Bullet
Director: Vijay Anand
Music: RD Burman; Lyrics: Anand Bakshi
Length: 156 minutes
Year: 1976
Ah, this film comes so close to the so bad
it’s good definition but in the end it really is so bad that it’s simply
bad – very bad. But within this incredible mediocrity are some marvelous
moments that made me tingle in disbelief and a non-stop series of idiotic
shots, clueless narrative and bad fashions that it gave me a wonderful
perverse sense of satisfaction. Perhaps to have reached true cult status
it needed one more clunky fight, one more drug induced music number, one
more brazen colored shirt, one more pair of hotpants or one more jaunty
cap perched on Dev Anand’s head. What really makes this shockingly inept
film so surprising is that it comes from the team of director Vijay Anand
and his brother Dev – the duo who produced and starred in so many classic
films in the 1950’s and 60’s – the creative forces behind the absolutely
brilliant and profound Guide (1965) and the legendary Jewel Thief (1967).
How could so much go wrong in one single film? What were they thinking?
It did bomb at the box office and deserved to totally.
The entire film is such a fashion faux pas that
it should be mandatory viewing in fashion school. This has to be laid at
the feet of Dev who seems to have taken all too well to tacky 70’s fashions
(as also seen in Hare Rama Hare Krishna) and who also as he got older appears
to have tried to cover this fact up by ever widening collars, eye scorching
colored shirts and matching ties, ascot scarves, leisure suits and a myriad
of juvenile caps that were almost always tilted dangerously to one side
of his head. He wants so badly to project an image of raffish charm, but
instead looks like the guy in the park who feeds the pigeons. Still this
is only a small guilty pleasure in a film with so many of them.
Inspector Dharam (Dev) is dead-set on nailing
arch criminal Dhurga Presad (perennial bad guy Kabir Bedi) who pretends
to run a legitimate shipping company but who is in fact swindling many
poor people who are gobbling up shares of his company. Dhurga or D.P. as
his friends call him – as I would like to call myself because I found myself
rooting for him by the end of the film – has a very lovely secretary, Sapna,
played by the strong cheek boned and statuesque Parveen Babi. In order
to get information, Dharam manages to woo Sapna even with his predilection
for canary yellow shirts and red polka dot robes. This though is nothing
compared to the erotic bottle dance in which he and Sapna dance with a
bottle between their foreheads. This would seduce any female I believe
and I am practicing it as I type – though the wall has to fill in for my
partner for now.
She helps by giving him the combination to D.P.’s
safe and the ultra-slick Dharam cleverly eludes security by deftly hiding
behind a column and then throwing them in the swimming pool. How legal
it is for a police officer to break in and steal evidence is not really
explored in this nail biting crime story. When Sapna visits his bachelor
apartment it is a mess with every single picture on the wall listing heavily
to one side. Only a real man would do that. She of course cleans it up
and straightens the frames as a real woman does while her man is away breaking
into a safe.
Later D.P. discovers who stole his files and
sets up Dharam for a fall – Dharam gets sentenced to jail with tragically
no access to his wardrobe. After he gets out he goes home where the pictures
are again leaning to one side as if in grief for their missing master.
He swears revenge on D.P. and visits him with a bullet in his hand and
tells him “this bullet that rests so close to my heart will some day rest
in yours” and then constantly shows up like gum on the bottom of your shoe
wherever D.P. is - grinning like a maniac on medication and holding the
bullet in his fingers. Not surprisingly D.P. orders five thugs to beat
Dharam up just for being so annoying and to bring him back the bullet –
but instead our hero wins the fight because he moves like the wind – on
a very hot slow day where even the ants stay home. Then as a tour de force
he is inspired to very quickly choreograph a music number at the night
club where D.P. is waiting for his bullet in which five women in hot pants
and Dharam's left over hats sing out “bullet, bullet, bullet” to taunt
him. It’s so cruel.
Running out of narrative at only the hour mark
or so, a side story is oddly introduced that almost saves the day. D.P.
is having an affair with a married woman, Mala (Sonia Sahni) who is married
to a wealthy older gentleman who has a daughter by a previous marriage
- Roshi played by the marvelous Jyoti Bakshi in a deranged debut that had
me cheering. She is a spoiled stoned out dope head who likes to hang out
at a hipster drug den decorated in skulls and spider webs – taking big
gigantic tokes and drinking until she is dazed and confused in her quilt
colored patterned clothes. When she comes home late one night her father
slaps her and she goes into a classic monologue that will break your heart
– “Finally you pay attention to me. If you had only slapped me when I had
my first cigarette at 8 years old, if only you had slapped me when I had
my first narco pill at ten years old, if only you had slapped me when I
had my first drink at twelve, my first pot at thriteen, my first boyfriend
at fourteen, my first orgy at fifteen, my first appearance in a porno film
at sixteen, my first lesbian encounter at seventeen, my first heroin overdose
at eighteen, my first oral sex in the oval office last week, my first S&M
session tonight, my first tattoo on my bottom tomorrow etc. etc. Thousands
of joints now fill my blood”. Yay! Good for you sweetie.
When she is later “kidnapped” by Dharam to get
some quick ransom money and in which he covers his criminal tracks like
an elephant on its way to the elephant graveyard – she slips him an LSD
pill and takes one herself and the truly mind-boggling Chori Chori breaks
out like a paranoid Dali painting in therapy – it may be the strangest
musical number I have seen in Bollywood yet and the very buxom and frisky
Roshi tantalizes the older man in her pink slip as they crawl around the
floor, walls and ceiling. Things only get stranger and stranger as Dharma
makes a mess of everything he touches. Huge plot holes, astonishing stupidity
from everyone and a suitcase of hand grenades all add to the general and
unintentional hilarity.
Tragically both female leads later in life came
to very sad ends. Parveen Babi was one of the real beauties from the 1970’s
– chiseled features, luxurious long black hair, piercing dark eyes – and
she had a large male fan base. She was a favorite of Amitabh Bachchan and
appeared alongside him many times in films – her role as a prostitute who
stands by him in Deewar got her raves. During this period the Bollywood
“heroine” was getting a facelift into a more morally ambiguous character
and Parveen and Zeenat Aman were the actresses of choice for this type
of role. She also had scandalous affairs – a long one with Kabir and another
with director Mahesh Bhatt (who is planning to make a biopic about her).
The affair with Mahesh was the basis for a film by Smita Patil called Arth
about a philandering husband. By the mid-80’s her star was on the wane
and she disappeared to America for many years. When she returned she was
nearly unrecognizable – very heavy – her face distorted and clearly mentally
unstable with paranoid schizophrenia – she told newspapers that Amitabh
was conspiring to kill her. She died alone in her small apartment in 2005.
I can’t find much on the very intriguing Jyoti
– she made only a few more films into the early 80’s and then apparently
dropped out of the film business for love – a love that went bad. Later
on she was often seen drunk and stealing food from restaurant tables –
she too died alone.
My rating for this film: 4.0 (but eminently
watchable)