Jagir (1984)

This is part of "Bob's Your Uncle", a multi-blog-extravaganza celebrating the memory of Bollywood's great Bob Christo, who died earlier this year, initiated by the fabulous Beth of Beth Loves Bollywood. Follow this link to find out what others have to say about the wonders of Bob.

The Maharajah of Anjangarh (Kamal Kapoor) and his forefathers have amassed an incredibly shiny treasure of jewellery and gold in their times. Because the Maharajah is incredibly virtuous and devout, he's hiding the treasure away in a cave quite out of reach of everyone to praise the gods with it, instead of, say, doing something for the people he's lording over with it. Only a map hidden away in an amulet shows the way to the treasure.

But the forces of evil in form of bandit leader Lakhan Singh (Amrish Puri, of course, though for some reason not quite as often doing his goggle eyes as usual) and the Maharajah's drunken brother think there are better things to do with treasure than nothing, and assault the Maharajah's palace. As this is a masala through and through, things don't end up as anyone had planned: the Maharajah and his brother don't survive the assault, the Maharajah's loyal friend and companion Mangal Singh (Pran) loses a hand to Lakhan's anger, the Maharajah's young son (of course carrying the treasure map amulet) disappears with the help of the family falcon, as does Mangal Singh's son - the latter believed dead after having been sacrificed by his father (whose "loyalty" to the Maharajah we are supposed to admire because of this; personally, I thought he deserved every punishment he got throughout the movie for it) to distract from the flight of the heir and the amulet, but in truth saved by "gypsies".

An amount of time the film calls twenty years, but that somehow has enabled the Maharajah's son - now called Shankar - to turn into fat middle-aged Dharmendra and Amrish Puri to age not at all, later, Lakhan Singh has become a beloved pillar of the community by day and evil-doer dressing up like a Catholic missionary also by day, while Shankar has gone into the whole Robin Hood business.

Because it's that kind of movie, Shankar meets Mangal Singh's son Sanga (Mithun Chakraborty) on a treasure hunt, and both hit it off after playing around with each other's hats in a spontaneous outburst of Freudian metaphors. They also meet and learn to love a certain Danny (Danny Denzongpa, looking like he has the time of his life), who just happens to be an enemy of Lankhar's too, though he doesn't know that at this time (let's just say it has something to do with Lankhar's foster son Ranjeet - played by Ranjeet, obviously - a dead wife, and a psychosomatically mute son). This still being that kind of movie, the three will soon enough cross paths with Lakhan again, and though nobody recognizes the other, there are still enough reasons for Lakhan for trying to kill our heroes in various ways. Namely, Sanga is in love with Lakhan's daughter Asha (Shoma Anand), and the bad guy does take that whole "overprotective father" role a wee bit too seriously, while Shankar is always trying to steal the same things as Lakhan.

Obviously, Shankar also has a right to a love interest, so the lucky bastard gets to romance Seema (Zeenat Aman, as often quite underutilized, but at least allowed to kick one or two asses and shoot a few people in the finale), who is of course also slightly connected with the whole family affair. Don't worry, please, this isn't a Japanese movie, so there's not too much risk of an incest plot. Anyway, lots of other stuff happens, until old secrets are revealed, families reunited, evil doers punished and Bob Christo kicked in the face.

Honestly, when I say that "lots of stuff happens", I really mean it. Pramod Chakravorty's Jagir is one of those masalas that pack so many minor plotlines, diversions, action scenes, and moments of random awesomeness in that a running time of 170 minutes actually feel a bit short for everything the director wants to show us. There's not just always something happening, but there's always something fun happening, as if Chakravorty and writer Sachin Bhowmick had taken a long hard look at the genre they were working in and decided that there's nothing wrong with its traditions and its structures that couldn't be fixed by replacing two thirds of the regular slots for comedy scenes and one third of the regular slots for melodrama with action sequences of the patented Bollywood style. Since the film is as long as it is (and 170 minutes are quite long even in Bollywood), there are still more than enough dramatic scenes and jokes (sometimes even funny ones) to give Jagir the expectedly baroque plot.

And, because it is also that sort of movie, Jagir includes so much ridiculously awesome stuff that I'd still be quite excited about it if it had no plot at all. To wit, apart from the things already described (padre Puri!) you will see: a Bollywood super animal in form of a falcon (often stunt-doubled by a stuffed falcon, making him doubly wonderful) who not only repeatedly saves Dharmendra's enormous behind, but also knows how to shoot a gun; a guy with steel teeth - obviously not at all inspired by a certain Bond character - having a car part throwing duel with our heroic trio; Pran doing one-armed Hindi kung fu like Wang Yu's long lost brother; Mithun in red cowboy boots that I suspect were initially part of Zeenat Aman's wardrobe; people calling Dharmendra a young man; one of the best death trap rooms with magnetic shackles and a spiky cross under a Christian graveyard in India ever; religious symbols and their use as lock picks; pneumatic jumping from everyone except Amrish Puri; and of course golden oldies like the obligatory scene where our heroes and their girlfriends (poor Danny's status as a widower alas means he doesn't have one) dress up as a "gypsie" dance troupe and sneak into a bad guy's base - well, tent camp. What's not to love?

But what, you might ask, does all this have to do with Bob Christo, the supposed target of today's ramblings? Well, in his career, Mister Christo might have been in every Bollywood movie made between 1980 and 1995, but because of this astonishing workload he was in many of them only for five or ten minutes, as is the case in Jagir. As you know, Bob was usually the actor a Bollywood director used when he needed a physically impressive white guy specialised in being evil to play the main henchman of the evil mastermind's main henchman, a position where his face made contact with all the great feet in Bollywood - like in this particular case those of Mithun and Danny (I suspect only Mac Mohan - also in Jagir of course - has been kicked or hit more). There is an obvious historical fairness (and a show of a re-growing self-confidence in a former colonized country) in having a white serial bad guy in post-colonial Hindi pop cinema getting punished by the hero of the hour. Watching Christo, I can't help but imagine (though I know it's probably not true) he knew that whenever Amitabh punched him in the groin in a movie, Amitabh was actually punching the British colonial reign (see also Mard). I imagine Christo accepting that, polishing his bald head, smiling about taking on a role that has to be taken by someone, so it might as well be him, and going on to the next movie.

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Commando (1988) - The Bollywood one

The Eighties, age of bad action movies, bad ninja movies and rampant nationalism, or - as in this case - bad Indian nationalist ninja action movies featuring not bad but downright evil dance numbers. This is, of course, something I have always dreamt of.

The film starts innocently enough. A slightly puffy guy (Satish Kaul) takes his little son out on their daily training routine. There are many things a young Indian MAN has to learn, including jumping from a roof into a swimming pool, getting hit by his father in the face and impregnating the ground. Well, the last one could be push-ups, but I doubt it. But a good father won't stop at his son's physical education, he will always try to awaken in his child an appreciation for the important things in live, like never bowing to anyone and being constantly ready to spill one's blood for the motherland (sweet, pure and innocent Mother India).

As it goes, Dad soon proves his commitment by catching a few bullets meant to kill Indira Gandhi in full sight of his wife, who doesn't take too well to her husband's death.

An unspecified number of years later (judging by his face and paunch about forty) Kid Commando has turned into Chander / Chandru (whatever it is the subtitles call him at the moment, always played by Mithun Chakraborty), whose years of diligent beer drinking training have finally paid off. India's biggest arms manufacturer has offered him a job working for them as a commando (or as I would call it: "armed security guard").

Finally, Chand can give his lifeblood for his beloved country (queue Indian national anthem here) and pay for the psychiatric treatment of his ailing mother, who has been driven mad by his father's dead. At first, I wasn't all that sure about the quality of her treatment - putting a woman in a big room with other women and letting her tear her hair doesn't look very expensive or therapeutic to me. In truth most of treatment's cost is based on the price of ballet tickets, as we will learn at the film's ending.

Unfortunately, not all is well at the arms factory. Unknown to its owner Kailashpuri Malhotra (Om Shivpuri) the evil mastermind Mr. Marcelloni (Amrish Puri) uses the factory's products not for the good of holy, pure and incredibly innocent Mother India!

In fact, Marcelloni is paid by "a neighboring country" (oh, what country might that be, pray tell) to destabilize (holy, pure, innocent and motherly) India by playing the Indian Hindus and Moslems against each other. For a project like this, even someone of Marcelloni's stature (and he is not merely great, he is a genius, let him tell you) needs helpers. Besides a training camp full of ninjas, led by Ninja (Danny Dezongpa, who certainly looks swell in his red satin ninja ensemble), he employs Malhotra's partner and the security chief of the factory to steal badly needed weapons for him. He told us he's a genius.

It really isn't surprising nobody has discovered the dastardly plan up to now, when one looks at the subtlety and care the traitors exhibit.

On Chand's first outing as security guard, their chief orders his soldiers to not open fire without his explicit orders, whatever may happen. Would you believe the transport is attacked by terrorists just then? Or that the chief orders his soldiers to lay their weapons down? How could anyone see through this plan?

All would go well for the Evil Ones, if Chand wouldn't discover his talent for patriotic (oh! glorious Mother India!) disobedience and attack the terrorists and their ninja cronies. What follows is one of the better action scenes of Bollywood cinema I have seen, possibly thanks to its close (like a Siamese twin) resemblance to a scene from American Ninja. Now that I mention it, the whole film has quite a few parallels to American Ninja, ignoring the dancing and bigger paunches.

The enemy's advantage in number forces our hero to retreat - fortunately not before demonstrating the real usefulness of a screwdriver - pulling the arms factory's owner's daughter after him. Asha (Mandakini) accompanied the convoy to "see original terrorists", which is as spunky as it is stupid. To my disappointment, Asha's spunkiness shrinks the longer the film goes on.

During their flight, the two rest in the wreck of a hay-transporting plane that also houses a helpless and innocent cobra who is promptly slaughtered by his paunchiness. Oh, and our heroes fall in love.

At some point, the two have crossed the border to another neighboring country, a place peopled by Indians wearing fake eyelids and demonic eyebrows while wearing Japanese sombreros - it's possibly Chindia, or Chinustan. Among those slightly disconcerting people dwells an even stranger creature, Ram Chong (Satish Shah), a fat old dude who thinks Asha & Chand are Asha Bosle and Kishore Kumar. To the sweet sounds of Ennio Morricone he offers to lend them his fabulous red vintage car, if they will just sing a little song for him. Of course they do, not even stopping when their enemies arrive and one of the stranger car chases of my movie nerd career begins. It isn't necessary to stop singing anyway - the old guy's car is outfitted with James Bondian gimmicks like oil spilling nozzles, mechanical boxing gloves and the ability to turn into a flying model car, ahem, I meant outfitted with a parachute of course.

When they return, Chand is reprimanded heavily for his weapon and women-saving ways, has a fight with one of his commando colleagues (Hemant Birje), who will become his best friend, parties hard, fights more ninjas, destroys fruit wagons during a chase sequence, is framed in most devious ways as evil terrorist spy, escapes from prison, has to sneak into the enemy's base in a neighboring country, has a dance dance party, does the robot, kills more evil people, makes things explode, murders a bunch of weaponless people (who are evil enemies of sweet, loving and innocent Mother India, of course), has the mandatory fight on a cable car, prevents the murder of another Gandhi by Ninja and restores his mother to sanity.

By the love of Michael Dudikoff, that was fun. Sure, Commando's production is slapdash (look at Mithun's training outfit, or look at Mithun, for that matter), its special effects of dubious specialty (it's hard for me to decide what is "better", the hills turned into a mountain range by a few scrawled lines in post production or the brilliant model work that is even more beautiful than that of Ajooba), the soundtrack cobbled together from parts of Once Upon A Time In The West and Star Wars (I  understand, I am a fan too), the editing bad and the acting only done by Amrish Puri. But all these are things I expect, even demand of an 80s Ninja/action film. As long as a movie in the genre features surprisingly competent fights and a ninja called Ninja I am happy as as a loon.

There are lots of other things to admire in Commando, from the interesting inside view into B-movie security measures (tight as a great big hole in a wall, I tell you) to the wish to only steal from the best without false modesty or shame, this film delivers everything someone of my taste could possibly ask warm.

 

Warm thanks to Todd of Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill! for recommending this movie and especially to Beth of Beth Loves Bollywood for granting me her copy of this timeless work of art.

 

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