A passing and a review: G.P. Sippy and G.P. Sippy's Sholay.
Bollywood producer and director G.P. Sippy is dead at 93.
I just managed to rent his most famous film (which he produced and his son Ramesh Sippy directed), Sholay (which translates as "Embers" -- something I learned from the NY Times obituary of last Thursday, 27 December 2007) last fall. Sholay, which was released in 1975, is described as India's first "curry western" (after the so-called "spaghetti western," a genre most closely associated with Italian director Sergio Leone and such films as A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and the operatic-cum-mythological Once Upon a Time in the West), and is often cited as the top-grossing Indian-made movie of all time; while Haresh Pandya's obituary says that Sholay was "loosely styled on The Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven" (the latter of which was a remake of the former), this seems misguided: it's far more of a Bollywood-dress version of one of Leone's epics than it is of either of the movies that Pandya likens it to, for all of the misfired subplot of the villagers reluctant to defend themselves against a marauding band of dacoits (bandits).
It took me four or five days to watch Sholay: I'm a Bollywood noob, and I still don't wholeheartedly embrace its conventions (long, loose, and shaggy -- if not ultimately disregarded -- plots; frequent song and dance numbers, at least two or three of which in any given movie are amped up with high production values, and which are intended to advance the plot by expressing the feelings and emotions of the characters in ways that they do not or cannot in the movie proper; mostly unconvincing action sequences [generally speaking, the more violent the action in a Bollywood movie, the less convincing it is: Mission: Kashmir, anyone..?]; often painful attempts at "comic relief"; etc.); and, while the first hour or so made me alternately cringe (particularly the scenes with the Charlie Chaplin-as-Hitler-stand-in from The Great Dictator prison warden [played by Asrani] declaiming every ten seconds that he used to work for the British, so the prisoners under his command had better watch out!), wince (particularly at the cutesy-pie and -- well, gay -- mugging and winking that the film's leads Dharmendra [as the manic wastrel Veeru] and Amitabh Bachchan [as the tall, taciturn, and deadpan Jaidev] throw at each other during the "picturization" of the song "Yeh Dosti Hum Nahin" [sung by Kishore Kumar and Manna Dey; the title is sometimes given as simply "Yeh Dosti," or "This Friendship," and it's included on The Rough Guide to Bollywood CD, if you're interested], as they're tooling around the countryside on a motorcycle with a sidecar), roll my eyes (at the ludicrously inept action scenes) and yawn (everything else, really), it gradually got more interesting as it got -- weirder.
Seriously, once it gets going -- and Sholay is a long (188 mins. in India; the director's cut is 204 mins.), weird movie, with spells of hilarity, eroticism (that number performed by the gypsy band, picturized by Jalal Agha as the singer/lute player [and a more phallic stringed instrument is hard to imagine...] and the Anglo-Burmese actress Helen as the -- well, "lubricious" isn't too strong a word -- dancer: "Mehbooba Mehbooba" ["Beloved, Beloved"], sung by the movie's composer, Rahul Dev Burman, f'r instance), butt-shaking fun (the "Holi Ke Din" dance number; now that's what a festival should look like!) and, finally, breathtakingly absurd and intense (and intensely absurd...) Bollywood grindhouse violence (I mean the original ending here, not the original sanitized ending where the main villain, Gabbar Singh (played with scenery-chewing relish by Amjad Khan), is merely arrested) -- it's pretty irresistible, quirks and cultural oddities aside.
Sholay's plot is paper-thin, and could easily have been competently treated in a less-than-90-minute "B"-movie programmer: two thieves (who nonetheless have wicked mad skillz with guns and hand-to-hand combat), Veeru and Jaidev ("Jai" for short), are recruited by a former police officer, Thakur Baldev Singh (played by Sanjeev Kumar, who bears a vague resemblance here to Omar Sharif; "thakur" is a title just underneath "raja" according to Wikipedia), to capture a notorious (and notoriously bloody) bandit leader named Gabbar Singh, so that he, the Thakur, may extract his revenge for the horrible mutilation that Gabbar committed upon him years ago. Several of the characters wear out their welcomes long before the movie finally ends (chiefly the dim-witted chatterbox Basanti, played by Hema Malini -- who ended up marrying her leading man, Dharmendra, even though he was married with four kids when they met on the set of Sholay -- the clownish Veeru [played by Dharmendra], and, last but not least, Gabbar Singh himself, whose melodramatics finally prove tiresome); watching the original ending, you may find yourself thinking of a cockfight -- and not in the punnish way that Madonna used the term in the last James Bond movie to feature Pierce Brosnan as 007, Die Another Day.
Stephen Horne's review in the UK's DVD Times sheds some light on the context in which Sholay was made and released:
"For India's disillusioned population, the movie's rebellious tone was a potent antidote to the country's depressing political climate in 1975, at which time corruption was rife and constitutional rights had been suspended. ["The Emergency," which would last nearly two years, began on 25 June 1975, and gave then prime minister Indira Gandhi the right to rule by decree; it was treated in fiction most famously by Salman Rushdie in his 1981 novel Midnight's Children, and by Rohinton Mistry in his 1995 novel A Fine Balance -- the latter of which was made a selection of Oprah's Book Club on 30 November 2001.], In addition, many Bollywood clichés are notably absent in the film, particularly with a lack of overstated 'family values'. Social stigmas were dealt a blow with the character of [the widow] Radha [played by Jaya Bhaduri, who was actually married to her leading man here, Amitabh Bachchan, a couple of years before Sholay was released; their daughter Shweta was born during the filming] being encouraged to re-marry instead of living a life of solitude, as society would have her do. Jokes are even made by Jai at Veeru's propensity for gambling, boozing and visiting whorehouses - all traits that were usually associated with Bollywood villains brainwashed by the 'evil' ways of the West. Clean-cut heroes were definitely out and anti-heroes were very much in.
"Even now, Sholay continues to be a phenomenon like no other. Much like The Wizard Of Oz, every scene has become a classic and each line of dialogue can be quoted by its fans. For those who've already watched and loved it, no amount of subsequent viewings will diminish the enjoyment and for those who haven't seen it, it will be an excellent example of Bollywood masala at its best. Either way, for newcomers or long-time fans, Sholay is essential viewing."
In short, the loss of anybody who played such a major part in bringing the exhausting, genre-busting fun of Sholay (sometimes titled G.P. Sippy's Sholay) to the screens and media players of the world is one to be profoundly regretted.