In which Biswajeet’s character ends up facing a wall studded with red-hot spikes. You don’t just skewered to death, you get barbecued in the process.

And Anwar Hussain, in yellow face, masquerades as a Chinese madman named Fu Chin, who first starts off in rumpled and faded orange monk’s habit, which disguises the fact that he’s actually a colonel… which, frankly, has no real bearing on the plot anyway.

In which, too, there are nine spectacular diamonds, which look more like bits of cheap red glass [diamonds, red?] but are very valuable—for reasons that emerge far down the line.

And London is only incidental [and is anyway often Bombay being passed off as London]. It’s mostly Beirut or Hong Kong instead.

But. To begin at the beginning, in Calcutta, where Renu (Mala Sinha), the daughter of a jeweller, reaches her father’s shop to find Daddy missing, and a stranger holding a message from him. Daddy has been kidnapped and taken away to Hong Kong, and he’s told Renu to come immediately. The stranger holds out Renu’s passport and ticket, and Renu hurries off…

In the den of Fu Chin (though he isn’t introduced as such to Renu at this point), Renu is brought up to date on matters. Her ancestors, too, were jewellers, and some generations back an ancestor of hers had crafted a necklace of priceless diamonds for a raja. During the uprisings against British rule and whatnot, that raja found himself in danger of his life and handed over the necklace to an English friend for safekeeping. It has since been in the custody of that Englishman’s family, his descendants.

Now Renu has to go to England, pretending to be a princess, laying claim to the necklace. If she doesn’t, it’s barbecue spikes for Daddy [see start of this post].

Renu complies, going to London and meeting Lord Statham (Sopariwala), an old and ill man, who seems happy to be able to finally return the necklace to its rightful owner.

Renu takes the necklace from him, and the next we see, she’s holding an auction where she’s trying to sell it off. [Why? Didn’t Fu Chin, with his barbecue-spikes wall, scare her enough? He wanted the diamonds, not any proceeds from the sale thereof, so why is Renu going rogue?] Among the bidders is a sinister-looking Shetty, who is willing to pay up to Rs 5 lakhs for the stones.

Weirdly enough, Renu puts a stop to the auctioneering [which was weird to start off with, anyway] at this point and goes off to party. Unfortunately, Shetty and his gang (of whom the main henchman seems to be Surya Kumar, acting as a guy called Robert) are also there. They chase Renu all around the place, leering at her and frightening her out of her wits.

Finally, Renu escapes and gets into a cab, only to have the cabbie turn around and leer at her. It’s Robert! He pulls a gun on her and shoots.

Fortunately, the bullet only grazes Renu’s neck slightly. It knocks her out but doesn’t kill her, and Renu is [presumably] dumped by the side of the road. Here she is [again presumably, since this isn’t shown] found and brought home by a man named Jeevan (Biswajeet). When Renu comes to, it’s to find herself in his home.

While Jeevan has been looking after the unconscious Renu, Shetty and Robert and their crony closely examine the diamonds. Shetty is disgusted to discover that the diamonds aren’t the ones they’re after. He explains to his baffled companions: the diamonds they want have a formula written on the back of each stone, a formula to destroy the world. That’s why those diamonds are so valuable.

[This, of course, raises a bunch of questions: at what point was that formula put on those stones? By whom? And what has Renu, who seemed a complete innocent, done with the real diamonds? Where did she get these substitutes and how did she know to substitute them?]

Renu, meanwhile, is busy falling in love with Jeevan, who takes her around town and sings songs to her while bemused Londoners look on and terrified pigeons flap away in Trafalgar Square.

Now and then Renu remembers why she’s in London, and she tries to leave. Especially one night when Jeevan’s long-lost step-brother Bahadur Singh (Johnny Walker) turns up, having first broken a bathroom window and frightened Renu. Bahadur Singh confronts Jeevan: isn’t his real name Vijay, isn’t he the son of Ajay? Jeevan accepts all of this [though this is the last we hear of him being actually Vijay, and it’s never even clarified why he’s going around calling himself Jeevan].

Renu had been happily reading in bed before Bahadur Singh came calling, but now she packs her suitcase and walks out. [Why? Does she wonder if Jeevan will ask her to give up the guestroom for Bahadur Singh?] As always, Jeevan gets her back and this time, with Bahadur Singh looking on, proposes to Renu. They’ll get married, everything will be all right. Renu is happy. [And absent-minded; this woman seems to have forgotten all the deep shit she and her father are in].

Sadly, just as Renu is getting ready for her wedding [which is being held downstairs, with Bahadur Singh officiating and the only witness around], the goons catch up with her and kidnap her. This time, Shetty puts the screws on Renu. She is tortured with psychedelic lights and Shetty’s voice booming at her to tell him where the real diamonds are. Finally, Renu crumples and agrees to tell all.

The next we know, Jeevan and Bahadur Singh, hot on Renu’s trail, discover that Shetty & Co. have taken her off to Beirut. They’ve injected her with some drug, so Renu goes quietly along, tottering about as if she’s tipsy, but otherwise complying.

While Bahadur Singh falls in love with a local dancer (Helen), he also finds time to help Jeevan rescue Renu and get her out of the clutches of Shetty.

But what Renu doesn’t know is that Jeevan is not quite the clean-as-a-whistle, good-as-gold Hindi film hero she imagines him to be: when night falls, he creeps out surreptitiously to meet a shady-looking stranger, and a deal is struck. For so many thousands of dollars, Jeevan will get hold of the diamonds and pass them on to shady stranger, above.

What is going on? Who is Jeevan, really? How did Renu manage to get the diamonds away, and to whom?

Your guess is as good as mine. Or Brij Sadanah’s, who directed the film, or Omar Khyam’s (whose story this was) or Ramesh Pant’s, who wrote the screenplay. Or, perhaps, whoever edited the version Ultra have uploaded on their YouTube channel.

What I liked about this film:

The music, by Laxmikant-Pyarelal, to lyrics by Anand Bakshi. As was the case with several of Biswajeet’s films in the latter half of the 60s, the songs are far better than the film itself. In Night in London, among the songs I really like are the title song; Ba hosh-o-hawaas mein deewana, and Nazar na lag jaaye kisi ki raahon mein.

Mala Sinha, who I think was far better in films that involved Western chic and spy games. Aankhen was where she especially excelled, but she’s nice enough in this: pretty and pretty stylish in many of the scenes.

What I didn’t like:

I think that should be amply clear from all the asides and remarks scattered through the synopsis, above. This film doesn’t merely have plot holes; it’s riddled with them. There is plenty of stuff—mysterious conversations, even more mysterious people doing odd things, etc—which seems to have been put in simply to up the thrill of the film, to increase the suspense. They’re not explained, there’s no rational reason for them. What you end up with is an occasionally (very occasionally) slick-looking film which, in the final analysis, makes very little sense.

However, here I am willing to give Brij Sadanah and his crew the benefit of the doubt. I don’t know how much this film has been tampered with by more recent editors, the butcher-crowd that mans the YouTube channels of various movie uploaders, including big guns like Ultra. I’ve seen several other Brij Sadanah films, including Yeh Raat Phir Na Aayegi and Victoria No. 203, which have had mostly coherent and suspenseful scripts and direction. It may very well be that Night in London did have its loose ends tied, its questions answered.

On the whole, a pretty enough film, but a damp squib as far as the suspense is concerned.