Sholay, Etc. | My Movie Diary

Sholay (1975) – I’ve seen everything from action movies shot in Ghana to art films made in Japan, but somehow I had never seen a flick from India, the world’s most prolific film industry. So when I stumbled across the most famous Bollywood flick of them all sitting there on Amazon Prime, daring me to take in its 3 hour and 15 minute splendor, I had to check it out. Wow, was it ever bonkers. From my limited research, I’ve found that Sholay is considered to be the ultimate example of the “masala” flick: a movie with a bunch of different genres all smashed together. They’re not kidding. Sholay is at once a western, a musical, a slapstick comedy, a melodramatic tragedy, and a rom-com, among other things. The tonal shifts can be jarring, as the film will switch from a tense, well-executed train heist sequence to a broadly comic prison break segment without any transition at all. And I do mean “broad”: the prison warden is played as a Hitler lookalike who does a silly pratfall literally every time he moves. The meandering plot concerns a pair of likable criminal adventurers who are asked to help a small village defend itself from notorious bandit leader Gabbar Singh and his evil henchmen. There are echoes of Seven Samurai here as the pair try and get the peasants to defend themselves, but the film owes even more to spaghetti westerns, not least in its central storyline of bloody vengeance. Director Ramesh Sippy cribs some scenes directly from Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, most notably an early massacre scene that ends with the exact same smash cut from a fired pistol to a squealing train engine.

There’s never a straight line taken through the plot in Sholay: a scene of Singh brutally murdering some of his own men cuts straight to a wild musical number about Holi, the festival of colors, which is kind of presented as a colorful celebration of sexual harassment. Then, just at the peak of the fun, the bandits ride in and a huge, lengthy gun battle ensues. Seriously, this flick is absolutely all over the place. It mostly all works, too, thanks in large part to its charismatic leads, who are some of the biggest movie stars in cinema history (even if this is the first time I’ve ever seen them). Dharmendra and Amitabh Bachchan are perfect as the two lovable crooks, each effortlessly exuding natural star presence. Bachchan went on to become Bollywood’s biggest male star for decades after Sholay, and it’s easy to see why. He has star quality written all over him, but never seems to be trying too hard. Think Harrison Ford at his best and you’re partway there. Other standouts include Hema Malini as Basanti, a talkative village beauty who falls for Dharmendra and at one point is literally called on to dance for his life, and Sanjeev Kumar as the retired policeman whose family’s tragic fate starts the whole plot in motion. This is epic filmmaking of a sort I’ve never experienced before, a wild action movie set on top of layers of heavy melodrama. Somehow, it mostly works, though. Sholay is a great introduction to Bollywood excess, bursting at the seams with energy, ambition, and a sheer desire to entertain.

Nocturne (1946) – This recent entry on TCM’s Noir Alley certainly looks the part, with some fantastic camera work from cinematographer Harry J. Wild. It’s got all of the looming shadows, venetian blinds, and mirrors you expect from a first-rate noir. Plus, there are a lot of great location shots of 40s Los Angeles, which add to the film’s dark ambiance. Sadly, looks is about all the film has. The flick stars George Raft as a crusading detective who is determined to get to the bottom of a musician’s “suicide.” He’s convinced that a murder took place, and risks his career to find the culprit. Pretty standard fare, but the movie is ultimately sunk by a rather meandering and poorly thought-out storyline, and by the absolutely terrible lead performance by Raft. He seems completely checked out, giving line readings in a flat, listless style that is almost mesmerizing in its half-assedness. The film drags along at a snail’s pace, stopping to painstakingly review the clues as often as an episode of Diagnosis: Murder. The solution to the crime then comes pretty much out of left field, negating most of what’s come before. This is far from the best work of anyone involved.

Magnificent Warriors (aka Dynamite Fighters) (1987) – This fast-paced 80s Hong Kong action epic stars a young Michelle Yeoh as an Indiana Jones-type adventurer in 1930’s China. She’s a biplane-piloting, whip-wielding smuggler who gets caught up in a convoluted plot involving resistance to the Japanese occupation, and wow, is she ever a badass. Yeoh stars in a series of explosive fight scenes, using everything at her disposal to fight the bad guys. My favorite sequence involved Yeoh taking on some unlucky cats with just a hook on the end of a long rope in a wild bit of choreographed mayhem. The film manages to find a decent rationale for having a fight or chase break out every ten minutes, so it never really slows down long enough for you to wonder what the heck is going on. The fight scenes are pretty uniformly great, with that frantic, 80s Jackie Chan-style pacing and use of environmental elements as improvised weapons. The climactic battle scene between the Chinese partisans and the Japanese invaders is pretty clumsily handled, but everything leading up to it is pretty fun. Michelle Yeoh’s awesomeness is reason enough to check this one out.

The Big Clock (1948) – Another TCM Noir Alley entrant, The Big Clock barely qualifies for the genre in my book. Sure, it’s got the requisite shadowy black-and-white cinematography, but it’s really just a fairly run of the mill thriller. Ray Milland stars as the editor of a ‘true crime’ magazine – the kind that has a giant staff of reporters/detectives who actually go out into the field and solve crimes. In other words, the completely fictional kind. Milland’s life takes a rather harsh turn when the blonde beauty he “innocently” spent a drunken night with turns up dead. And all the evidence seems to point to him! Now he’s got to find the real killer while keeping the whole thing from his wife and boss. It’s all pretty dumb, its preposterous take on the publishing world just a part of the stupidity. As with many of these old noirs, one of the main takeaways is that the 40s and 50s were very forgiving to philandering husbands. We’re meant to sympathize with Milland’s character, even though he’s only in a bind at all because he decided to blow off going on a second honeymoon with his wife so that he could spend the night boozing it up around town with another woman. His obnoxious drunken antics are clearly meant to be harmless and endearing, but he comes across as pretty much of a drip. Milland’s performance doesn’t help. He’s so blithely glib about the whole thing you’d be forgiven for forgetting that it’s a woman’s murder he’s trying to solve. The film also has a distinct undercurrent of “things are wacky in the big city,” with lots of silly business involving minor characters helping Milland out. There’s nothing very dark or menacing going on here, just some ultimately pointless silliness.

The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) – This overheated melodrama won a raft of Oscars upon its release, and it’s easy to see why Hollywood types loved it. The story revolves around a scumbag movie producer (Kirk Douglas) who double-crosses and betrays everyone around him on his way to the top of the industry. Its central message is literally “no matter how terrible a person you are, all is forgiven if you make good movies,” a theme that was clearly catnip to Oscar voters. The film is basically a cut-rate Citizen Kane, with a trio of Douglas’ former partners taking turns spooling out flashbacks that depict how they were personally betrayed. Movie director Barry Sullivan tells how his dream project was stolen from him, actress Lana Turner relates how Douglas broke her heart, and screenwriter Dick Powell tells how Douglas was responsible for his wife’s seduction and death. After each of these folks finishes their story, grizzled studio head Walter Pidgeon asks, “Is what he did to you REALLY that bad?” I kind of see his argument for the first two folks, but Powell’s wife was killed by the gigolo that Douglas hired to seduce her! You can’t simply wave that off by saying, “But you won a Pulitzer for the novel you wrote about your dead wife!” I enjoyed the flick well enough as I was watching it, but the twee finale in which all three of the aggrieved parties set aside their problems with Douglas to hear his new idea for a film was just too much. I’m quite sure that scummy Harvey Weinstein types eat up this kind of lame mea culpa for their heinous behavior, but it rang pretty hollow to me.

Deadwood (2019) – Finally, a fitting conclusion to the incredible HBO series that was cut down in its prime! Or, a conclusion. Or something. This flick has somehow gotten rave reviews, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why, other than misplaced nostalgia at seeing these actors reprising some of their greatest roles. Yes, it’s fantastic to see Ian McShane spouting off about “cocksuckers” again as Al Swearengen, and Timothy Olyphant sure did let that moustache get thick! For me, though, those kind of skin-deep charms do not make a good movie. After thirteen years, writer David Milch has crafted a film that relegates the bulk of his talented cast to cursory subplots, as he hones in on the trio of Swearengen, Olyphant’s sociopathic Marshal Seth Bullock, and evil gold magnate George Hearst, now a senator from California (and still played to the scheming hilt by Gerald McRaney). And while this three-way conflict did dominate the third (and final) season of the series, it was by no means the only thing that people cared about. Major characters like widow-turned-banker Alma Ellsworth, clinically depressed madam Joanie Stubbs, and window-dressing mayor E.B. Farnam are given next to nothing to do, as the focus of the flick stays stubbornly on the Hearst-Swearengen-Bullock dispute. Also, I guess the Doc’s tuberculosis cleared itself up over the decade between the series and the events of the film, because he doesn’t so much as cough during the film. As a huge fan of the series, I was really looking forward to this. I rewatched the whole series this summer with my wife, who had never seen it before. But frankly, I feel like the original non-ending was better. Yes, everything was kind of left hanging, but the contours of where it all was heading were pretty obvious. This movie takes all of the messy ambiguity out of the equation, leaving every character either dead or with a happy ending. They even manage to contrive a scene where Hearst finally gets some measure of comeuppance – who cares that nothing of the sort ever happened and the whole thing is ludicrous? Sending everyone off with a smile on their faces may be great fan service, but it cheapens the legacy of one of the most complex, tangled, discursive television series ever. I’m not happy that as the last scene set in this most entertaining of fictional towns unspooled, all I could think was, “Well, that wasn’t very good, was it?”

The Red-Headed Woman (1932) – This bit of pre-code fluff stars Jean Harlow as the red-headed woman in question, determined to sleep her way into high society. Her plan is spelled out pretty clearly right from the outset: she’s going to use sex to entangle a rich man into marriage. To that end, she starts off by finagling her way into her first rich target’s house under some work-related pretext. Needless to say, the guy’s unable to resists Harlow’s charms, and soon he’s divorcing his wife and marrying the fiery redhead. Everything’s going great until Harlow meets an even richer, even older man, and she instantly sets her sights on him. For a story about a woman explicitly using sex to trick wealthy men into marrying her, the film is surprisingly non-judgmental about the whole thing. Harlow’s seductions aren’t played as being especially wrong or immoral, it’s just what she does to get ahead. In the end, she’s not only allowed to get away with attempted murder, but the victims of her scams have a good chuckle over the fact that she’s moved on to an even richer dupe. No great shakes, but fun enough while it lasts.