Cheap thrills and more

A book that showcases an American’s take on Bollywood of the 1970s.

April 25, 2015 02:12 pm | Updated 02:12 pm IST

Funky Bollywood by Todd Stadtman

Funky Bollywood by Todd Stadtman

Books on popular cinema are being published at a fairly steady pace and that is a good augury. The Indian film industry is the largest in the world in terms of number of releases, but perhaps one of the least analysed. In recent years, film scholars across the world have begun to look at Indian popular cinema and a slew of books that are more accessible to the lay reader have also made an appearance. But these tend to be mainly about individuals (stars, more often than not) or specific films. There is hardly any writing on genres or eras.

Therefore it is with pleasure that one receives this book, written by an American who runs the marvellous blog, Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill about global pop cinema and genres such as Mexican Lucha libre films. Kitsch, cheesiness and over-the-top treatment, of emotions, sets and action — Todd Stadman loves them all, and happily, without the least touch of condescension.

He describes himself as someone “whose interest in Bollywood is neither academic nor motivated by a desire to worship at the altar of its current stars? What if you are, for instance, someone like me — a person who has left the world of high-brow film connoisseurship behind and dedicated himself to trolling the more disreputable regions of world popular cinema in search of, for lack of a better word, cheap thrills?”

And thrills, cheap and otherwise, are available in generous doses in this volume, which is chiefly concerned with the masala films of the 1970s, a decade of excess and garishness like no other. Not just the colours, the fashions and those hairstyles, but even the storylines and the posters come in for close scrutiny. The book’s subtitle — The Wild World of 1970s Indian Action Cinema — says it all. Most of the films are in Hindi, with the occasional Telugu action thrillers like James Bond 777 or Mosagallaku Mosagadu , a cowboy film.

The chapterisation of the book is interesting, whetting our appetite for what is to come. The first half concentrates on the Stars, which includes the Heroes, the Heroines, the Heavies, the Supporting players, the Directors and the Screenwriters. Then come the films, which include sub-sections like the Spy films ( Suraksha , et al) and Curry Westerns ( Sholay , Khote Sikkey ). In between a key is provided, which — when applied to each film — gives us a good idea in shorthand what we can expect — violence: bromance, lost and found, and even Helen, who was a staple in that decade. This is a helpful idea, somewhat like the red chilly symbol in menus that inform us that the dish is spicy and hot.

What lends a certain novelty to Stadman’s point of view is his knowledge of international film genres of the period, which put Hindi films in context of the times. “Generous homage is also paid, as in most great actioners of the era, to Hong Kong martial arts films (Amitabh even engages in a Gordon Liu-style pole fight at one point), as well as to contemporary American organised crime films that were an obvious influence,” he writes about Don. Stadman has researched the Indian social context well too: About Deewar , he says, “If it is indeed the quintessential Angry Young Man film that is because it is itself an angry film, released just ahead of the State of Emergency declared by Indian president Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed in the tumultuous summer of 1975. Its sympathies render it admirably gray in its moral shading for a Bollywood film of its time”.

But it is not just the ‘big’ films like Amar Akbar Anthony , Zanjeer and, of course, Sholay that get a lot of play; no film is too small or cheesy to escape Stadman’s eye. So there are delightful analyses — if that is the word — of long-forgotten lemons like International Crook , Warrant and Chaila Babu ; films that only the diehard fan would remember or want to know about. What we get to know while digesting the entire volume is that the period was about movies where the women were just glamour dolls and the men were macho and rugged. The 1970s action ‘formula’ had a mix, in different proportions, of separated brothers, outlandish villains living in well-protected lairs (shades of James Bond films), skimpily clad women and, often, exotic locations. And some great music too. The songs and even the title sequences of those times are now in great demand among the DJs of Europe, who can’t get enough of the funk.

This is a must-have for not just the casual browser but also the more serious student of Hindi films who is interested not just in individual movies but also, so to speak, the big picture. The loud graphic design additionally helps us appreciate that the 1970s were, indeed, a unique decade in Indian cinema.

Funky Bollywood: The Wild World of 1970s Indian Action Cinema; Todd Stadman, Fabpress, £12.99.

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