Past Misdeeds: Qurbani (1980)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.


Rajesh (Feroz Khan) leads the charmed life of a manly man Robin-Hood-like thief, a life that is more than a little sweetened by the existence of his beautiful nightclub singer girlfriend Sheela (Zeenat Aman, alas not allowed to do more than that description promises). Between random motorcycle riding and disapproving of Sheela's job (but hey, she disapproves of his job too, so they're on the same level here), there's not much that troubles him.

Until one of his jobs goes wrong and he meets his own private nemesis in the form of Inspector Amjad Khan (Amjad Khan, playing himself, but as a rather sleazy cop!?) and goes to jail for a bit.

While Rajesh is behind bars, Sheela meets single dad Amar (Vinnod Khanna), and befriends and nearly falls in love with this second hairy-chested piece of manliness, who comes with the bonus of being a widower with a highly decorative daughter. Sheela's taste in men is a little dubious, since Amar did also stand on the wrong side of the law once, working as a smuggler for Rakka (Amrish Puri), until he disagreed with his boss's personnel politic of shooting people who fail at their jobs and quit.

When Rajesh gets out of jail, he and Amar meet and fall madly in love with each other (well, the film calls it friendship, but isn't really fooling anyone).

This could be the beginning of a wonderfully progressive three person relationship with bonus child, but alas, Rajesh's jail acquaintance Vikram Singh (Shakti Kapoor) and his sister Jwala Singh (Aruna Irani and her mad contact lenses of doom) have other plans.

They really, really hate Rakka (or his afro), you see, so much so that Jwala has an illuminated portrait of the man on her living room wall next to her horse pictures.

What better method to take revenge on him could there be than to kill him and blame the deed on Rajesh whom they'll only need to rope into stealing all of Rakka's money? Rajesh isn't too enthusiastic about the whole thing - even without knowing about the scape goat part - because he has promised Sheela to give up on his wicked ways. But what is Amar's little daughter Tina (Natasha Chopra) good for if not for being kidnapped to press Rajesh into service?

Qurbani was edited, produced and directed by Bollywood's hairiest chest Feroz Khan himself and say what you will about his overly manly acting, he does handle his three other jobs very nicely indeed.

His direction shows a much finer eye for frame composition than was typical for some of Hindi cinema at the time, as well as a love for weird camera angles, and a more than a little dubious sense of fashion without ever overdoing it and getting so crazy as to be eyesight-destroying.

The obligatory musical numbers by Kalyanji Anandji are mostly Bollywood standard, not as mad as they sometimes get, but extremely useful to strengthen the emotional underpinnings of the film and delight its viewers with the lesser of Zeenat Aman's talents.

It has to be said that super macho Feroz Khan was an equal opportunity cheesecake director, and so friends of hairy, sweaty manliness will have their own moments of joy here.

Of course the film features the typically enthusiastic and slightly insane fight choreography of its time and place, with lots of jumping and kicking, a serious amount of back flipping and a friendly disinterest in physics or the way human anatomy functions. All of that is of course a good thing if you're like me and like your action scenes entertaining instead of realistic.

The whole film has a very fine flow to it that even the usual annoying scenes of comic relief (Jagdeep in the house, why does nobody burn it down?) can't disturb too much.

The plot consists of a merry randomness of incidents which are less bound by logic than by Qurbani's thematic core of male friendship and sacrifice (as the title promises). Somehow, Khan manages to tie up his plot threads satisfyingly enough to come to a tight and exciting finale and a surprisingly poignant ending that shows a spiritual connection to the brand of epics of manly friendship people like Cheng Cheh or John Woo traded in in Hong Kong.
Now, all this might sound like a million other action melodramas, and Qurbani is most certainly never original in the things it does, but the trick lies, as it often does, in the film's flawless execution of its tropes, and in the sure hand Khan shows in deciding when to use them.


There is something deeply satisfying about a film like Qurbani that knows which buttons a genre film has to push and then pushes them expertly and incessantly with a sort of relish that stops just shy of decadence.

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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More rambling, different place

Kevin Pyrtle of WtF-Film.com has graciously invited me to contribute to his site.

This means not much of a change for The Horror!?, since my regularly scheduled natterings will still appear here and I'll diligently link to everything that will go up on WtF-Film.

So, what could be a better start for really anything than a film featuring Feroz Khan's hairy chest?

It's time for adventure (and barely concealed manlove) in Feroz Khan's wonderful Qurbani!

 

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