Daulat
Director: Mohan Segal
Year: 1982
Duration: 150 minutes
Music: RD Burman
Rating: 6.0
Trans - Wealth
If you are looking for subtlety and sophistication,
you have come to the wrong place. Those two characteristics are as far away
from this film as the Earth to Mars. But if you want absurd over the top
melodrama with slugfests that send men flying back 20-feet, a kung fu cutie,
multiple disguises and enough silly coincidences to fill a freighter, then
welcome in. This is Old School Bollywood when the films were made for the
back-seaters who bought the cheapest tickets and yelled the loudest. The
films of the 1950s and 60s were elegant, the 1970s brought on the Angry Young
Man injustice films and by the 1980s they were just going for thrills. There
is even someone credited as "Thrills". The plots fall apart like moth-eaten suits, the
heroes are big and brash with fists that do their speaking for them, the
women are tougher than a well-polished sharp nail. This was not a great period
for Indian films - even the music had lost some of its luster - but that
doesn't mean that these films are not fun on a spectator level where you
simply leave your logic and good taste at the door and dive in. This one
is a lot of fun even though you can't help but realize that it is by today's
standards ridiculous to the nth degree.
I don't know if Indians have a name for
this genre of film, but I call it Lost Family Films in which children are
separated from their siblings or parents from their children or parents from
each other. These films were enormously popular and I come across them repeatedly.
The first few times, you roll your eyes but eventually you get sucked into
the drama - no, not coincidence but God and Fate at work and there are always
moments when the now adults realize that so and so is their brother, sister,
mother or father and they are great moments. Fate has thrown them back together.
This film goes overboard and has all of
those configurations. It is idiotic. At the end of the film - not to give
too much away but it's not likely that any of you will ever watch this unless
trapped in a room and this film is being played. But after years of being
separated through evil doing and bad luck, they find each other and are all
on a bus - tied to the outside or inside with a gun to their head and a bomb
under the bus. But they are so happy to be together again. I know of
families where tying them up like this would be the only way in which they
would be together.
Follow this if you can. You will be tested
later. Ghanshyam (Sheeram Lagoo) is a loving father and husband who works
for the Treasury Department printing money. He has two young boys - Ravi
and Sushil and a blind daughter, Chanda. It is Diwali and the family is celebrating
- the older brother Ravi promises Chanda that someday he will become a doctor
and cure her blindness. It seems that Diwali is a propitious day for
gambling and the father and his friend go off to a small casino to test their
luck. But a nefarious plan is afoot to frame the father for murder and then
force him to work for Joseph in printing money. It works and the father goes on the run - Ravi
follows him to the train station and gets in the same car as . . .
Joseph who gives him a briefcase of jewels that he spills and is arrested
for and goes to jail. Meanwhile mom and the other son and daughter take a
bus to get away - and at a stop the mother and daughter get left behind and
Sushil is still on the bus. And then the bus goes over a cliff. This was
one very bad day for this little family. Sushil gets adopted by the
Chief of Police (Om Shivpuri). Damn, and you thought you had it bad.
Some twenty-years passes - Ravi has become
a master thief who steals from the corrupt and gives to the poor and is looking
for the man who screwed up his life. Sushil has of course become a policeman.
The mother and blind daughter have become beggars. The father is still printing
notes for Joseph who has grown a beard and has a respectable front to society.
He is played by the great movie villain, Amjad Khan, Ravi by Vinod Khanna,
Sushil by Raj Babbar. A heck of a cast and then throw in Zeenat Aman. She
meets Ravi when he disguises himself as a blind man and steals all of her
uncle's jewels. Naturally, she falls in love with him and helps him by disguising
herself as a senorita from Spain who sings, dances and knows how to say Ole!
And Sushil traps a gang member of Joseph's
by faking an accident - and they have a fight - and she almost beats him.
Yes, she - the Kung Fu girl Sushma played by the one-name Sarika. So, we
have a thief, a cop, a father working for a crook and a mother and blind
daughter on the streets begging. How could they ever find each other? Bollywood
Magic. That's how. Music from the great R.D. Burman.
