Avijit Ghosh - 40 Retakes

40 RETAKES: Bollywood Classics You May Have Missed

A vijit Ghosh was born in Agartala, capital of the tiny north-eastern state of Tripura and grew up loitering in the small towns of Bihar and Jharkhand: Dumka, Giridih, Arrah and Ranchi. Spending many of his college hours in cinema halls, he graduated in history from St Xaviers College, Ranchi and filched countless cups of canteen tea from friends on his way to earning MA and M Phil degrees in modern history from Jawaharlal Nehru University.

A journalist and a husband for the past twenty years, he has worked with the Press Trust of India, The Pioneer (the best days of his life, some months he even worked for half pay), The Telegraph and is now employed as a senior editor with The Times of India. He has also been a visiting fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania.

Addicted to cinema and sports, he writes regularly on these subjects. He is the author of the novel, Bandicoots in the Moonlight (Penguin), which suffered the fate of an honourable art movie: a minor critical success and a major commercial failure. His second book, Cinema Bhojpuri (also Penguin), earned him the Special Mention for Best Writing on Cinema in the 58th National Film Awards.

Avijit lives in Delhi with his mother, wife and two kids, Abhishek and Diya. He eagerly awaits your feedback on any of the three books he has written at

TRANQUEBAR PRESS

An imprint of westland ltd

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First published in TRANQUEBAR PRESS
by westland ltd 2013

First e-book edition: 2013

Copyright Avijit Ghosh 2013

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-93-83260-31-7

Typeset by Ram Das Lal

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, circulated, and no reproduction in any form, in whole or in part (except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews) may be made without written permission of the publishers.

To Mushi (who I know will read the book one day)
and to Tintin (who might pore over the pictures,
if he ever loses the smartphone)

Contents

Foreword

H ave you heard of Man Ka Meet? The 1968 movie, produced by actor Sunil Dutt to launch his younger brother Som Duttwhich vanished without a trace? So did Dutt junior. But in my ordinary life, Man Ka Meet holds an extraordinary place. It is the first movie I saw; not the entire thing, just thirty minutes of it.

We lived in a small town in erstwhile south Bihar called Giridih. My father used to be an officer with the state intelligence department, a plainclothes cop. One evening, when he had taken me out for a Coca-Cola, he got chatting with the manager of a movie theatre whose name I can no longer recall. I was getting bored. So he asked the manager to get me a seat inside the theatre. Even today I can picture myself in the dark auditorium with the magical world of moving pictures coming alive before my eyes for the first time. It was a gamechanging moment. I remember Som Dutt jumping up and down a train chased by a bunch of boisterous girls in tight slacks who sang, Ek anari junglee janwar budtameez deewana. I was thoroughly enjoying myself when I was asked to step out because my fathers meeting was over. But the die had been cast. I was hooked on movies forever.

Now, films consume me. Almost every second day I watch at least one, mostly on television or dvd. Movies allow me to think and ruminate. What would have happened to Amitabh Bachchan if Dev Anand had said yes to Zanjeer? What kind of films would Awtar Krishan Kaul (director of the seminal 27 Down) have made had he not drowned trying to save a friend? What sort of impact would K. Asif s Sasta Khoon Mehnga Paani, the magnum opus he abandoned midway, have had on the Hindi film industry? The couple of reels one gets to see of Shabab Ahmeds Film Hi Film are simply mindblowing.

This book, though, isnt about cinematic fantasy; it is rather rooted in reality. It is an attempt to revisit a bunch of special films that either did not get their due or have been largely forgotten. It is an attempt to show, that like fine wine, a movie too is a living thing that constantly evolves over the years.

I record my gratitude to Firoze Rangoonwalla, Shiv Viswanathan, Anil Grover, Suresh Kohli, Susmita Dasgupta, Sidharth Bhatia, D. Shyam Babu, Chandra Bhan Prasad, Nirmal Sharma, Vinay Pandey, Narayani Ganesh, Rakesh Batabyal, and Subodh Verma, for their help and support in the writing of this book.

This is also a suitable occasion to say thanks to some friends and colleagues: Shishir Prashant, Deepika Sahu, Gautam Sidharth, Anuj Kumar, Manoj Mitta, Jagdish Yadav, Chitra Padmanabhan, Namrata Joshi, Anuradha Raman, Samita Bhatia, Pradeep Thakur, Syed Saud Akhtar, Shashi Prasad, Renu Pachauri, Meenakshi Sinha, Kim Arora, Vijay Lokpalli, Ronojoy Sen, CP Surendran, Alok Sinha, Amit Bhattacharya, Aarti Tikoo Singh, Ananth Srinivas, Dhananjay Mahapatra, Malini Sen, Tirna Ray, Sushil Aaron, Shankar Raghuraman, Atul Thakur, Debashish Roy, Devlin Roy. I would like to record my appreciation for Prita Maitra at Westland for editing the manuscript and hammering it into shape. She has been a firm friend in the world of publishing.

To my mother Anjali, sister Bani and my jamai babu, I express my sincerest gratitude. And last, but not the least, this book wouldnt have been complete but for the support and help offered by my wife and first reader-editor Rachna. My gratefulness cannot be expressed in words.

Avijit Ghosh

Introduction

L ike most works of art, films are generally judged by two barometerspopular success and critical acclaim. Failing to achieve either usually condemns them to oblivion. But life isnt black or white. Neither is cinema. The truth remains that good, even great, movies falter at the box office. Sometimes they also fail the critics test. Or vice-versa. Now, as we celebrate 100 years of Indian feature films, this book is an endeavour to draw attention to a bunch of movies that deserve a second look. Some were underfted by critics and failed at the ticket counters when first released. A few were admired by critics, or rewarded at the cash counters but have been forgotten over the years and need to be reintroduced to a new generation of filmgoers.

Consider Footpath (1953), a hard-hitting indictment of soulless capitalism. Director Zia Sarhadys film fell flat at the box office. Even in the biographies of Dilip Kumar, the movie hardly gets the detailed analysis that it deserves. But it remains one of the finest works of the virtuoso actor.

Few have managed to make an engrossing yet educative film on the reproductive rights of women as masterclass director Shyam Benegal does in Hari Bhari (2000). Sadly, the film which profiles the lives of five women in a rural Muslim family in Uttar Pradesh barely made it to the theatres. Antardwand (2010) falls in the same category. Based on the phenomenon of shotgun weddings in Bihar, this movie of stunning authenticity sank without a trace.

Producer-director-actor-writer Chandra Shekhars Cha Cha Cha (1964) is another fascinating film. A box-office success when first released, the film is largely remembered for the memorable compositions of Iqbal Qureshi still played by Vividh Bharati and nostalgia-friendly FM radio stations. But not many of us have actually seen the film and know what is all about.