Thank You, Jeeves! (1936)

Posted on by

2

What I didn’t like about this film:

Yes, I am breaking with tradition: this is not going to be the usual type of blog post format I use for film reviews on Dustedoff. For the simple reason that this travesty of a film doesn’t deserve that much time and effort.

So, what I didn’t like:

The mockery they’ve made of a Wodehouse story. Writers Joseph Hoffman and Stephen Gross, and director Arthur Greville Collins, give credit to Wodehouse but all that remains in the film that is even vaguely connected to Wodehouse and his style are the two main characters: Bertie Wooster (David Niven) and his gentleman’s gentleman, Jeeves (Arthur Treacher). Nothing else, not the elements of the story, not the language, not the story, is anything like the Jeeves-and-Wooster stories.

The characters are insipid. Wooster isn’t a chump; Jeeves is. In fact, Jeeves is such a moron, he doesn’t even realize he’s literally on the edge of something big. He is distinguished only by that stiff upper lip; no brilliant brains, no coming up with genius schemes to haul the young master out of the mulligatawny. In fact, when Jeeves eventually does come to Bertie’s help, it’s with fists flying. It’s Jeeves’s fighting skills, not his brainpower, that comes in use here.

The other characters, too, are dull and boring. Not a single flat-footed village policeman falling off his bicycle; not a single pair (let alone the usual three or four) of star-crossed lovers who go through bouts of jealousy, suspicion, disapproving parents, etc. No bossy aunts. No newt-loving, orange juice-guzzling, spineless nincompoops. No silly females who think stars are God’s daisy chains. Not a single interesting, memorable, funny character.

The utterly flat plot. A mysterious woman named Margerie Lowman (Virginia Field) barges into Bertie’s home one night; she is being pursued by two men, who continue to watch from the sidewalk. She pretends to know Bertie’s (non-existent!) brother, and on that pretext, stays part of the night—leaving in the wee hours of the morning through the back door. Bertie, in love with her already (yes, that’s believably Bertie, I will admit), follows along with Jeeves, and finds himself in a most unfunny (though not especially dangerous) plot involving stolen plans of some sort.

Lame. When Wodehouse weaves a criminal plot into his stories (and he does that very often), it’s always very skilfully done. It’s always fabulously convoluted, there are invariably sudden twists and turns that throw everything out of whack, and the object being pursued is never anything as mundane as a plan. Diamond necklaces, priceless statues, incendiary memoirs, a prize pig: those are the things people steal in a Wodehouse novel.

The racist stereotyping. Halfway to the country inn to which they’re following Margerie Lowman, Jeeves and Wooster give a lift to an African-American saxophonist (Willy Best). He bumbles, he gapes, he plays his sax, he tumbles about. He is the stereotypical gollywog brought to life, and made me most uncomfortable.

The slapstick. The climactic scene, while not exactly the pie-in-the-face type of lots of other comedies of that era, is still pretty slapstick. Not quite the Wodehousian style.

Bertie falls in love and is all set to get married. This is serious stuff. Or, at the other extreme, it’s juvenile humour. What it is not is Wodehouse.

So, be warned. I have watched several Wodehouse-inspired old films (and some not so very old ones) over the years and have come to the conclusion that none of the old film-makers really did any justice to the magic that was Wodehouse. They used his name, they used his famous characters, they banked on his ability to amuse people—and then they went their own way with what they thought would amuse audiences.

Possibly—just possibly, if you’re unfamiliar with Wodehouse and you’re easily pleased—you might not find this one utterly irritating, or at least awfully tedious. If you are a Wodehouse fan, though, I’d suggest you give this one a miss.

What I liked:

David Niven. Not because he makes for a good Bertie (because this Bertie isn’t really Bertie), but because he’s Niven. A very good actor, and always watchable.

(If you do want to watch Thank You, Jeeves—don’t say you weren’t warned—there’s a print here, on YouTube).

Ten of my Favourite Suman Kalyanpur Songs

Posted on by

38

In May, I posted a tribute to Asha Bhonsle, and Anu remarked that ‘with her passing, an era has ended’. A comment I agreed with, but to which blog reader Pratick Mukherjee replied by saying that we still have Suman Kalyanpur and Sudha Malhotra.

And sadly, we do not have Suman Kalyanpur any more: she passed away on May 31, 2026, at the age of 89. An immensely talented singer, and one who proved her worth in one song after the other, but who remains underrated, often unfairly compared to Lata Mangeshkar. Even though their voices, I think, were very similar—but Lata was a colossus no-one could really beat.

That, however, is a debate for elsewhere, and for another time. For now, I want to focus on Suman Kalyanpur, and to celebrate her work in ten songs. I had dithered over whether I should focus on ten duets or ten solos, and then decided to not restrict myself, because my favourite Suman Kalyanpur songs include both duets as well as solos.

Continue reading →

Aarzoo (1965)

Posted on by

32

A couple of months back, my sister Swapna was invited to head a quiz team at a pub quiz (Jai Arjun Singh, who was also there, wrote about it here). Telling me about the quiz later, Swapna mentioned that there was one question that even Jai didn’t know. In Aarzoo, which place in Delhi does Rajendra Kumar’s character say he belongs to?

Nobody could answer that question. But the answer is Okhla Village.

… which sort of struck a chord with me, because till we shifted from Delhi to Noida, my husband and I had spent many years living very close to Okhla. And Noida, in case you weren’t aware of this, is actually an acronym for New Okhla Industrial Development Authority. Okhla follows us around. Or we refuse to really move away from Okhla.

This incident reminded me, though, that I have never reviewed Aarzoo on this blog, though I’ve watched the film at least twice. Time to amend that, I decided.

Newly-minted medical graduate Gopal (Rajendra Kumar) and his neighbour Ramesh (Feroze Khan) have been best friends since their childhood. Gopal’s younger sister Sarla (Nazima) and his widowed mother (Achla Sachdev) regard Ramesh pretty much the same as Gopal: a member of the family, a brother/son just as Gopal is.

Continue reading →

Asha Bhonsle: Ten Duets, Ten Co-Singers: Part 2

Posted on by

42

When I posted this list  of ten Asha duets last week, the plan had not been to post a follow-up list as well. But then, blog readers began commenting on the post, and several of them posted songs that I really like, with playback singers I hadn’t mentioned. After all, when you’re doing a list of just ten songs, the tendency—and I admit I succumbed to this temptation—is to include your favourite songs. All the duets with Rafi, Kishore, Mukesh, et al, featured there. And those songs with these singers that didn’t actually get listed, I at least made it a point to mention.

Even when I’d posted that list, I was ruing the fact that I had still not got around to writing about Asha’s songs with, say, her sister Usha Mangeshkar. There were, in addition, a few rare songs with relatively little-known singers, too, that I had had in mind, but hadn’t written about.

So many good songs on the back burner. I decided a Part 2 was in order. So here it is. Ten duets sung by Asha Bhonsle with a fellow singer who wasn’t listed in the earlier post. As always, these songs are all from pre-1970s Hindi films that I’ve seen. These are in no particular order.

Continue reading →

Ten Singers, Ten Duets: The Timelessness of Asha Bhonsle

Posted on by

39

(Apologies for the hiatus, the result of a series of unavoidable circumstances). 

Last month, when I posted a solos list as a tribute to Asha Bhonsle, a couple of blog readers asked me if I would be posting one (or more) follow-up posts. After all when Lata Mangeshkar passed away, I ended up publishing five posts, a total of fifty songs showcasing the solos Lata had sung with fifty different music directors or music director pairs. Surely Asha merited something similar? Yes, indeed she does, but I personally think Asha’s most stunning solos were sung for a handful of composers like OP Nayyar and SD Burman during the 1950s and 60s. She did sing songs for a wide range of music directors, but I find a lot of those songs relatively forgettable.

I decided therefore to focus this post on another aspect of Asha’s career: her duets: Romantic, funny, flirtatious, poignant—and so much more. Songs where her voice merged with that of a co-singer to create magic.

Continue reading →

Ten Composers, Ten Solos: The Magic of Asha Bhonsle

Posted on by

60

I know I am late. Asha Bhonsle passed away, at the age of 92, on April 12. Within a couple of hours of the news of her death, there were tributes cropping up all across the net. Song lists, essays, memories, some misplaced attempts to jump on the bandwagon even if one wasn’t too sure what the fuss was about.

I am late, yes. I have to admit I was a little benumbed—Asha has always been one of my very favourite singers (dare I be an iconoclast and admit that I liked her more than Lata?). But more than that, she symbolized for me an older, sweeter time: an era of kinder films, gentler films, of sublime music and innocence. Asha was the last of the stalwarts, the last one standing of those who had created the magic of the 50s and 60s.

Continue reading →

Raahi (1952)

Posted on by

14

This was a film I watched by way of tribute to Nalini Jaywant earlier this year. I had initially not planned to review it, but there were several points about Raahi that I found unusual enough to make me decide it needed to be documented.

I first heard about Raahi on Anitaji’s blog, where she mentioned that it was based on Mulk Raj Anand’s novel Two Leaves and a Bud—which is where one of the songs of the film, Ek kali aur do pattiyaan, draws its inspiration. Anitaji had included this song in a list of songs picturized in tea gardens, and it intrigued me. The story, set in a tea garden where friction between the workers and a heartless, predictably colonial (money-minded, racist, contemptuous) management causes problems, sounded like something that might merit watching.

Raahi begins on a country road in Assam in 1945. A Britisher (S Michael) going by in a jeep loses his temper at Ramesh (Dev Anand), who’s walking in the middle of the road.

Continue reading →

Ashwamedham (1967)

Posted on by

10

My go-to expert for opinions on old Malayalam and Tamil cinema is Anu. Some years back, I’d been complaining to Anu about how so few old films from the South are available with English subtitles, but then I found a bunch of them on Jio HotStar. Anu asked which ones I’d found, and then was kind enough to give me her opinion on the films. About Ashwamedham, she wrote: “Ashwamedham deals with the social attitudes towards leprosy patients. Fabulous performances, especially from Sathyan. If you want to see the then-reigning triad of Malayalam actors from that age – Sathyan, Prem Nazir and Madhu – this is the film to watch.”

That sounded good, so why not watch (finally!)?

The film begins in the home of Keshavan (PJ Antony), whose wife Laxmi (Santha Devi) is expecting her tenth child. She’s quite sick of the whole thing and had been wanting to get surgery done to prevent her getting pregnant again, but Keshavan had refused. Now she’s pregnant again, and very upset about it. Already they have lost three children; already they have four daughters whom they need to marry off… the strain, both financial as well as emotional (not to mention physical, on Laxmi) is tremendous.

Continue reading →

Ten of my favourite ‘Housework Songs’

Posted on by

75

This needs some explaining. I don’t mean songs that extol the virtues of doing housework (as someone who does more housework than the average middle class Indian woman, I cannot imagine ever extolling the virtues or joys of housework—it’s possibly the most thankless, relentless and utterly monotonous job out there). But the monotony of housework, the fact that you can get nearly all of it done without really applying your mind or having to concentrate, means that you are free to do something else. Especially something musical.

My mother-in-law invariably turns on the radio and listens to songs as she goes about her work. But my mother, from as far back as I can remember, used to sing. As she went about dusting and the cooking and whatnot, I’d hear her singing. She still has a wonderful voice, and back in her heyday, it was stunning—and her repertoire was amazing, all the way from hymns to hits by Elvis and Jim Reeves (and some old Hindi songs: as lullabies, she sang O mere pyaar aaja to my sister, and Yehi woh jagah hai to me).  I too, when I’m doing housework—especially when I’m cooking—sometimes sing. All sorts of songs.

So, too, do a fair number of people onscreen. Here, then, are ten songs that feature people singing as they go about doing housework. Besides my usual criterion, about the film in question being a pre-70s one that I’ve seen—I’ve imposed one more rule: that the person should be doing some work in the course of the song (this is why Kismat ki hawa kabhi naram doesn’t feature on my list; while Bhagwan’s character is in a kitchen, surrounded by pots and pans and even wearing a chef’s cap, he never uses any of those for anything remotely connected to housework).

Continue reading →

Aaya Saawan Jhoomke (1969)

Posted on by

27

When Dharmendra passed away some months back, it reminded me that while I have seen a good bit of his filmography from the 1960s—including little-known, forgettable films like Begaana, Main Bhi Ladki Hoon, Chandan ka Palna and Jab Yaad Kisiki Aati Hai—I haven’t reviewed too many of his films. Some, yes; but plenty, even much-loved films or well-known ones, have somehow slipped under the radar. Time to correct that, I decided.

And why not with this film (directed by Raghunath Jhalani), which I had last seen perhaps a little over 20 years ago, and which I remembered vaguely. Nirupa Roy, having (once again) misplaced a child. Aruna Irani on the verge of becoming an unwed mother if some good Samaritan doesn’t come to her rescue. Asha Parekh, lower lip quivering and eyes swimming with tears. Some very well-known songs.

Continue reading →