn't pregnant here:


The movie also seems to believe that wearing glasses ages one instantly:







Random Sanjay pictures: