My Essential B Watches
Wildly original, far more entertaining than what passes off as A
My Essential B Watches
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Some movies become B despite having A-stars. The mind-numbing “Aaya aaya Toofan, bhaga bhaga Shaitaan” of Amitabh Bachchan’s Toofan. Rajesh Khanna’s bra-fuelled serial-killer rampage of Red Rose. Kamalahaasan’s rapacious wrath of Pyasa Shaitaan. Dev Anand rapping in Mr Prime Minister. Every Mithunda movie made in Ooty, from the mid-’90s to its end, where the only suspense was whether his sister would be off-ed before or after the interval.
And some movies have B-ness thrust upon them, even with their rather mainstream intentions. The “so-bad-they-are-good”s. Sushmita Sen’s eye-rolling, hair-flinging, scenery-chewing Noch loon teri aankhein, kaat loon teri jeebh madness of Chingari or the physics-laws-bending heist of the wantonly-wannabe Players or the tubelights-passing-off-as-light-sabres jousting of Love Story 2050 or virtually every Bengali movie of the legendary Sukhen Das, where, afflicted with poverty, tuberculosis and overacting, he would weep copiously over the kidney he sold to finance his reprobate younger brother’s education, the same brother who now beats him with a belt.
To be honest, I resent these labels. ‘B’ or ‘C’ or ‘D’. It seems derisive, as if these marvellous creations are somehow children of a lesser god. Whereas the truth is that they are often wildly original and infinitely more enjoyable than what passes off as A. For one, they go beyond the boy-meets-girl, boy-sings-with-girl, boy-gets-girl formula. Consider, for example, Wahan Ke Log, an extraordinary tale of alien-hunting, where Pradeep Kumar, who would put the Men In Black to shame in terms of size and suavity, investigates a series of bizarre crimes which may have been committed by death-ray-emitting two-plates-stuck-together alien crafts, working in collusion with a madman (played by the legendary Nisar Ahmed Ansari). How many mainstream movies in India venture into the risky territory of science fiction?
That’s not all. Lower-alphabet movies have spanned medical thrillers like Diya Aur Toofan, in which Kader Khan as the doctor does brain surgery transplanting Mithunda’s brain inside heroine Madhoo’s; serial killer dramas like Red Rose, where Rajesh Khanna’s black-goggled psycho killer character and the film’s Truffaut-inspired use of still photography together made Norman Bates of Pyscho look as harmless as A.K. Hangal.
And, of course, horror. As a matter of fact, it is in the genre of horror that so-called C movies have come into their own. While the Ramsay brothers are a household name, with Purana Mandir and Samri and Dahsat crossing almost into the mainstream, it is the other masters of horror, no less significant, that have not gotten the attention they deserve. Geniuses like Harinam Singh, creator of such classics like Shaitaani Dracula and Khooni Dracula whose persistent motifs include the director playing a character from the working class who gets ravished by upper-crust ladies, and the mythical Joginder, whose oeuvre included the cerebral Adamkhor Haseena and Pyasa Shaitaan, captured concepts as varied as violations by trees, pyschosexual levitation, black magic, bathing while fully clothed and demonic possession. Characterised by an almost Dadaist assortment of sequences with absolutely no relation to one another, Joginder’s films represented the high noon of ‘B-grade’ art. The tragedy is that he and the Ramsays never received the international attention they deserved, the kind that the Argentos and the Fulcis and the whole Giallo genre got.
Even when these non-mainstream directors handled conventional genres like masala action, they brought something new to the table. Like Kanti Shah whose revenge-dramas Loha and Gunda with dialogues like “Jahaan nimboo naheen ghusta wahaan nariyal ghused dete hain (where the lemon does not enter, I insert the coconut)” raised the bar of machoness of the blood-flows-like-tomato-sauce flick, in the same influential way that Sergio Leone (not a relative of Sunny Leone) defined the Spaghetti Western.
Novelty. Originality. And, most importantly, undiluted entertainment. That is their legacy. If the story of the celluloid journey that began with Raja Harishchandra has to be told, the contribution of the B and C-grader to the narrative cannot be forgotten.
(Arnab Ray is the author of The Mine and May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss. He blogs at http://greatbong.net and tweets from @greatbong.)