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.
Night in London (1967)
Author Archives: dustedoff
Island in the Sun (1957)
RIP, Harry Belafonte.
I have an admission to make: Harry Belafonte was the first singer I ever crushed on.
When I was a child, my parents had a large collection of LPs, and among the many singers we heard on those, the ones who stood out for me were Connie Francis, Pat Boone, Jim Reeves—and Harry Belafonte. I still remember a Belafonte album (Belafonte Sings of the Caribbean) we had, which was one of my favourites. This one was also present among the LPs at my maternal grandparents’ home in Kolkata, which we visited sometimes for Christmas. My mother’s father had worked for the Indian music giant HMV, so their home had a massive collection of LPs, with Belafonte front and centre. We didn’t just listen to his carols and hymns at Christmas; we listened to every song he’d made popular, from the soulful Jamaica Farewell (one of the first English language songs I learnt to sing) to hilarious ones like Matilda, Man Smart Woman Smarter, and the classic There’s a Hole in the Bucket (which, by the way, is also a favourite with my daughter: she and I sing it together and always end up having a good laugh).
I loved his voice. I thought the photo of him, smiling and so handsome, on the LP cover, showed that he didn’t just have the most fantastic voice, he was also easily the best-looking of all the singers.
Ten of my favourite crooner/club songs
This post has been in the pipeline a long, long time. When I first started this blog way back in November 2008, the very first ‘ten favourites’ song list I compiled was for Madhubala songs—and (unlike what I now do, which is to steer clear of assigning ‘absolute favourite’ status to any particular song), I actually went out on a limb and marked one Madhubala song as my favourite. That was Aaiye meherbaan baithiye jaan-e-jaan. And, even as I was putting that down on my list, I thought to myself: “I must do a list of my favourite crooner and club songs someday.”
Well, here it is, finally. It’s not as if I’ve spent the last many years thinking of this post; but the ‘Crooner Songs’ folder has been there on my laptop all these years, even with some screenshots taken of the songs I knew had to be part of the list.
In any self-respecting, urban-centric film of the 50s and 60s, a club song was almost de rigueur. It would probably be picturized on someone of the likes of Helen, but not necessarily: at times, what was needed was not someone who was a fabulous dancer, but someone who could project the oomph one associated with the club singer.
Aandhiyaan (1951)
In 1951, fresh from the success of the Dev Anand-Geeta Bali-Kalpana Karthik starrer Baazi, Chetan Anand decided to make a film that would highlight the very interesting aspects of film-making he had been learning from studying the works of various European directors. ‘Based on a true incident that took place in Amritsar’, as the film’s credits read, the story of Aandhiyaan was written by Chetan Anand himself, along with Hameed Butt.
The film’s credits roll to an unusual sequence of shots: in each frame, one actor or the other is shown, battling the eponymous ‘aandhi’ or storm, though in this case literal rather than metaphorical.
The story is centred round a young and zealous lawyer named Ram Mohan Kapoor (Dev Anand). Ram lives upstairs from his munshi (Ratan Gaurang), whose daughter Rani (Nimmi) has long been in love with Ram, though she’s too shy to let him know that. When the story begins, Ram’s mother (Durga Khote) is due to arrive, and Ram is getting ready to go to fetch her from the station. Rani makes tea for him, and an excited Ram confides in her: he’s asked his mother to come because he wants her to fix a match for him. With a girl he likes a lot.
Jighansha (1951)
Meaning, Blood-lust.
More than Hindi cinema, I think, Bengali cinema has drawn from Western literature: including not just the more serious literary works, but also a good deal of popular literature. Of these, mysteries have been adapted often (possibly a reflection, too, of the fact that there’s been a long and much-respected corpus of Bengali mystery and detective fiction?) This is one, based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles.
The film begins with a brief and mysterious scene in which somebody finds a dead body among the marshes of a principality called Ratnagarh. We are never shown the face of the man who stumbles upon the corpse; but the news of this death is brought to Kolkata, to the ace detective Smarajit Sen (Shishir Batabyal) by Dr Palit (Kamal Mitra), the doctor at Ratnagarh. Sen’s assistant, Sanyal (?), is also present.
Sara Akash (1969)
When Basu Chatterji passed away in 2020, I wanted to pay a tribute to him, because he was one of my favourite directors from the 70s and 80s (and he directed Byomkesh Bakshi, a television series I love). But given that I restrict my blog to films from before the 70s, there was only one film that would fit: Sara Akash, Chatterji’s first film, which was released in 1969.
This was in June 2020, at the peak of the lockdown. The situation was dire. We were getting news of people we knew who were ill with Covid, even a few who had succumbed. Close family were suffering the fallouts of the lockdown. I tried watching Sara Akash, but couldn’t sit beyond the first five minutes. Perhaps I was not in the right frame of mind.
But now I was tempted to give it another try, because I’d been reading about the film in Anirudha Bhattacharjee’s Basu Chatterji and Middle-of-the-Road Cinema (my review here).
Aadhi Raat ke Baad (1965)
I dithered over this film for a long time after I’d finished watching it. Should I review it? Should I not? It wasn’t a great film, but it wasn’t terrible, either. It wasn’t as if a review was needed to warn potential viewers off it. Or vice-versa, to alert people to a film they must see.
Eventually, I decided that at least a brief review was in order, because this film had an interesting connect to another film I’ve wanted to watch for a while: Mr X.
In 1957, Nanabhai Bhatt had directed a science fiction film (borrowing from HG Wells’s novel The Invisible Man) that starred Ashok Kumar and Nalini Jaywant. According to this web page on Mike Barnum’s blog, the film is about a man who ingests a drug that makes him invisible; he uses this invisibility to go on a Robin Hood-esque spree, helping the poor by robbing the rich. The cops, baffled by the invisible man, dub him Mr X.
I’ve long wanted to watch Mr X, mostly because it features one of my favourite N Dutta songs, Laal-laal gaal. The film isn’t available online, at least, or even on DVD, from what I can tell; perhaps there are carefully guarded prints deep in some archive…
Ten of my favourite spooky songs
Some days back, I watched A Shamshir’s Woh Koi Aur Hoga (1967), starring Mumtaz, Feroz Khan, and Sohrab Modi. It turned out to be one of the most incoherent and illogical films I’d ever seen: Sohrab Modi’s character, a professor, is drugged (by Asit Sen in yellowface, a Chinese villain pretending to be the professor’s Indian servant) and made to do the dirty work of the Chinese: that is, inject hapless victims with something that will drain the blood from their bodies. The corpses are then covered with wax and sold off as mannequins to the wealthy gullible who want realistic-looking statues in their homes (and are possibly not averse to the frightful stench).
But, digressions aside: there was also, in the film, Mumtaz. Wearing a shimmery white dress and roaming about the hills at night, singing a sad song. Repeatedly.
Watching Ae raat ke andhere mujhko gale lagaa le, I was reminded of many other songs with a similar premise: a ghostly figure (invariably female), wandering about in the night and singing a signature spooky song. There is often an echo, sometimes other props, something else perhaps to suggest darkness, mystery, ghosts.
Gambit (1966)
I have a soft spot for heist movies.
And Shirley MacLaine.
And Michael Caine.
And movies about inept crooks.
Which, given that they all come together in Gambit, made this a film I had to watch.
Gambit begins in Hong Kong, where Harry Dean (Michael Caine) surreptitiously follows a woman through the streets of Hong Kong. He watches until she goes into a night club.
Later, we see the woman in action, as she (Shirley MacLaine) dances at the club. Harry takes a seat beside his friend and associate Emile (John Abbott) and they watch the woman, Emile with a surprised but approving look on his face. Yes, she will be the perfect fit.
New Book: ‘The Pledge: Adventures to Sada’
I have a new book out!
The Pledge: Adventures to Sada has been published by Speaking Tiger Books, and has been written in collaboration with film-maker Kannan Iyer, of Daud and Ek Thi Daayan fame (yes, finally my blog gets linked, even if it’s a tenuous link, to more recent cinema).
Dustedoff 