As the film opens, a chauffeur named Kishenlal (Pran) is released from prison after serving a sentence for a hit and run accident. He returns home to find his wife, Bharati (Nirupa Roy)—whose name evokes the nation’s—suffering from tuberculosis, and their three little sons starving. He is furious to learn that his rich employer Robert has not honored his promise to support the family, for indeed (we soon discover) Kishenlal himself was innocent of any wrong, but took the rap for an accidental killing at the guilty Robert’s request, on condition that his family receive triple his wages during his jail sentence. When he confronts the villain in his lair (played as a comical Anglo-Indian by Jeevan, the actor famous for portraying the mischievous sage Narada in numerous mythological films – cf. JAI SANTOSHI MAA), Robert first humiliates him and then orders him killed by his goons, but Kishenlal escapes in a car that (unbeknownst to him) is loaded with smuggled gold bullion. He returns home to discover his sons abandoned by Bharati, who has left a suicide note (as she doesn’t want him to have to spend money on her T.B. treatment). Since Robert’s men are in hot pursuit, he loads the boys into a car and rushes them to a nearby park where he leaves them under a statue of Mahatma Gandhi—incidentally, it happens to be August 15th (Indian independence day). Before Kishenlal can get back to them, the little boys get accidentally “partitioned” and are found and adopted by (respectively) a Hindu police officer, a Muslim tailor, and a Catholic priest. At the same time, Bharati, running through the forest, is struck by a falling tree limb and loses her eyesight, and Kishenlal is apparently killed in a fiery car crash. But no!—the latter survives, and even gets away with the gold, though a police constable mistakenly reports to poor, blind Bharati (who has now decided to live, enduring blindness as God’s punishment for her suicidal impulse), that he and their sons have all perished. Haay!!





Fast forward twenty-two years: the middle son is now a streetsmart Goanesque liquor dealer named Anthony Gonsalves (Amitabh Bachchan), who exasperates his priestly benefactor but atones for his waywardness by giving half his earnings to the Blessed Virgin. Amar (Vinod Khanna) has followed in the footsteps of his adoptive father to become a dashing and exemplary (which is to say, tough) police officer, and Akbar (Rishi Kapoor) is a passionate qawwali singer in love with a young doctor named Salma (Neetu Singh). All are going about their business when an old, blind woman who sells flowers on the street (take a wild guess as to who she is!) is struck by a car, and the three boys, who turn out to share her bloodtype, are pressed into service as donors. In one of the film’s most memorably overdetermined visuals, this is done by direct transfusion from three beds positioned under windows that frame (respectively) a temple, a mosque, and a church, while “Mother India” lies unconscious on a fourth bed at the boys’ feet.





Although this may sound like the grand finale to an epic film, it is in fact only the end of the 25-minute prologue to this one: the credits roll as the boys placidly give their blood to the poor maternal “stranger.” The remaining two-and-a-half hours will naturally be devoted to contriving, but artfully delaying, the revelation of who is who, reuniting the sundered family, and giving the evil Robert his just deserts. But since all this is a foregone conclusion, most of viewers’ attention can be surrendered to the cavalcade of “items,” including love interest (of suitable religio-ethnicity) for each of the boys, knockabout brawls and car chases, Bachchan’s Bombay-mod wardrobe, zippy dialog spiced with plenty of street slang, and a hilarious final triple impersonation.





The bouncy Akbar Illahabadi, King of Qawwals, is the first to fall in love, wooing his beloved Salma during a public performance of the rousing and suggestive filmi qawwali Parda hai parda (“There is a veil”):





There is a veil, and behind the veil,


a modestly veiled woman,


and if I don’t unveil her,


then my name isn’t Akbar!





But when Salma’s strict and dwarfish lumber dealer father forbids their union, Akbar rounds up a group of transvestite hijras (the real thing, from the looks of them) to taunt him with the song Tayyab Ali pyaar ka dushman (“Tayyab Ali is the enemy of love!”). Overcoming his enmity will require a minor subplot involving an angry courtesan (the father’s ex-mistress) who sets the house on fire, allowing Akbar to display his courage by rescuing both Salma and her dad.





Officer Amar gets (for reasons to be discussed below) the most cursory romantic treatment: he apprehends a stylish young woman named Lakshmi (Shabana Azmi) who is hitching rides with strangers and then delivering them to a gang of robbers; however, we soon learn that she is only doing this at the behest of an evil stepmother (the famous actress Nadira in a cameo) who is threatening her beloved grandma. In a trice the stepmom and her dastardly gang are behind bars and Lakshmi shifts to the kindly Amar’s house, to henceforth be seen only in saris and with properly tied-back hair, engaged in virtuous activities such as taking in the laundry. She is, in short, well on her way to becoming a good, middle-class Hindu wife. No further surprises here.





Anthony falls, after a suitable buildup, for a London-returned knockout named Jennie (Parveen Babi), who attends the same church that he does and is ostensibly the daughter of Kishenlal (remember him? the boys’ actual father, who got away with a box of gold). The latter—thinking his wife dead and his sons irretrievably lost—has now become a crime boss himself and is getting back at Robert, who has been reduced to working for him. But in fact, Jennie is actually Robert’s daughter, whom Kishenlal kidnapped as part of his revenge, and when Robert escapes from Kishenlal’s surveillance and reestablishes himself as a rival smuggler king (this happens in a matter of minutes), getting her back becomes his number one priority, a task at which he is assisted by a ridiculous platform-soled strongman named Zebisco (Hercules). But first Anthony declares his love to Jennie during a rock’n roll Easter function (those Christians sure know how to party!) at which he emerges, top-hatted and monocled, out of an enormous Easter egg to perform the comical song My name is Anthony Gonsalves, which sends up all the pretensions (including rapid-fire but nonsensical English declamation) of certain Anglo-Indians: a cabaret version, one might say, of G. V. Desani’s novel All About H. Hatterr.





Poor blind Bharati stumbles in and out of these episodes, for she is now in contact with all three boys, though she does not yet realize that they are her own sons (of course, they touchingly call her “Ma” anyhow, as is quite proper in Hindi). Causing the scales to fall from everyone’s eyes will require intervention by Higher Powers, represented by suitably folksy deities of the three traditions: Santoshi Ma, Sai Baba (an early 20th century Muslim holy man who is now revered by many Hindus as well), and Jesus-and-Mary—assisted by cobras, a magical locket, and a bleeding crucifix. The pop qawwali-bhajan Shirdiwale Sai Baba (“O Sai Baba of Shirdi”), performed by Akbar and an ecstatic congregation in a shrine incorporating the Muslim crescent and star and a Shiva bull and lingam epitomizes this unembarrassed syncretism.





As the above synopsis should suggest, India’s religio-ethnic minorities are hospitably and centrally accommodated in this film, yet they are also presented (as American minorities have often been in Hollywood films) as embodiments of rakish comedy, exotic color, proletarian uninhibitedness, and yes, rhythm. Naturally they are junior brothers (who are traditionally permitted more license in the joint family), and moreover they are reassuringly Hindu inside (indeed, of one blood with Amar and the Mother, and as the voiceover song intones during the transfusion scene, “Blood is ever blood, never water.”) But as juniors and Others, they get to display the boisterous highjinks that would be inappropriate in their Senior, the grave patriarch-in-the-making Amar, who serves as the dharma-devoted Rama of this set, and whose most emotional scene occurs (naturally) when he recognizes and embraces their father. As a police officer (back when police officers were still routinely portrayed as incorruptible), he also represents the “dignity” of both the State and the middle class (and it seems appropriate that he is played by actor Khanna, who—after a flirtation with the Rajneesh movement—would eventually end up as a Hindu-nationalist Member of Parliament). Hence when it comes to a fistfight between Amar and Anthony, viewers will not be surprised to find the great and lanky Amitabh for once taking a beating; even if he is an inch shorter, Big Brother has to win. But despite their (necessary) weakness, minorities are clearly the spice of life in Desai’s worldview, and tellingly, the straight-laced Amar is the only brother who doesn’t get a song of his own, merely participating in show-stopping ensemble pieces: the triple-duet Humko tumse (“I’ve fallen in love with you”)—a lovesong uniting all three brothers and their sweethearts in separate locations, and featuring the voices of Lata Mangeshkar, Mohamed Rafi, Kishore Kumar, and Mukesh—and the final title-song trio (in which he gets to comically impersonate a one-man wedding band), when the bad guys get their comeuppance.











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A train arrives at a rural station and a lone police officer disembarks, looking for "Thakur Sahib" (thakur, literally "lord, master," is a respectful title for a member of one of the landlord castes who trace their lineage to ancient kshatriyas or warrior-aristocrats; Sahib means "sir"). As the credits roll, we follow his horseback journey through a Badlands-like landscape to the remote settlement of Ramgarh (“Rama’s fort”). Here he meets the Thakur, Baldev Singh (Sanjeev Kumar), a retired police officer who is always wrapped in a gray shawl. Singh requests his visitor to locate and bring him two criminals, the scruffy, ever-smiling Veeru (Dharmendra) and the lanky, brooding Jaidev or “Jai” for short (Amitabh Bacchan). When the officer asks what task these notorious repeat-offenders can possibly be suited for, Singh recounts his first meeting with them, two years earlier, when he was transporting them to jail via a freight train. Immediately after they boast to him of their courage, the train is attacked by bandits, and they defend it and their wounded captor against a seemingly unending troop of horsemen. But their moral ambivalence is revealed when they toss a coin to decide whether to bring the bleeding officer to a hospital (landing themselves in jail), or to escape (leaving him to die). In a motif that will be repeated, "chance" impels them to do the Right Thing. The flashback ends with Singh's visitor promising to search for the pair, but adding that, if they are out of jail and at large, it may be difficult to locate them.





Cut to the first musical number: Veeru and Jai steal a motorcycle with sidecar and burst into a rollicking "song of the road," evoking the antics of Raj Kapoor's "vagabond" persona of the 1950s (cf. Awara, Shri 420). Here, however, it is not simply a celebration of manic, vaguely anti-social freedom, but an ingeniously choreographed male love-duet, as they affirm their eternal friendship (dosti) during a joyride through a scenic obstacle course dotted with banyan trees and hapless rustics.





We next see them approaching a crooked but comical Muslim lumber dealer, Surma Bhopali (Jagdeep), with an unusual offer: he will turn them in to the police, collect the reward of 2000 rupees, and split it with them when they are released from prison. Cut to the prison, and another ludic interlude, including homage to Chaplin's Great Dictator in the crackpot jailer (comic actor Asrani), who boasts of his training under the British. The wily pair easily outsmart him and escape, but when they return to Bhopali to collect their promised thousand rupees, he betrays them to the police. Back in jail, they are located by the Thakur's agent, and Singh awaits them outside the prison gate when they are released, thus ending the comic digression and returning to the frame narrative. Singh asks them to capture the notorious outlaw (daku) Gabbar Singh; in return, he will give them the 50,000 rupees reward offered by the police. He pays them a 5,000 rupee advance, and promises another 5,000 when they reach Ramgarh.





Arriving by train, the boys encounter a talkative female tonga (horsecart) driver named Basanti (Hema Malini). Jai is bored by her ceaseless chatter but Veeru is entranced. Soon after reaching Ramgarh, Jai catches a glimpse of Radha (Jaya Bhaduri, Bacchan's future wife), the Thakur's daughter-in-law, who wears a widow's white sari. Having received their 10,000 rupees from the Thakur, and having glimpsed the riches in his safe, the duo plan to rob the household by night and make a quick exit. But as they prepare to do this, Radha confronts them, offers them the key to the safe, and tells them to take her jewelry (emblematic of the auspicious state of a married woman) as she has no more use for it. They are shamed into dropping their plan.





Enroute to picking green mangoes for her elderly aunt, Basanti helps a blind maulvi (Islamic preacher) descend a hill—thus demonstrating that communal harmony reigns in Ramgarh. He asks her to help convince his only son, Ahmad, to take a job in the city, although this will mean leaving him alone in his old age. In the mango grove, Veeru and Jaidev shoot down green fruit for Basanti, and Veeru "teaches" her to use a pistol.





The village routine is shattered when dacoits arrive, demanding their tribute of grain. The Thakur refuses to pay, and aided by Veeru and Jaidev, drives them away. They return to Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan), who metes out sadistic punishment for the failure of their mission.





Cut to a scene of Holi festivities in the village (the spring harvest festival of fertility and licentiousness, and a stock trope in many Hindi films; cf. the similar scene in Mother India); amidst a rain of colored powders and dyes, Veeru and Basanti dance and sing a saucy duet, but Jai can only gaze at the somber Radha from afar. The festivities are interrupted by a brutal attack by Gabbar's band, who almost kill the heroes, but are at last driven off. Afterward, Veeru's disgust at the Thakur's failure to assist them at a crucial moment (by tossing them a gun) leads to a long flashback, in which he explains the cause of his helplessness and his enmity with Gabbar Singh. (Intermission)











When Veeru and Jaidev, horrified by the Thakur’s tale, vow to kill Gabbar Singh, the Thakur reminds them that he wants the outlaw alive. A villager brings news that gypsies—known to supply arms to the dacoits—have arrived in the area. Cut to a dance sequence in the gypsy camp, featuring the hypnotic song Mehbooba (“Beloved,” sung by R. D. Burman himself), with sensual (to Indian ears) Middle Eastern-style music and heavily Persianized lyrics. While Gabbar Singh is distracted by the show, Veeru and Jai enter the camp. In the ensuing skirmish, Jai is wounded. As he returns home, Radha rushes to meet him and the Thakur realizes her feelings.





The blind maulvi receives a letter from his urban brother, informing him that he has found a job for Ahmad; however, the boy refuses to leave his aged father. It being Monday, Basanti goes to a temple to ask Shiva for a good husband (as unmarried girls typically do). Veeru briefly impersonates the deity, but is found out. As Basanti drives away in anger, Veeru sings to her "Anger makes a pretty girl even prettier." Veeru now tells Jai that he wants to marry Basanti, and asks his buddy to intercede with her aunt. Jai finally does, but the aunt is horrified by Jai's description of Veeru's lifestyle of drinking, gambling, and whoring. Rejected, Veeru gets drunk and threatens to kill himself by leaping from the village watertank. The dialog to this famous scene includes comic asides on Veeru’s use of English.





1st villager: Brother, what is this "suicide" thing?





2nd villager: You see, when English people croak, they call it "suicide"!





At last, Basanti's old aunt relents and agrees to the match.



Basanti is pursued by Gabbar's men, and Veeru tries to save her. Both are captured. In a famous scene, Gabbar forces Basanti to dance in the hot sun, threatening to shoot her lover if she stops. She sings, "I will dance as long as there is breath left in my body." At one point, the dacoits make her dance on broken glass (recalling the climactic dance sequence in Pakeezah). Needless to say, Jai comes to the rescue, the dacoits are slain, Thakur Baldev Singh takes his revenge on Gabbar, and (some of) the lovers live on happily.








Sholay presents interesting parallels with its predecessor by nearly two decades, Mehboob Khan's Mother India, notably in the enduring trope of the daku (Indian English "dacoit") or highwayman—an outlaw whose popular representations span the gamut from freedom-loving Robin Hood to rapacious sociopath. In the earlier film, the mother's dark, younger son Birju, driven by well-justified hatred for the parasitic village moneylender who has ruined the family, eventually becomes the leader of a dacoit band; he appears as a dashing, richly-dressed horseman, who is primarily interested in settling a score against feudalistic oppression; yet when he finally abducts the moneylender's daughter, his own mother rises to destroy him. In contrast, the dakus of Sholay—from their first appearance in the flashback of the train-shootout—are unambiguously evil and bent on carnage, yet they are apparently ensconced in the very heart of the nation (the film's visual setting is the plateau country of the northern Deccan, India's midsection), and the forces of social order (here focused in the brooding patriarch, Thakur Baldev Singh) are powerless to defeat them. Indeed, the sadistic Gabbar Singh has brutally murdered this "Father India's" two sons and has literally cut off his law-administering arms (cf. the comparable though "accidental" mutilation of the father in Mother India). To strike back, Singh must (as he puts it) "use iron to cut iron," replacing his slain offspring and severed arms with two "adopted" criminal “hands,” who alone possess the requisite bravery (and moral ambivalence) to track down the monster in his lair.



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Though the Himalayan hill station of Mussoorie, where the action ostensibly transpires, certainly exists, it does not now nor did it ever contain hotels with Las Vegas style revues, soulful and pampered young drummers with Teddy Boy wardrobes, and high-heeled vamps in fur and silver lamé, nor was it ever located, as this film’s resort town patently is, somewhere in the Deccan. No matter; sur-realism reigns supreme here, and Vijay Anand’s fine eye and Hitchcock-homage vision, together with Burman’s bouncy score carries the day, even for those who are not Shammi Kapoor fans.



For those who are, this is one of the actor’s most applauded roles after JUNGLEE, pairing him with Asha Parekh and giving him plenty of opportunity to display his trademark manic-obsessive lover character. Here he is Anil Kumar, a.k.a. “Sona,” a.k.a. “Rocky,” a drumming and singing sensation who, together with his jazzy band and a lavish revue featuring dancer Ruby (Helen), packs ‘em in nightly at the posh Park Hotel. Unfortunately, a girl named Rupa, who is in love with Rocky but has been spurned by him, falls to her death from the hotel’s third floor (that’s British style, so the American fourth)—an apparent suicide. One year later, her younger sister Sunita (Parekh), believing Rupa to have been raped by Rocky, comes to the hotel seeking revenge—in the usual way, of course: by having her college girls’ hockey team attack Rocky with their sticks! Trouble is, Rocky has already fallen in love with Sunita, whom he met by chance on the train from Delhi, so he arranges for a band member to impersonate him for some days while he, using his real name of Anil, woos the obstinate girl as only Shammi can: by hurling himself in front of her, talking manically, making rubber faces, etc. He is aided from time to time by his well-heeled older friend, Prince Mahender Singh (Premnath) and frustrated by the pouting Ruby, who is madly smitten with him. Against all odds, Sunita does fall in love with him too—after he protects her, one Dark and Stormy Night, from a gang of rapacious thugs—but there’s still the problem of Rupa’s death, which may in fact have been murder. Did Rocky do it? Or Ruby? And what about the sinister Ramesh (Prem Chopra), Rupa’s jealous fiancé, who is also making a play for her sister Sunita?



It all gets sorted out, more or less, in a surprise ending, but the real delight is in the pop-hallucinatory mise-en-scene. Though the film’s treatment of character is conventionally sexist (narcissistic, romance-obsessed, but ultimately patriarchal-conservative hero-stud encounters a sequence of three “bad”—which is to say, independent and sexually forward—ladies, each of whom is, of course, destroyed), the visual regime is playful, innovative, and often erotic. The wicked camera work includes gazing at and through apertures of all sorts—eyes, lattices, and guitar soundboards—and the frenetic cutting sets a pace that manages to upstage even hammy Shammi. The baroquely incoherent sets, especially for the club numbers, might have sprung from the fevered brain of a downmarket Salvador Dali (though, of course, they are really Bombay Occidentalism’s idea, in 1966, of the last word in modern chic). In one costume bit during the first song, Woh hasina (“That beauty,” sung for Shammi by Mohammad Rafi), Helen appears, dressed as a pink Flamenco diva, in the pupil of an enormous eye, framed by lashes that are shaped into cruel-looking steel fangs, while Shammi in a silver tux blows soulfully on a tenor sax. A moment later, they are romping through a landscape littered with what appear to be beribboned Joan Miro sculptures, then on to a forest where giant pastel-shaded lamps with crooked stands surround a faux Henry Moore figure, around which frolics a troupe of Slavonic ladies and Mariachi men. (Alice’s Adventures might have turned out like this had she gone, instead of to Wonderland, to the Museum of Modern Art during an Ethnic Diversity festival.)



Another standout number is Aaja aaja (“Come to me, come to me”), performed in an equally pastichey “rock ‘n roll club” and featuring Shammi’s orgasmic twitching during the beckoning refrain, “aa-aa-aa-aaja, aa-aa-aa-aaja”—which is evidently contagious, since everyone begins to do it. (Lucky thing that, back then, no one worried about Sexually Transmitted Dances!). Other catchy tunes, performed in more standard mountain landscapes, are Deewana [mujh sa nahin] (“There’s no mad lover like me…”), and O mere sonare (“Oh my darling Sona,” the latter sung by Asha Bhosle for Parekh).



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This loopy romantic comedy about upper-middle class Delhiites stars Dev Anand as Rakesh Kumar, a young USA-returned architect whose ultra-modern house designs are in high demand—these feature swooping precast concrete curves and trellised cantilevered balconies, of the sort that now indeed dot many of the southern suburbs of the Capital that date from this period. In one of the new colonies, two feuding and apparently nouveau-riches tycoons, Seth Karamchand (Harindranath Chattopadhyay) and Lala Jagannath (Om Prakash), purchase lots directly adjacent to one another. Each then engages Rakesh to build a palatial dreamhouse "in front of" (and eclipsing and obscuring) the other's. The problem is that although Jagannath is Rakesh's own hot-tempered father, the young architect promptly falls in love with the bilious Karamchand's daughter Sulekha (Nutan). As if further levity were required, there are two comical couples: Sulekha's libidinous brother Ranjit, a.k.a. "Ronnie" (Rajendra Nath), on leave from a military post in Kashmir, who falls in love with Rakesh's glamorous Goan secretary Ginny Fernandez (Zareen Katrak), and Rakesh's comic sidekick Mohan (Rashid Khan), who falls for Sulekha's maidservant Moti (Praveen Chowdhry). The resolution of this plot worthy of a lite Mozart opera unfolds through a strong musical score, several histrionic speeches, and (perhaps most notably) a deliciously-bizarre double dreamhouse (worthy of early Barbie) that ultimately spatially unites the two warring families around the Vedic fire altar at which Rakesh and Sulekha's nuptials are performed.



Memorable songs include Dil ka bhanwar kare pukar ("the bee of the heart calls out"), sung as Sulekha and Rakesh descend the winding stairs of Delhi's 13th century Qutb Minar after having gazed voyeuristically down at Ronnie and Ginny boldly holding hands in the courtyard below; Tu kahan, yeh bata ("Where are you? Tell me") sung as Rakesh wanders the moonlit streets of Shimla in search of Sulekha (both songs performed by Mohammed Rafi), and the surrealistic pictureization of the title duet Tere ghar ke samne ....ek ghar banaunga ("I'll make my home...in front of your house"), in which Rakesh muses on his growing love for Sulekha, who appears suspended in his whiskey glass (sung by Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar).



Some fairly tacky soundstage sets alternate with wonderful location shots around Delhi and Shimla. Throughout the film, images of architecture and especially of home-construction serve to evoke the dual projects of modernization and nation-building (in one memorable scene, Rakesh, pursuing Sulekha to Shimla, drives his scooter through the rising Le Corbusier city-center of Chandigarh, one of the great emblems of the Nehruvian modernization project). As the film's climax approaches, the verbal and visual messages urging the pair of feuding patriarchs to unite to form a single, undivided household inevitably evoke—even in so light-hearted a narrative—the serious threat of familial and social disintegration embodied in such seminal tales as the Mahabharata, and dramatized anew by the trauma of Partition and the subsequent experience of Hindu-Muslim communal tensions. All such backgrounds contribute to the cathartic release of the ultimate embrace, not of Rakesh and Sulekha (who have been in love since the second song sequence), but of their weeping fathers.



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