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Thursday, November 20, 2008Shiva Ka Insaaf Release Year: 1985Country: India Starring: Jackie Shroff, Shakti Kapoor, Poonam Dhillon, Vinod Mehra, Mazhar Khan, Parikshat Sahni, Gulshan Grover, Birbal, Satish Kaul, Nandita Thakur Writers: Ravi Kapoor, Mohan Kaul, Kader Khan Director: Raj N. Sippy Cinematographer: Ashok Mehta Music: R.D Burman Producer: Romu N. Sippy Until the mid eighties, the costumed superhero as we know him in the West was a figure largely absent from Indian cinema. The primary exceptions were those intermittent attempts to appropriate the Superman character that seem to dot the history of modern South Asian film, such as the competing attempts by directors Mohammed Hussain and Manmohan Sabir, Superman and Return of Mr. Superman, which were both released in 1960 and , curiously, starred the same actor, Jairaj, in the title role. Yet in the neon decade the industry seemed to see something of a mini renaissance in the appearance of such characters. Superstar Amitabh Bachchan's attempts to revive his career after his less-than-stellar turn in Indian politics, perhaps by way of overcompensation, included not one, but two portrayals of uber-abled caped crusaders, first in the relatively well received Shahenshah and then in the dreadful Toofan. In addition, 1987 saw yet another pass at the Man of Steel in the form of the infamous Superman, aka Indian Superman. And, most famously, there was that same year's mega-hit, Mr. India, in which Anil Kapoor portrayed a humble citizen who, granted the ability to become invisible at will, used his powers to defeat the enemies of his country. But before all of these there came another film based around the exploits of a costumed hero of superhuman abilities, 1985's Shiva Ka Insaaf.     The absence of traditional superheroes in Bollywood up to this point might well be explained by the fact that, despite that absence, the nation's screens saw no shortage of colorful figures fighting for the cause of justice and virtue with the aid of superhuman powers. These figures appeared in those films known as "Mythologicals", a staple of Indian cinema since its very inception, based on the religious epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Indeed, even Hollywood might have seen religious-based films become more of a staple genre had the tracts of Western religion been populated by such fanciful deities as the monkey god Hanuman, a fearless and cheekily charismatic hero who in modern times has even proven himself worthy of fighting alongside Ultraman. In fact, when, in the 1960s, India began to produce its own indigenous comic books, it was the heroes of the Ramayana and Mahabharata that featured in their pages. This is not to say that comics had not been produced in the country prior to that, but up to that time they had only been comprised of reprints of popular Western comics, such as Mandrake the Magician, Lee Falk's The Phantom, and, of course, Superman. It was only in the 1970s that bona fide and uniquely Indian superheroes began to see print, and it is perhaps due to those characters gradually making their way into the larger public consciousness that we saw films such as those mentioned above being released in the following decade. Still, the connection between India's superheroes and its cherished religious figures remained strong, as many of these films clearly evidence. In Toofan for instance, Amitabh's character is granted his powers by Hanuman, and in Shiva Ka Insaaf, our hero, Shiva, derives his powers from... well, the name pretty much says it all. (This practice can be seen even in more recent Bollywood superhero films, such as 2006's Krrish, in which the hero derives his name from that of Krishna.)     It was not the presence of a masked superhero alone upon which the movie Shiva Ka Insaaf depended for its novelty, however. The film is, in fact, sometimes mistakenly identified as being India's first film made in 3D, though that honor actually goes to 1984's My Dear Kuttichaathan, an enormously popular children's fantasy shot in the Malayalam language. Still, Shiva Ka Insaaf followed hot on the heels on My Dear Kuttichaathan, and can -- and did -- rightfully make the claim to being the first Hindi film shot in 3D. In India, the 3D process ran pretty much the same course that it does periodically throughout the rest of the world, making a big initial splash. which, in turn, inspired a short run of increasingly less successful films trumpeting its use (which included, in addition to Shiva Ka Insaaf, Indian cheapy horror maestros the Ramsay Brothers' 3D Saamri, aka Purana Mandir 2) before the industry abandoned it due to its financial returns not justifying the added expense of labor and capital that it required. In keeping with that familiar trend, Shiva Ka Insaaf contains within it all of those gimmicks that you'd expect from a movie riding a brief wave of 3D-mania, loaded with "gotcha" moments in which all manner of things are thrust at the camera in the hope of inspiring startled gasps on the part of the audience. Shiva Ka Insaaf features as its titular hero the actor Jackie Shroff, at the time a freshly-minted superstar thanks to his lead role in the blockbuster hit Hero the previous year. I have to admit that, prior to seeing Shiva Ka Insaaf, I had only seen Shroff in films of more recent vintage, and, while he has obviously aged into a beefy and appropriately craggy-faced picture of Bollywood machismo in the interim, it was shocking to see him here so fresh-faced and comparatively scrawny. Even his mustache looked undernourished to me. And, when suited up as Shiva, his heroic demeanor is undermined by a comportment that I can only describe as being a bit on the slouchy side. Of course, as many movie stars throughout the world have had the sad opportunity to learn, superhero movies, with their frequently ridiculous-looking costumes and over-hyped expectations, are an invitation for unflattering comparisons. We can't all be John Phillip Law in Diabolik, after all. In fact, none of us can, save John Phillip Law -- and God help the poor, pear-shaped everyman who tries to pour himself into a painted-on leather catsuit to prove otherwise. So simply add Shroff to the long line of thespians whose run-in with a form-fitting, head-to-toe leather superhero uniform left them looking more deflated than ennobled.     Anyone who has watched a lot of Bollywood action films knows that in them the parents of young boys are something of an endangered species, and that, if a pair of them are introduced during the first five minutes, odds are pretty high that they will soon be gunned down by a cackling villain while little Junior watches from some hiding place he's squirreled himself away in. Now, I've seen enough Spaghetti Westerns to know that this particular trope is not the exclusive property of Indian cinema, but it is only in Bollywood that it sees such steady repetition as to seem like the observance of some kind of ritual. In any case, Shiva Ka Insaaf makes admirably short work of this set-up, seeing that little Bhola's lawyer father and doting mother are dispatched by the ruthless bandit Jagan (Shakti Kapoor) within mere minutes of the opening credits. Of course, from his hiding place, Bhola can only see the telltale scar on Jagan's hand as these vicious acts play out, and thus are the seeds of vengeance and its lifelong pursuit sown. With his dying breath, Bhola's father tells the boy to seek out one of three men -- the names and photographs of whom are provided in a diary he keeps -- to take him in and give him a proper upbringing. Fortunately for Bhola, it turns out that all three men -- whose relation to Bhola's dad is never made clear -- live under one roof, Full House style. These men are Ram, Robert and Rahim (Vinod Mehra, Parikshat Sahni and Mazhar Khan), whose names echo the idealized vision of harmony between Hindu, Catholic and Muslim seen in numerous masala films -- especially those directed by Manmohan Desai, such as, most famously, Amar Akbar Anthony. Perhaps what unites Uncles Ram, Robert and Rahim, despite their different faiths, is the fact that they are all hirsute macho men and that each, in his own way, is a raging badass. To illustrate this, we are shown a series of vignettes, the first of which shows Ram wielding his fists and a pair of bamboo sticks that he uses like nunchucks with fearsome effectiveness, sending a bad guy flying through a wall and leaving a perfect man-shaped hole in his wake. Next we see Robert practicing a unique skill in which he launches little metal balls -- directly at the camera, naturally -- from little cups located on the tips of his shoes, hitting his targets with startling accuracy. Finally Rahim demonstrates that he is very good with a whip. All three, it seems, are ideal candidates to prime Bhola for the task of avenging his parents' deaths, and so follows a training montage taken directly from a Liu Chia-Liang movie (seriously, Bhola even has to run across those floating logs like in 36 Chambers of Shaolin), during which Bhola goes from being portrayed by a child actor to being portrayed by twenty-eight-year-old Jackie Shroff, despite the fact that his adopted uncles only age in that typically Bollywood, mild-graying-at-the-temples way.     Finally, Bhola's uncles take him to a temple to the god Shiva, where they bestow upon him his leather-heavy costume, a ring in the shape of Shiva's third eye (all the better to leave a distinctive mark on those he punches) and a replica of Shiva's weapon, the trishul -- or trident -- which he is to use to announce his arrival, striking terror into the hearts of those evildoers who are about to be on the receiving end of his wrath. At this, an eerie wind sweeps through the shrine, and his uncles tell him that the power he will be wielding will not be his own, but rather that of Shiva working through him. Now, whether this means that Bhola is now blessed with superpowers is unclear, as most of the crimefighting abilities he will display from this point on are in the form of the type of exaggerated punching and leaping around that we normally see from Indian action heroes -- only in their case without them being burdened with masks, capes and constricting head-to-toe leather uniforms -- though there are a couple of instances in which it appears that Bhola/Shiva can fly. Whatever his abilities may be, however, there is no doubt in my mind that Bhola/Shiva's most super power of all is his poetic way with a mortal threat, aided greatly by the fact that, whenever he puts on his costume, his voice automatically becomes equipped with its own echo unit. Thus is made even more grimly authoritative such pronouncements as "I will make you writhe so much that death will shiver looking at you." Or when, on another occasion, while trying to extract information from a recalcitrant goon, he intones ominously, "Even if Shiva goes to a cemetery, the corpses there get up and tell their names and addresses." Still, while generally a man of few words, Shiva does at times prove long-winded, as you'll no doubt find after hearing his little introductory speech being delivered for the umpteenth time. This, in response to his prey's panicked queries as to his identity, goes as follows: "The breeze that will extinguish the fire of injustice... The cure to poor men's pains... I am Shiva!"     Given the typically intricate plotting of Bollywood films, you might think of my above summarization of Shiva Ka Insaaf''s first act as being somewhat glib. But Shiva Ka Insaaf is far from typical in that regard, and shows an economy in its approach to storytelling that, unless you consider the circumstances, is a little surprising. Few Indian films of its era clock in, as Shiva does, at a mere two hours, but I imagine that this truncated length represents an attempt on the part of its producers to limit, to some extent, the expenses and technical complications involved in filming a movie in 3D. The resulting need to cram all of its business into what, to its makers, must have seemed like a very brief running time leads to a narrative that is uncharacteristically lean, and free of those many subplots and parallel storylines that make up the normal masala film. Now, I'd be lying if I said I didn't think the film could benefit from the introduction of some of those elements, but we should perhaps be grateful for what we have. After all, director Raj N. Sippy might not have been able to integrate those disparate elements as expertly as, say, Shekhar Kapur did with Mr. India, and we might have instead ended up with something as sprawling and unfocused as Toofan, a superhero movie so overburdened with plot that its superhero ends up being crowded off-screen for most of its length. Shiva Ka Insaaf may indeed boast a story that is little more than rote superhero boilerplate, but, as a frequent viewer of Indian films, I have to confess that it's nice to on occasion be let off easy: to part ways with a film after a non seat-numbing investment of time and without having to have kept track of all of its characters and tangents by way of copious notes. Anyway, with Bhola's superheroic transformation now complete, his uncles determine that it is time for him to go to The Big City, for that is where they have determined his parents' killer has migrated, despite them having no clue as to his identity. (Hey, my praising the movie's brevity doesn't mean that it doesn't sometimes come at the expense of sense.) To this end, they provide him with an entre to a job at a big city newspaper, where he is to work in the guise of a bespectacled, mild mannered reporter. Mind you, Jackie Shroff's take on this oft-essayed role ends up being an insult to bespectacled, mild-mannered reporters everywhere, as it involves a stuttering caricature of simple-mindedness and social retardation that borders on cretinism. Still, this somehow does not prevent the newspaper's beautiful female editor, Rekha (Poonam Dhillon) from giving him a job, thus setting us up for the inevitable triangle between Bhola, who falls hard for Rekha, and Rekha, who ends up falling even harder for Shiva. Now, as to the root of Rekha's attraction, I'd love to quote Batman and say "It's the car", but Shiva doesn't even have one, as evidenced in a later chase scene where he takes after a carload of thugs on a bicycle. (One article that I read about this film, written by a South Asian writer, cited this scene as singling out Shiva as being the most Indian of superheroes.) Must be the leather, then.     Meanwhile, we find that the intervening years have seen considerable upward mobility on the part of our old friend Jagan, as his relocation to the city has been accompanied by a transformation from grubby, scarf-wearing dacoit to white-suited, highball-swilling underworld kingpin, and has in turn necessitated him being re-christened with the cryptic but suitably sophisticated-sounding appellation "The Doctor". (No, he doesn't have a Tardis. Nerd.) Once Shiva has made his presence known around town, striking the appropriate amount of fear into its criminal underbelly, Jagan and his son, Vikram (Gulshan Grover), take it as their first order of business to eliminate him. And so begins the series of free-wheeling, violent encounters between Shiva and Jagan's army of goons that are essentially the very type of business you would presumably be watching a movie like Shiva Ka Insaaf for in the first place. And, unless you have expectations of gritty realism, you shouldn't be disappointed, as these scenes come replete with loads of unnecessary acrobatics, loudly resounding punches thrown directly at the camera, and Shiva skewering his adversaries with little mini trishuls that he throws with deadly accuracy. One of these aforementioned action set pieces involves Shiva being lured by Jagan's men to a warehouse filled with packing crates, where they then try to kill him by running him over with their cars. Inserted, at certain points, into the footage of real cars crashing through stacks of real crates -- I'm guessing, in order to somehow achieve the desired 3D effect -- are poorly matched shots of what are obviously toy cars crashing through stacks of miniature crates, which then fly out toward the camera. In like fashion, during the fight that ensues, whenever one of Jagan's henchmen is hurled or falls from the rafters, it is represented by an -- again, very obvious and, by all appearances, pocket-sized -- doll being dropped onto the camera. These are both pretty typical examples of the caliber of miniature work you see in older Bollywood movies -- going back as far as such methods were employed and extending forward to as late as the mid-nineties -- and it's something that, by virtue of its naive charms, I've found myself becoming completely obsessed with. Nothing makes me happier these days than to be watching some old Indian movie and suddenly see a scene such as those that I've described above play across the screen, and the shoddier it looks, the better.     I should point out, however, that the crudeness of those effects is not due to them being primitive by necessity. It wouldn't have required that much greater of an expenditure of cash or resources, if any, to make those models slightly more detailed, or to film them from an angle that would have created an illusion of scale. Nor, in my opinion, is it a matter of Bollywood effects crews of the day simply being inept. Rather, it's the result, I think, of a particular approach to special effects that puts less of a premium on realism, preferring instead to simply suggest the thing represented, while letting the effect itself be seen by the audience for the ingenious bit of trickery that it is. It's a self referential form of movie magic that, by its very obviousness, invites the audience to be gleeful participants in their own deception. It also both exemplifies and enables that promise of escape into a totally fabricated reality that, for many of us, makes Indian commercial cinema so irresistible. As for Shiva Ka Insaaf's most important special effect -- that is, its attempted illusion of three dimensionality -- I cannot offer an evaluation. The only way the movie can be viewed these days is in the stubbornly two dimensional format of cheapo Indian DVD, and, even if it were to generate enough interest to merit a screen revival in all its intended glory, that wouldn't be likely to occur on my shores. Still, anyone attempting to watch the movie even in its current format will do best to be advised of its origins, otherwise the near constant thrusting and hurling of objects into the camera with little or no narrative justification will prove pretty perplexing.     For myself, what was most interesting about all of that was how, unlike other 3D movies that I've seen, in which the effect was generally used to provoke in the audience a feeling of physical threat (ooh, watch out for that ping pong ball!), Shiva ka Insaaf is just as likely to tease its audience with temptation. There are any number of nasty looking weapons brandished at the viewer, but he or she is just as often -- or even more often -- tantalized with the offer of a plateful of tasty looking food, a handful of candy, or even a fistful of cash. When you consider that the majority of the film's audience would have come from the lower economic strata of Indian society, you have to wonder if Shiva Ka Insaaf didn't perhaps cross some line beyond Bollywood's mandate to provide wish fulfillment and enter territory where it could have been perceived as taunting, or even cruel. Still, I have to admit that the first thing that came to mind upon seeing one of those handfuls of colorful sweets being launched toward my face was the image of a theater full of shrieking kids joyfully leaping with arms outstretched toward the screen. And I imagine any parent would feel safe letting their child accept candy from Shiva ka Insaaf, as, aside from a couple of bloody moments and a very well-placed use of the word "shit" by Gulshan Grover, it's decidedly kid friendly. The drama never gets too intense, the overall look is bathed in that inimitable bright 1980s glow, and the score happily percolates with songs by R.D. Burman at his most lightweight and catchy. In other words, The Dark Knight this is not, and if you're looking for depth, you should have seen it when it was in 3D. However, if you're in the mood for some good-natured, if unremarkable, costumed horseplay with that ineffable whiff of spice peculiar to Bollywood, you could do much worse. Labels: Action: Superheroes, Bollywood, Stars: Jackie Shroff, Year: 1985 posted by Todd at 9:56 AM | 12 Comments Saazish Release Year: 1975Country: India Starring: Dharmendra, Saira Banu, Dev Kumar, Helen, David Abraham, Paintal, Madan Puri. Writer: Ranjan Bose, Ramesh Pant Director: Kalidas Music: Jaikishan Dayabhai Pankal, Shankarsinh Raghuwanshi Producer: Kalidas At some point, online emoticon technology will advance to the point where there is a little smiley face thing that perfectly expresses the sentiment of me shaking my fist toward the heavens and yelling, "Dharmendra!!!" And when that technology exists, I will insert it into this and several other reviews, because it seems like every time I pick some weird subgenre of exploitation film to find a Bollywood version of, when I find it, it ends up starring Dharmendra and being sort of disappointing. Take, for example, my long quest to find a Bruce Lee exploitation film from Bollywood. Eventually it turned up in the form of Katilon Ke Kaatil, starring Dharmendra and well-known Bruce Lee impersonator Bruce Le. It also ended up being sort of disappointing, even though, in addition to a showdown with Bruce Le, it also featured Dharmendra fighting a sasquatch dressed as General Ursus from the Planet of the Apes movies. I know, I know. I too thought there was no way a movie featuring those ingredients -- not to mention Dharmendra in drag -- could be disappointing, and while Katilon Ke Kaatil is well worth watching, it also managed to let me down a little. This is probably unfair. I don't know why I assumed a Bruce Lee exploitation film from Bollywood would somehow be awesome when almost every other Bruce Lee exploitation film was crappy. In the end, though, it was a decent enough movie, with lots of fist fights and guys getting punched through random piles of bricks.
Similarly, I've been on an even longer quest to find the movie Saazish, though for a long time I didn't know the name of the movie for which I was searching. You see, way back when, or at least several years ago, there was a mini-explosion of interest in Bollywood music outside fo the Indian community. This was happening mostly amongst club DJs from the UK and continental Europe, some with Indian backgrounds, others without, but all interested in mining the rich vein of breakbeats present in the ultra-funky, ultra-swanky Bollywood music of the 60s and 70s. The end result for those of us who weren't European club DJs was a series of CD releases of dubious copyright legality from various labels documenting the music that had become suddenly so popular in modern dancehalls and discotheques. This coincided with a curious surge of Hollywood stars claiming to love Bollywood and want to do a Bollywood picture. Most of that ended up being "jump on the bandwagon" bullshit, though. The closest anyone came to making good on the lip service was Will Smith, who at least showed up on whatever they call American Idol in India (umm, my guess is Hindustani Idol) to sing and pal around with the judges. The flare-up of Bollywood awareness in American pop culture even seeped into such strange places as rap music, when several stars used Bollywood breaks for their songs (including the fine rump shaker "Shake Ya Bum Bum" -- that's right! I know Li'l Kim songs), and the inexplicable use of "Chaiyya Chaiiya" from Dil Se as the theme song to Spike Lee's Inside Man. The whole thing only lasted about a year -- a little longer in the club scene -- but it was fun at the time. And we got some cool CDs out of it. One of the coolest was "Bombay the Hard Way," from Motel Records. It was a mix of music from masala action films of the 1970s. Some were remixed. Others, like the theme from Don, the DJs knew better than to mess with and so are presented in their original, unaltered form. This CD was the reason I ever bothered to start exploring the world of Bollywood action films. Around the same time, Pete Tombs' Mondo Macabro book came out with chapters on Indian horror and fantasy films, and while that was also a major impetus as well, it was the bad-ass theme song from Don that really convinced me to set my sights on the sub-continent.
Not too long after, Motel Records came out with a second volume, called "Bombay 2: Electric Vindaloo." On the cover of the CD were a number of screenshots, one of which featured a dude with a blue head and a Mandarin-collared jacket. He wasn't doing anything special, other than just standing there, but I guess if you are a guy with a blue head and a Blofeld jacket, you don't have to do much on top of that to be special. I recognized him instantly as Fantomas, or some Bollywood variant thereof, though it took a little longer for the reality of the matter so sink in: somewhere out there was a Bollywood Fantomas film. I should probably save a full history of Fantomas for a review of an an actual Fantomas film, but as fate would have it, I'm getting to this movie before any of those, so some introductions is in order. To do that, we have to travel back in time a little bit to the golden age of pulp fiction, when the pages of fantastically lurid adventure magazines were filled with the exploits of men like The Shadow, The Spider, Doc Savage, and Fantomas. Tracing the origins of modern pulp fiction can be tricky, and most claims one makes are instantly debatable. But for a lazy man like me who likes to make wild shit up off the top of his head and pass it off as research, it goes something like this: in the beginning, or at least in 1844, there was The Count of Monte Cristo. You could argue that The Odyssey was the first true work of pulp fiction, but then, you can argue pretty much everything, so for the sake of brevity, let's start this particular timeline with Dumas' thrilling tale of a guy who learns to be the most super-duper cool guy in the universe, then uses his newfound skills to mess with people who pissed him off. Dantes becomes a master of disguise, a master fencer, master boxer, and thanks to a fortuitous turn of events while unjustly imprisoned, has a veritably inexhaustible amount of wealth to finance his many exploits. It's a pretty good book, and if you haven't read it, you really should. Or at least pick up the "Illustrated Classics" mini-version or something. In the character of Edmond Dantes, it's easy to find a number of traits that would find their way into the many pulp and comic book characters of the early 20th century. Heck, Batman's Bruce Wayne is basically just Dantes without an accent mark in his name. In 1907, as the pulp era was getting into the swing of things, France was introduced to the character of Arsene Lupin. Lupin was the classic gentleman thief, a character archetype that would be reincarnated over and over again in such varied forms as The Saint, that movie where Cary Grant steals stuff, the guys from both generations of Oceans 13, and of course, that delightful Hans Gruber. Like many film fans, I delight in the stereotype of the gentleman thief, though in my darker hours, I wonder how many gentleman thieves there have actually been through the ages. I think the era of gentlemanly thievery may have passed when thieves stopped stealing precious jewels and works of art and started stealing credit cards and social security numbers. I mean, you can't steal someone's credit card number, then rakishly hop up onto a window sill, shout "Tally ho!" as you give them a jaunty little salute, and swing out the window on your grappling hook. Things were just more fun when "identity theft" meant the thief donned a fake handlebar mustache, adopted a phony German accent, and sold himself in high society circles as Baron Ascot Von Fancypants, heir to the Fancypants fortune. Into the mix, round about 1911 or so, came Fantomas, another French master thief and master of disguise. Like Lupin, Fantomas immediately caught on with the public, and a huge number of Fantomas stories were published throughout the early 20th century.
The pulps were full of similar outlandish characters. Some were heroes, some were lovable rascals. A few were actual villains. Pretty much all of them had skills beyond those of us average chumps. It wasn't long, then, until such characters found themselves parading across the relatively new medium of the motion picture. In serials and shorts, most of the pulp heroes and villains started showing up on movie screens. The ruler of the roost at the time was the creation of German director Fritz Lang. His name was Dr. Mabuse, and the inspiration behind that character seemed to be the question, "What if a guy had all that awesome cunning and intellect of the heroes of Dumas and the pulps, but he was a total dick?" I have yet to see the silent era Fantomas films, but I'm working on it. So until then, let's skip ahead. World War I. Weimar Republic. Jesse Owens, World War II. Comic books. Captain America punches Hitler. My grandpa Harley starts thinking Truman is a jackass. That should bring us up to the 1960s, right? So after a period of hibernation, the pulp characters of the early half of the 20th century are suddenly resurrected in the form of Italian and French comic book -- or fumetti -- characters and films based upon those characters. In the interim, the United states had been the stewards of the pulp characters, sustaining them largely through radio dramas and comic books. In American comic books, however, the bad guy was usually the bad guy, and the good guy was the good guy. There were very few anti-heroes, and even Batman was smiley and joking around while fighting guys like that cat who put pennies in people's ears. In the 1960s, however, Italy took over with a splashy, much more adult-oriented blending of old pulps with the wildly popular James Bond books and movies. The results were fumetti, and guys like Diabolik and Kriminal ran wild. The big difference this time around was that while the old pulps had been split pretty evenly between heroes and villains, and American comic books from the era always sided with the good guys, this new breed -- nourished as it was on the growing counter-culture distrust of authority figures -- saw the villain as hero. Diabolik, for example, would murder and steal to get what he wanted, but we still rooted for him because he was just so much cooler than the square authority figures around him -- and that includes squares on both sides of the law. It was only natural that someone would revive Fantomas and translate him into the modern jet-set, Eurospy style of film. A series of French films were thus commissioned starring the mysterious master criminal behind an expressionless blue mask. As with other films of the era, Fantomas is nominally the "bad guy," but it's never in doubt that we are rooting for him rather than the police. This time, Fantomas had an awesome underground layer, expertly designed and decorated as all 1960s villain lairs were, and a cool car. It's not surprising that such an iconic figure would be "borrowed" for productions in other countries. Thus, Fantomas appears in flagrant violation of copyright law in the 1969 Turkish film Iron Claw, The Pirate. He would show up again in 1975's Saazish, matching wits with Dharmendra, and eventually winding up as a screencap on the cover of a CD.
The problem when I got the CD was that I knew immediately I wanted to see the film, but nowhere in the CD packaging did they credit the movie from which the shot was taken. Since most of these CDs were released by one-off labels who disappeared shortly after issuing the album, Motel Records was gone by the time I contacted them to see if they could shed any light on the topic. I turned then to the Internet, but after a few years of asking about "that blue headed guy on the cover of Bombay 2: Electric Vindaloo," I'd received nothing but suggestions that turned out to be dead ends. At the time, the coverage of these types of films was considerably thinner than it is today. Well-written resources on Bollywood film were hard to find, and those that did exist concentrated almost entirely on new films or old dramas and romantic comedies. A few years ago, though, a number of sites began cropping up that were more willing to explore the battier side of Bollywood, thanks in large part to such films becoming more readily available on DVD. This meant a whole new generation could rediscover films that, even if they'd been wildly popular at one point, had lapsed into obscurity since then on account of there being no medium other than the theater in which to see them. It also helped that coverage of Bollywood films was expanding outside the boundaries of India. This is not meant as a slight on India or on Indian film historians. But when you are in the thick of something, you tend to tire of things much faster than people who are coming to the game with new eyes. Academics concentrate on the "important" films. Working film writers within India were there to write about current films and scandals. Neither population has much vested interest in dusting off memories of a movie where Dharmendra jumps a horse over a castle wall. Covering goofball exploitation films has always been the domain of dedicated fans and niche professionals, and until recently, many such fans in India did not have the means to see the films or communicate to others about them. The culture for supporting this sort of "scholarship" has existed primarily in the United States, Europe, and Japan, where the means of producing fanzines and organizing clubs was more readily available, and where the concept of films -- even the bad ones -- as something to be preserved rather than consumed and destroyed to make way for next new product was more prevalent than in places like India or Turkey. The Cahiers du Cinemart rehabilitation of weird old genre films did not trickle down to India, where films were still largely made to be consumed then disposed of.
Things have changed a lot since then. While the state of writing about old Bollywood genre films is still in its infancy, it has advanced in leaps and bounds in the past few years, and it's even advanced considerably since last I complained about this very topic -- which must have been round about the last time I reviewed a Dharmendra film. This has happened for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the growth of the Indian middle class, the rise of DVD and VCD, and the introduction of the Internet as a cheap alternative for publishing that removed the cost and organizational overhead of producing a fanzine, newsletter, or film club. It also has a lot to do with the spread of Indian culture and art throughout the rest of the world as Indians continue to immigrate or come of age in other countries. There's a whole batch of writers now who are ethnically Indian but have grown up in places like the United States and England. They're able to indulge to a much greater degree in exploring the history of a big chunk of Bollywood that was all but ignored by the academic press. For some, it's a whole new experience. For others, it's reawakening memories of loving these films as a child. Their enthusiasm draws in people from outside Indian culture, people who might be fans of crazy fantasy films or spy films but not necessarily fans of Bollywood. And they, in turn, draw in other people. And somewhere along the line, someone's dad finds out you're writing about Shammi Kapoor's pencil-thin mustache, and it brings back a whole slew of memories for him as well. And slowly but surely, Bollywood cult cinema has a network just like the one that exists for, say, Hong Kong action films or European horror movies. For the first time in a long time, you know other people who are watching and writing about Ramsay Brothers horror movies. Most of the cult film cabalism I've been a part of I came into after a support network, however thin, already existed. With the exploration of these types of films from India, I feel like we're in the midst of creating an entirely new fandom. It's a pretty cool feeling to be in on the ground floor and to know that on any given day, I can cruise on over to Die Danger Die Die Kill, Beth Loves Bollywood, Memsaab Story, Roti Kapada Aur Rum, and a number of other sites and find yet another recently rediscovered gem written about by someone as enthusiastic about these types of films as I am. It's a pleasant change from the days when I would skulk into a hole in the wall Indian video store looking for Ramsay Brothers horror films and be met with nothing but puzzled looks of either clulessness or disapproval. The celebration of Indian cult cinema is coming of age, and it's as diverse as the country and the cinema itself. Bollywood cult cinema is emerging on the world scene and being put on context next to everything from Eurospy films to Mexican luchadore and monster movies.
Which is to say that, after years in the wilderness, a group of people were starting to emerge that might bring me closer to figuring out what movie that goddamned screencap had come from. And it finally happened one day several months ago. I had decided that the screencap was a mistake, that it was just a still from one of the French Fantomas films of the 1960s that was erroneously placed on the cover of a Bollywood music remix CD. I didn't really believe it in my heart of hearts, but it was all I could tell myself so that I could stop thrashing fitfully about in my sleep, only to wake up in a cold sweat and screaming "Bollywood Fantomas!!!!" On a whim, and because I have an addictive personality, I did one last Google search for "bollywood fantomas." Nothing on the first page. Why do I even bother? Well, I thought, might as well look at the second page of results. And there it was. A link that said "Saazish: I think the boss is based on Fantomas." Could it be? So I followed the link, which happened to be a review from the site Memsaab Story. And scrolling down I saw...let's see. Helen's giant eye. Dharmendra in what looks like a helmet from an Italian science fiction film, a fake Chinese guy, and...my God! It's beautiful! There he was, staring back at me in all his expressionless blue-gray glory. I felt like Louis de Funes, the cop forever in pursuit of Fantomas in the movies and always one step behind the master criminal. "Bollywood Fantomas!" I cried triumphantly. "This time I have caught you!" One quick trip to IndiaWeekly, and a few days later I owned my own copy of the movie whose name had eluded me for so many years. My debt to Memsaab Story is beyond measure, though I feel it has shrunk a little since actually watching the film. Because after watching the film, all I could do was shake my fist at the heavens and angrily yell, "Dharmendra!!!" And, like Fantomas, all I could hear was his laughter, echoing in the distance as he escaped through some clever means and left me standing there, feeling a bit cheated on this, the eve of my victory. Because the son of a bitch done it to me again. Which is a really, really long way of saying that Saazish isn't very good. It's even more disappointing than Katilon Ke Kaatil, because Katilon Ke Kaatil was goofy and fun on top of being incompetent, where as Saazish is simply boring and poorly made. To be fair, there was probably no way it could live up to a build-up that spanned years. At the very least, though, it could have had the decency to be decent. And I guess maybe little parts of it are good, but there is so much crap to wade through to get to the good stuff that it's not really worth it. Granted, there's a lot of crap to wade through in many films, especially many Indian films. But usually it's crap with which I can deal. In the case of Saazish, however, the crap is mostly a performance by Saira Banu in the female lead that just might be the single most insipid, annoying, and grating performance I've ever seen in a Bollywood film. I would rather watch ten Johnny Levers than ever have to sit through Banu's performance in Saazish again.
My first experience with Dharmendra was the slick little espionage caper Aankhen, which among other things paired him with a woman who pursues him in the beginning of the film to the point of seeming insane. Saazish features the same basic set-up, as Banu's Sunita picks Dharmendra's Jai more or less at random and decides to mercilessly stalk and sing to him until he falls in love with her. The difference is that Aankhen starred Mala Sinha, and her character wasn't just insane for love; she was also a bad-ass spy who knew her way around a Tommy gun, took an active part in blowing up various villain lairs, and owned a gigantic floppy sombrero. By contrast, Sunita...well, she frequently shrieks, overacts with the fierce hunger of Richard Burton at his very worst, and tends to cry in the way you expect to hear from a ten-year-old, practically mouthing "boo hoo hoo!" at various points. By the halfway point, I was ready to throw my lot in with Fantomas, who was doing his best (which, to be fair, was pretty bad) to have her killed. So here's the plot, such as it is. Sunita has just won the Miss Cosmos beauty competition, a fact that she tells pretty much anyone and everyone she meets. You might think that this is an attempt at characterization, that we are supposed to find her constant mentioning of her beauty to be a comedic character quirk. I assure you, it is not. We are supposed to find her engaging and charming. I did not. Her first task as the world queen of beauty (I beg to differ, but that's me, and opinions vary) is to go to Hong Kong and award the trophy for what is supposed to be the most prestigious auto race in Asia. Said race is realized by cobbling together stock footage of what looks to be a Le Mans race with footage from what looks to be someone's home movie of a dirt track race, then you edit in some head shots of a listless Dharmendra wearing a dorky helmet that looks like it was on loan from an Alfonso Brescia sci-fi film. When Dharmendra wins the race, Sunita decides she is madly in love with him, even though the only thing she knows about him is that he won a car race. I don't even know what that is. I mean, if she thought he was hot, then at least she would be shallow. But she hasn't even seen him as anything other than a speck on a race track wearing a dumb helmet. So that doesn't even qualify as shallow. That's just plum crazy, son. Dharmendra seems to think so, too, but after she wears him down with her endearing antics that include following him around, shrieking like a banshee, and pretending to commit suicide, he finally gives in and takes her on the least scenic musical travelogue tour of Hong Kong imaginable, including as it does a highway junction, some dreary gray cinderblock housing projects, and a walk down the middle of a fucking busy highway!!! Lady, could his signals be any clearer??? Their mediocre day out together culminates in a cruise during which Sunita happens upon a murder in progress. As a dying man riddled with bullet holes staggers toward her, notice that the many extras seated around her remain as still as statues, staring directly ahead as if absolutely nothing is happening. The dying man mutters something about gold, a ship, and reporting to Interpol, then drops dead, leaving Sunita face to face with a bunch of gunmen who, though they are standing in the middle of the dining room waving their guns about, also fail to attract the attention of anyone else on the boat.
Sunita, rather than rushing to Jai's side (he was busy getting coffee, which must be the most delicious coffee in the world, as it causes him and everyone else on the boat to miss a murder by machine gun as well as a blood-soaked dude staggering up and down the stairs), or rushing to the nearest cop, hops off the boat, hails a cab, and badgers him until he takes her to the Interpol office, which looks to be a quaintly appointed residential living room with fancy space-age phones. Somehow, Sunita is allowed to walk right into the building and straight up to the director's office without being questioned by anyone. That's some quality security, Interpol. No wonder they got shifted from fighting criminal masterminds to shutting down bootleg DVD retailers. As soon as she arrives in the office, the phone rings. The director, who was hiding behind his desk for absolutely no discernible reason other than shits and giggles, hands it to her, as the call is for her. It seems the gang responsible for the murder has captured Jai, and if Sunita talks, they will kill him. No one stops to wonder how they knew where to call her, just as no one thinks that possibly calling someone on the phone line belonging to the head of Interpol so you can tell that person not to talk to the head of Interpol might not be an entirely secure way of doing covert business. The Interpol guy then allows her to leave without asking her any questions or following up with the whole death threat phone call -- which he listened in on using a pair of glasses with flashing lights on the rims. Sure, they have other ways to listen in on phone calls, like picking up the other receiver, but I reckon some slick traveling salesmen sold Interpol on the stupid glasses, and they feel like they should get their money's worth no matter how stupid it is. It was probably the same guy who sold the Japanese military all those Maser cannons to fight giant monsters, but neglected to mention that they only work against gargantuas. Still, Japan has a lot of the things, so every time Godzilla shows up, they dutifully roll them out in hopes that he'll trash a few of them, allowing the Japanese Self Defense Force, if nothing else, to free up some much needed garage space. If idiocy like this comprised the entire running length of the picture, I'd be in perfectly comfortable territory. Alas, it only lasts for about five more minutes -- as Jai meets the mysterious Fantomas -- or Mr. Han, as he's called here (let's call him Hantomas) -- and convinces the master criminal that he should be allowed to kill Sunita, since he was only with her to get at her considerable wealth. Remarkably, Mr. Hantomas agrees to this without so much as a single question. Damn. Apparently, working for Hong Kong's most infamous masked criminal is easier than getting a job at Best Buy. Back in 1992, I worked a warehouse job at Toys-R-Us, and even for that I had to take a long test and watch a bunch of videos about how stealing is wrong. Surely Hantomas can make Jai watch some videos about how stealing kicks ass, or do a background check, or something. I thought that Interpol was incompetent, but if this is the sort of master criminal they're up against, I guess it's a pretty level playing field.
Of course, one of the key components of any swingin' Bond style super-villain is his secret lair. Fantomas had a pretty swanky underground pad full or works of art and candelabras, something in between Diabolik and Doctor No. Hantomas got the cave part down, but he didn't add much other than installing a few swishing doors, some random blinking lights, and for some reason, a hidden radio. I guess that shows initiative. It's not every super villain who would go that extra mile to install a hidden radio inside a lair that was already hidden. That's like buying a safe and putting a little safe inside it that contains your Zune (because you didn't want to buy an iPod) even though the big safe is already full of jewels and bundles of cash and nude photos of Priyanka Chopra. It's probably one of those flourishes that seemed cool at the time but got to be a real hassle after a while. Every time someone wants to use the radio, they have to go through the ritual of turning the statue and opening the rock wall. Since the guys in the secret lair would already also know about the secret radio, it probably got to the point where Hantomas' right hand man, Mr. Wong, just told the guys to leave it open. That, of course, leads to Hantomas furtively going over and closing it all the time, until the two criminals descend into a petty bickering argument not unlike roommates fighting over the proper setting for the air conditioner. Oh yeah, Mr. Wong. If you ever rolled your eyes at Caucasian guys donning fake eyelids and accents and passing themselves off as Asians in movies, rest assured that this is hardly confined to the West. Madan Puri, who portrays Mr. Wong, is about as Chinese as Bela Lugosi, the last non-Chinese guy to play an evil Mr. Wong. Turnabout's fair play, though, because it's not as if there was never a Chinese actor who put on "brown face" and played an Indian. The thugs in Hantomas' gang don't really inspire much more confidence than their boss. Even though their order is to kill Jai as soon as he leaves, all they do is point their guns and run toward him one at a time so he can kick them in the face. At one point, they even stand around with their guns pointed at him and wait until he fishes a yo-yo out of his pocket and uses it to hit them in the face. Dudes, Hantomas bought you guns! As professional heavies, it was your obligation to learn when and how to use them. Like when the guy you are supposed to shoot is standing right in front of you, that's generally a good time to shoot him, not wait for him to fish a yo-yo out of his pocket (it takes him a few tries) and throw it at you. And seriously -- why the hell has Jai been walking around with a yo-yo in his pocket while he was on his date with Sunita? Actually, I have to retract my criticism of their failure of three men armed with machine guns and pistols to defeat a guy with a yo-yo in his pocket, because in the ensuing car chase, we see them right behind him, but the dude firing the machine gun out the window is holding it straight out to the side of the car, meaning that he's not even firing in the right direction. This is what Hantomas gets for hiring his goons from the line outside a "Three Stooges" casting call. Somehow, that whole mess ends up with Jai throwing grenades at people. So he went on a date and filled his pockets with yo-yos and hand grenades? Dharmendra sure knows how to operate!
From here, the movie settles in for what seems like a full hour of Saira Banu turning in a performance that would embarrass a marginally talented actor in a sixth grade school play. Every facial expression, every movement, every line is delivered with the subtlety of a petulant child playing charades. And when she cries! Oh my God, when she cries! No professional actress should actually use the words "Oh boo hoo hoo!" to communicate crying. But you better get used to it, because for the next hour, it's "Oh boo hoo hoo!" and "Oh Jai, I'm so scared!" and "Why, I'm Sunita, the winner of the Miss Cosmos beauty contest. Don't you know?" It's a nightmarish slog through the middle ninety minutes of this film, and if I wasn't watching it with the intention of reviewing it, I would have given up and watched it on fast forward. Even the rare musical number offers no respite from the tedium, as these scenes offer absolutely nothing in the way of creativity or fun, unless you think it's fun to watch Dharmendra standing on some concrete steps while wearing a sweater. I guess we're supposed to be on the edge of our seats as Dharmendra attempts to outfox Hantomas by pretending to be on the side of evil, but it's hard to get into the spirit of things when it's so obvious Dharmendra will end up being a secret Interpol guy. Seriously, after about the third time he's foiled a Hantomas hit attempt, you'd think the master criminal would stop believing the guy. Eventually everyone winds up on board a cruise ship that also happens to be full of smuggler's gold, reminding you that you've gone for most of the movie without even knowing what the hell Hantomas and his gang are even trying to do. I guess they were trying to smuggle gold, or possibly steal it, but their entire scheme seems to have absolutely no point at all. Nothing they do seems to have any connection to anything else they do. It's completely baffling to the point that I started to think this was less a criminal gang and more a dada-ist performance art troupe. Every time you ask them a question, they respond with a dance or by miming a tennis match. What are you trying to tell me, Hantomas! I don't understand!!! Or perhaps...perhaps Hantomas is a criminal genius, and the apparent incoherence of everything he does is just a clever ploy to confound Interpol! Or perhaps this is just a piece of junk script that no one put any thought into. We may never know. At least Helen is aboard the ship. Did that woman age at all? She's as wild, flexible, and hot in 1975 as she was in 1965, which is more than can be said for Dharmendra. Her appearance is almost as nonsensical as everything else in the film, but I've never needed much logical reason for Helen to appear. At least we can look forward to one good dance number. Or can we? Because they mostly have her hanging around in her room, half-heartedly romancing whichever guy happens to walk through the door. All Helen really does is remind you how much happier you'd be if the entire move had featured her instead of Saira Banu. Helen eventually gets a dance number, but she has to share it with Banu, which is not welcome. Being in a number with Helen does Saira Banu no favors, either, as Helen is about a hundred times hotter and makes Sairu's dancing look like Sonny Deol's. At least Dharmendra strips down to his little Elvis Presley swimming trunks for the final showdown with Hantomas and the goons, at which time it is revealed that practically everyone on board the ship is either an undercover criminal or undercover Interpol guy.
So here's what you do to make this a good movie. Watch up until Jai meets Hantomas, then fast forward to the hour-forty mark, right when the Sunita/Helen dance number starts, and finish the movie from there. Because the last thirty minutes or so is nothing but Dharmendra beating the tar out of chumps while wearing tiny little shorts. Oh yes, there will be Dharmendra buffalo shots. The entire ship erupts in a finale of kungfu fighting, machine gun waving, gratuitous backflipping, and grenade tossing. If the whole movie had been like that, it would have been the most awesome film ever made. Instead, it was about thirty minutes of cool stuff smothered by ninety minutes of stuff that, at its best, is tedious, and at its worst actually made me wish I could reach into the television Videodrome style and throttle Saira Banu until she shut the hell up. You remember how much we all hated Kate Capshaw in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom? Well, now I have fond memories of her. Thanks, Banu. You were that bad. To be fair, though, Banu is still less annoying than the insanely creepy comic relief guy who shows up on the boat and keeps breaking into people's cabins in order to find Helen, with whom he seems obsessed to the point of being a potential rapist-murderer. What the hell was his deal anyway? I don't even care anymore. When Mr. Wong threatens to kill the asshole, I can't help but wondering, once again, who's the bad guy here? This whole ship was full of creepy guys -- like the dude who spends all day hanging upside down and pouncing on people like a cat. Seriously, Saazish -- what the hell? At some point, I thought I might have accidentally stopped watching a spy movie and started watching something like Mansion of Madness. All this ship lacked was a madman in ragged Victorian garb, carrying a scepter made out of garbage and leading an equally ragged band of crazies like they were in a marching band.
Under normal circumstances, espionage films such as these are more than enough fun to make it easy to gloss over the rough edges that are present in so many of the films: the daft plotting, the crude editing, the overall cheapness. But when a movie's virtues are as thinly spread as they are here, the foibles are impossible to wave off. Instead, every idiotic line, every bad edit, every time the shadow of the boom mic, the camera, and the entire goddamn crew shows up on the wall behind the actors, it's hard not to notice. The plot seems to have been made up as they went, and even then they weren't putting much work into it. Even by the less-than-rigorous continuity standards of Bollywood action cinema, it's an incoherent, bloody mess full of the most glaring inanities. It seems like the film's production might have been stretched over a long period, as Dharmendra's hair changes radically, sometimes in the same scene. Or maybe his ability to have sideburns appear and disappear in the same scene was part of his character's spy training. For a while I thought they got a really doughy, unflattering stunt double for Dharmendra in certain scenes, until I realized that it actually was Dharmendra. Like his hair, his level of fitness varies pretty wildly from one scene to the next. Luckily, he's in pretty good shape for his ass-kicking romp in the only booty shorts smaller than the ones being worn by Sunita. Director Kalidas had very few film credits before this film, and even fewer after, which means at least soemthing good came of this movie. Ranjan Bose is credited for the story, and Ramesh Pant for the screenplay, but I refuse to believe this film was actually written by anyone. Pant also wrote An Evening in Paris, which is a fine film. And hell! Bose wrote The Great Gambler, which starred Amitabh and Zeenat and was all sorts of awesome. I can only assume that absolutely no one gave a damn about Saazish while they were working on it. Even the music and dancing is lame. Why the hell put Helen in your movie than have her do only half a dance? Although, to the film's credit, her outfit is the only one skimpier than Dharmendra's action man-panties.
Speaking of not giving a damn, that seems to be Dharmendra's main mode here, though from time to time he does seem to liven up a bit. By 1975, I guess Dharmendra's star was starting to fade a bit, and the new king of the scene was Amitabh Bachchan. That might go a long way in explaining why these mid-70s Dharmendra films are as bad as Amitabh's mid-80s film, when his star was in about the same place as Dharmendra's was in 1975. Just a year earlier, Dharmendra starred with Saira Banu in the film International Crook, which I have not seen. Usually, finding out that Dharmendra was in a movie called International Crook, and that Feroz Khan was in it as well, would be enough to put that film on my "must see" list. After enduring Banu's wretched histrionics in Saazish, though, I don't think I ever want to see anything with her in it again. Maybe if her character was supposed to be a spoiled brat who learns the error of her ways or is at least played for comedy, but no. This wasn't comedy or clever satire, or even stupid satire. It was just phenomenally terrible acting. I know, I know, she was in the original Bluff Master, and that's a pretty good movie, but I don't care. In all my journeys through Bollywood so far, I've never encountered an actress whose portrayal of a character filled me with such irritation. Well, congratulations, Banu. I guess someone had to be the first. I'm convinced that her career as an actress had less to do with either her looks or her talent, and a lot more to do with the fact that she married Bollywood megastar Dilip Kumar. I went in to this movie predisposed to liking it. It was an espionage/fumetti flavored Bollywood film. It starred Dharmendra. It featured Fantomas, calling himself Mr. Han (someone must have just watched Enter the Dragon). And I spent years trying to track it down. Plus, I watch films with the intent of enjoying them. As I've written before, one of the principles behind Teleport City is that we aren't a site that exists purely to rip apart movies and complain about them. We're here to celebrate the things we enjoy, and usually, the ribbing we do is good-natured and done out of affection. Although it sounds unbelievable, I really do have better things to do with my life than watch movies I don't like. As such, it was going to take a whole hell of a lot of badness for me to not like Saazish. Sadly, a whole hell of a lot of badness is exactly what I got. It seems rather a cold payoff for all those years of searching, as I put more work into finding and watching this movie than the cast and crew put into making it. Even measured against the bottom of the espionage film barrel, this is pretty bad stuff. And for once, I'm not going to spend an entire review poking fun at a film, then tell you to go see it. You can feel perfectly at ease skipping this one entirely. I guess if you are walking home one night and someone hits you over the head and forces a copy of this movie into your hands, then you can take it home and watch the very beginning and final thirty minutes or so and have a pretty good time of it. Just beware the ninety minutes in between, for there is a black pit from which your soul will never again emerge, and you will be forced to spend eternity in that black pit next to Dharmendra, who will shrug like he doesn't give a damn, and for the rest of your miserable existence, all you will hear is a shrill female voice whining, "Oh, Jai! Boo hoo hoo!"  Labels: Bollywood, Espionage, Stars: Dharmendra, Year: 1975 posted by Keith at 1:08 AM | 18 Comments Tuesday, November 11, 2008The Mummies of Guanajuato Release Year: 1972Country: Mexico Starring: Blue Demon, Mil Mascaras, Santo, Elsa Cardenas, Juan Gallardo, Jorge Pinguino, Manuel Leal, Julio Cesar, Carlos Suarez, Patricia Ferrer Writers: Rogelio Agrasanchez, Rafael Garcia Travesi Director: Frederico Curiel Cinematographer: Enrique Wallace Music: Gustavo Cesar Carrion Producer: Rogelio Agrasanchez Also known as: Las Momias de Guanajuato; Santo vs. Las Momias One need only glance over the many titles in the lucha movie genre to see that there is a long history of enmity between Mexican wrestlers and mummies. This goes all the way back to 1964, when Elizabeth Campbell and Lorena Velazquez threw down against a pop-eyed, reconstituted Aztec warrior in their sophomore effort as The Wrestling Women, Las Luchadoras contra la Momia, and continued throughout the rest of the sixties, during which Santo, the most celebrated movie luchadore of them all, would come up against shambling bandage jockeys in films like Santo and Blue Demon vs. The Monsters and La Venganza de la Momia. But the conflict didn't really kick into high gear until 1972, when the success of a little film called The Mummies of Guanajuato (aka Las Momias de Guanajuato) guaranteed that, for the next several years, Mexican movie screens would seldom see respite from the spectacle of colorfully-garbed, masked Mexican grapplers working their moves on a seemingly endless series of inexplicably muscular mummified adversaries. The Mummies of Guanajuato was the brainchild of Mexican independent producer, distributor and writer Rogelio Agrasanchez. Now, Agrasanchez is a figure whom I have decidedly conflicting feelings toward. His wrestling films are generally emblematic of the type of haste and neglect that plagued the lucha genre during the 1970s, marked by sloppy storytelling rife with plot holes and continuity errors, lackadaisical pacing, hunger-strike production values, extremely hit-or-miss technical execution, and a patience-testing reliance on padding -- often in the form of footage lifted from other films, as well as poorly integrated musical numbers, beauty pageants, and anything else they could squeeze in -- that definitely gives the impression of films that were made on the fly with very little prior story consideration or planning. Of course, Agrasanchez was not the only Lucha filmmaker of the period who was guilty of these sins, and it should be kept in mind that this was a time during which, first of all, audience interest in the genre was waning and, second of all, government financial support for commercial Mexican films, which had been plentiful during the sixties, was at a temporary ebb due to a shift in priorities toward funding more "respectable" fare. As a result, the profitability of such films dictated a need for thrift and speed that Agrasanchez alone can't be held personally accountable for.     Still, the fact is that lucha libre films were never big budget items, and what one sees occurring over the lifespan of the genre, from the dawn of the sixties to the end of the seventies, is not so much a reduction in the amount of money spent as a reduction in the amount of care put into insuring that the films were actually coherent or watchable. While an early film like Santo contra las Mujeres Vampiro seems to be the work of accomplished craftsmen determined to deliver an engaging and atmospheric example of B movie entertainment to the fullest extent that their modest means would allow, many of Agrasanchez's films seem to demonstrate a concern primarily with attaining acceptable feature-length by any means necessary while delivering the minimum number of bankable elements at the most minimal expenditure of time and resources possible. While, again, these faults were not those of Rogelio Agrasanchez alone, that is not to say that he didn't, in many other ways, put his own personal stamp upon his work in the field. And, to give the man his due, I would here like to list those contributions to Mexican wrestling cinema that are indeed uniquely Agrasanchez's own. These are elements that you can not only count on from pretty much any one of his lucha films, but that also mark those film as being distinctly his. The first of these would have to be… ...Midgets. Sure, there were midgets in lucha movies before Rogelio Agrasanchez came upon the scene -- most notably Waldo, the hunchback in Santo and Blue Demon vs. The Monsters. Furthermore, The Mummies of Guanajuato, by Agrasanchez's standards, is fairly conservative in it use of little people, limiting itself to only one in the cast. But, generally, Agransanchez's thinking seemed to be that, if you were going to have one midget, you might as well have a whole posse of them. It seemed he felt that there was something intrinsically much more thrilling about having a burly masked wrestler fighting several midgets as opposed to just one normal-sized man. The result saw the employment of a troupe of wee folk that I like to call The Agrasanchez Midgets in film after film. They wore matching superhero costumes with big "M"s emblazoned on their chests in The Champions of Justice, little moonman suits in Superzan el Invencible, rat-person costumes fashioned from fuzzy footy pajamas in The Champions of Justice Return, and appeared as fanged mini-vampires in the Mil Mascaras effort The Vampires of Coyoacan, which is probably one of the producer's most enjoyable films.     Now there is nothing inherently wrong with this, of course, and, upon first encounter, you can't beat the sheer entertainment value of watching a big, musclebound lug like Mil Mascaras or Tinieblas trying to pretend that he's being taken down by a gang of clamoring homunculi. In cases where the featured wrestlers are in less than peak physical condition, I can even see the utility of such mismatched pairings. But over time it comes to seem like evidence of an absurdly obstinate aversion to opportunity when a film has athletes such as these at its disposal and dedicates most of their screen time to pitting them against opponents a sixth their size. The result is that, impressively and against the odds, these pictures often manage within ninety minutes to drain something as awesome sounding as masked-wrestler-midget-fighting of much of its novelty and entertainment value. Another hallmark of Agrasanchez's films is a reliance on musical accompaniment that is inappropriate to the point of approaching ironic commentary. In the case of The Mummies of Guanajuato, this is perpetrated by frequent lucha movie scorer Gustavo Cesar Carrion in the form of sedately jaunty organ riffs that bring to mind nothing more than heavily medicated mental patients on furlough traversing endless dazed circles around an ice skating rink. Still, Guanajuato is far from the worst offender in this regard. The soundtrack to The Champions of Justice is much more typical, seemingly comprised of the producer just letting a sub-par West Coast Jazz album side play out over all of the action, with the result that every bit of screen business -- be it Mil Mascaras hurling a midget or Blue Demon staring blankly at a cue card -- carries the same negligible dramatic weight.     The Champions of Justice also represents another one of the trends that ran through Agrasanchez's lucha work, and that was his tendency to stuff his films full of as many masked wrestlers as they could possibly hold. Of course, that he would do so is not all that surprising, given that Champions -- which featured a total of six luchadores, including heavy-hitters Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras -- was one of his early successes in the genre. Audiences had seen wrestlers paired onscreen before in the several films that teamed Santo and Blue Demon, but it was Agrasanchez who made the use of small armies comprised of three or more fighters his own. Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with this. In fact it's a great idea. It's just that the half-heartedness of Agrasanchez and his crew's execution so frequently resulted in these films being so much less than the sum of their parts and, as such, fragrant of wasted opportunity. I realize that a lot of people reserve a fond place in their hearts for The Champions of Justice, but I can't help thinking that they do so as a result of being in love more with what the film promises than with what it actually delivers. The dependence of Agrasanchez on multiple wrestlers to make up his casts lead the producer to even invent new wrestlers of his own, which brings me to the last of the cinematic offenses he committed that I will comment upon here: Superzan. Superzan was a bodybuilder by the name of Alfonse Mora who Agrasanchez styled as a masked wrestler/superhero (the name was meant to suggest a combination of Superman and Tarzan) to both star in his own series of films and fill-out the bill in some of the producer's multi-wrestler extravaganzas -- such as the aforementioned Vampires of Coyoacan and the final entry in the Champions of Justice trilogy. Aside from a black hole-like lack of charisma, Superzan's biggest liability was probably his costume. While, by this time, other wrestling heroes were affecting a more casual look, wearing their street clothes, or at least a more basic wrestling ensemble, with their masks, Superzan in the field always wore a complete, head-to-toe superhero outfit complete with cape, sparkly skin-tight body suit and boots. When paired with a comparatively less flamboyant wrestler, this made him look kind of like the kid who insists on wearing his costume to the grocery store the day after Halloween. On top of this, it didn't help matters that the film meant to launch Superzan into stardom, Superzan el Invencible, is among the most lackluster and incomprehensible in Agrasanchez's body of work, so leaden with pointless filler that it stubbornly defies even the most masochistic viewer's efforts to view it to its conclusion.     Now that I've spent several paragraphs ardently running Rogelio Agrasanchez's contributions to lucha cinema into the ground, let me shift gears a bit and focus on another, quite different aspect of his career in film. This occurred later in his life, when he began to take interest in the preservation of Mexican commercial cinema's history, an interest which involved him acquiring and preserving, not only many original negatives of classic films, but also countless posters, lobby cards and other examples of Mexican film-related ephemera. In the 1980s, his son, Rogelio Jr., also began to take an interest in this project, and is today the owner and curator of the Agrasanchez Film Archive in Harlingen, Texas, home to thousands of movies and pieces of memorabilia from throughout the long and varied history of Mexican film. Apropos of the diversity of its contents, the archive boasts an ethos that is refreshingly egalitarian, catering to the standard scholarly interests while at the same time reflecting an attitude that The Braniac is every bit as worthy of study as Los Olvidados. Now, to give you some idea of just how high my esteem is for efforts such as those of the Agrasanchez family, let me just say the following: Here at Teleport City, there is not a single day that passes -- not one single day -- in which we are not tortured -- tortured! -- by the fact that we will probably never be able to see the Filipino monster vs. superhero mash-up Batman Fights Dracula or the similarly tantalizing-sounding Turkish effort Killink vs. Frankenstein -- this largely due to the low premium those films' respective countries of origin placed on the preservation of their national popular cinema. On the other hand, we do not take lightly the fact that, when it comes to Mexican cinema, if we hear about a film such as, say, the science fiction/western/musical La Nave de los Monstruos, or the Sixties spy spoof Cazadores de Espias, in which a masked luchadore can be seen fighting a robot while a scantily clad Maura Monti go-go dances ringside, we can rest assured in the knowledge that sooner or later we'll probably be able to scare up a copy. Of course, I realize that this is not due to the efforts of the Agrasanchez family alone, but those efforts are emblematic of both an abiding respect for their nation's cinematic history and a forward-thinking understanding of the need for preservation of the type that makes the lives of basement-dwelling world cinema obsessives like ourselves less of the recipe for serial disappointment and despair than it otherwise might be. In fact, so deep is my appreciation for Rogelio Agrasanchez in this regard that every negative word I cast in the direction of his efforts as a filmmaker is like a dagger plunged into my own side, making the preface of this review something akin to my own little private circle of Hell.     The primary reason that The Mummies of Guanajuato had the success that it did is because it marked the first time that the three biggest stars of lucha libre -- and of lucha cinema, for that matter -- had appeared onscreen together, those three stars being Santo, Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras. I've devoted a lot of words to the careers of both Santo and Blue Demon in my reviews of Santo and Blue Demon vs. The Monsters and Santo vs. Blue Demon in Atlantis, but, for those not well versed in the particulars of Mexican wrestling movies, Mil Mascaras will probably need some introduction. Like Santo and Blue Demon, Mil Mascaras (the name means "Thousand Masks") had enjoyed success in his own series of films prior to making The Mummies of Guanajuato, though, beyond that, he was separated from his costumed co-stars by some marked differences in terms of both his personal style and his career path. Mil, who was born Aaron Rodriguez in 1942, began his screen career in 1966 under the guidance of low budget independent film producer Luis Enrique Vergara. Vergara had produced popular lucha film series for both Santo and Blue Demon, but, by the time of signing Mil, had found himself without a star as a result of Santo moving on to greener paychecks and Blue suffering a debilitating injury that would keep him off the boards for a matter of months. Now, one major difference at this point between Mil and those other two stars at the dawn of their respective movie-making careers, aside from the fact that he was considerably younger, is that, unlike Santo and Blue, who began their film careers later in life and thus made films that capitalized upon the stardom that they had already achieved in the ring, Mil at the time of his screen debut was a relatively unknown up-and-comer, a fact which made Vergara casting him something of a gamble on the producer's part. As a result, Mil Mascaras was unique among lucha cinema's top stars in that his public persona had in part been established as a result of him appearing in these films, rather than the other way around. Of course, he would later go on to prove himself in the ring and, in that regard, achieve international fame that would in some ways even surpass Santo's, but that does not change the fact that, unlike his peers, he was, to some extent, a movie star first and a wrestler second, which may explain some of those differences in style that I referred to earlier.     For one thing, Mil was a dedicated bodybuilder, and had a lean, chiseled physique that was a marked contrast to the stockier builds seen on many of the wrestling stars of the day. This not only made him stand out, but also fit in nicely with the superheroic persona that Vergara had crafted for him. (Mil Mascaras, his scrupulously titled debut film, even fitted him with a Captain America-like origin story, in which, left orphaned as an infant during the war, he is raised by a team of scientists to be an invincible super soldier.) Beyond that, Mil brought a rockstar-like flamboyance to his style of dress that seemed exceptionally peacock-like even within the context of the colorful world of lucha libre. This may have been the result of his chosen gimmick, which was to wear numerous masks as opposed to one distinctive one, and which might have lead him to feel the need to visually distinguish himself by other means. Still, despite the name, the number of different masks he wore numbered far less than a thousand, and was generally limited to several highly identifiable models -- my favorite being a toothy green dragon number that looks like it could have been designed by Ed "Big Daddy" Roth. The reason for Mil's signature sartorial style was more likely that he was just a big, glammy ham. And God bless him for it, because his clothes alone exponentially increase the entertainment value of any movie in which he appears. In The Mummies of Guanajuato, for instance, he spends much of his screen time wearing a pair of leopard print hotpants on top of a pair of gold lame wrestling tights, topped off with a red velvet vest with gold trim worn over a bare chest. As pimp-tastic as that may sound, it is only a distant second in splendor to the outfit he wore in the loose Mummies of Guanajuato sequel, The Mummies of San Angel, which consisted of a silver, billowy-sleeved pirate shirt paired with a vest that had his face -- in starburst, of course -- emblazoned on the back. The Mummies of Guanajuato was originally intended to be a starring vehicle for Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras alone, but doubts on Agrasanchez's part that their names would carry the necessary box office clout lead him to make the eleventh hour addition of Santo to the cast just for good measure. Mil Mascaras reacted to the resulting dimunition of his role with pragmatic stoicism, but for Blue Demon this was just another insult in a long history of rivalry with el Enmascarado de Plata, and would reportedly remain a thorn in his side for the rest of his life. To Blue's point, Agrasanchez and company were certainly less than sensitive to their top billed stars' feelings in the ham-handed manner in which they inserted Santo into the action, essentially using him as a deus ex machina who shows up at the end to save the day with relatively little effort after Blue and Mil have proven ineffective for much of the previous running time. While Santo was basically credited as a special guest star, with Blue and Mil's names above the title, the true nature of his participation can be gleaned from the title that the movie was given upon its release in Spain later the same year: Santo vs. las Momias.     Now to fully understand and enjoy The Mummies of Guanajuato, one has to appreciate that the "mummies" of its title are not the kind of mummies that viewers of English language horror films are normally accustomed to, as, rather than being ancient mummies that are man-made in origin, they are naturally occurring mummies of much more recent vintage. The real Mummies of Guanajuato were corpses -- many of them casualties of a cholera epidemic that swept the city in 1933 -- that were disinterred from a cemetery in the Mexican city of Guanajuato between the years of 1896 and 1958 -- said disinterment being the result of a law that required loved ones to pay an annual grave tax in order to keep their dearly departed safely ensconced underground. Inevitably, some of those loved ones were unable or unavailable to make payment of that tax, and so up from the crypt old Aunt Paola and Uncle Gustavo came. Once those bodies were brought back into the cold light of day, it was found that many of them had undergone a natural process of mummification, the result, it has been conjectured, of soil and atmospheric conditions unique to the area. As novel as that is in itself, the thing that ended up making the real-life Mummies of Guanajuato the stuff of legend, as well as a popular tourist attraction, is the fact that many of their faces were contorted in what appeared to be horrified screams. While this has been explained away by some dull scientific types as a natural result of the skin constricting in the course of mummification, the creepier and, thus, much preferable explanation is that these particular mummies had been cholera victims who had been hastily buried before they were completely and verifiably dead. So, as fascinating as we might like to pretend that the phenomenon of naturally occurring mummification is to us, it is, understandably, this tantalizing, spook show aspect of the mummies that has kept the coins of paying customers pouring into the till of the museum in Guanajuato where they are lovingly displayed. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
