Sholay

[tikistitch]

Bromance!



First thing you have to understand, this is like the most famous, well-regarded piece of Indian cinema ever.

But it's not some kind of obscure, artsy-fartsy film. It's a western! And I tell you, they must have watched every single American western movie ever, because they hit all the tropes. I'll give you one: guy on a moving train aims a hip shot with a pistol at a dude riding a horse, and KNOCKS HIM OFF THE HORSE. In one shot. Ha! WITH A PISTOL! In this case, there are no Indians, or rather, everybody is an Indian, but the bad guys wear turbans.

The story concerns a pair of small time criminals, Jai and Veeru. Jai is played by Amitabh Bachchan (Abhichek's dad), who went on to become one of the biggest stars in Indian cinema. The movie starts off silly. At one point the guys get imprisoned in a place with a "tough" warden: he has a Hitler mustache! But like a lot of Indian movies, it gets more dramatic as it goes on. The plot will be familiar to anyone who's ever seen Seven Samurai: an isolated village is beset by bandits, and it's up to Our Heroes to defeat them. There are a lot of fun action scenes along the way (it begins with a great raid on a train, and at one point, one of the leading ladies has an exciting chase in her wagon as she tries to outrun some bandits). And of course some music and dancing.

Even the fights are good. Many Indian movies - even recent ones - have pretty terrible fistfights: one guy swings a fist and catches air, and you hear a smacking sound and someone falls down, but the fights in Sholay look like people were bruised up later. And there's so much violence that some scenes were cut by the censor and not restored until the DVD finally came out many years later. In one scene that manages to be both hilarious and supremely awesome, a dude with NO ARMS beats up on a fully able guy.

This movie went on to become a super mega hit, going on to run FIVE YEARS at one theater. My husband liked it, and he usually runs to the other room when I turn on Bollywood. (He also liked Robot, but more on that later.) I remain amazed that they could take a genre as purely American as the Western and totally hit one out of the park like this.