Zanjeer

To watch the aboriginal Bollywood blockbuster Zanjeer (1973) is to be bodily transported to a very particular cinephilic place and time: the moment when the Indian film industry, already one of if not the world's most prolific, fully recognized its crazy commercial potential outside of a set of popular genre frameworks, and galvanized the world's second largest population into a movie-mad frenzy. A rough-and-tumble crime saga oozing with moral indignation, Prakash Mehra's film instituted a new wave in Indian pulp movies, at a time when Indian society itself was plagued by corruption, post-colonial difficulties, and what was mockingly referred to by economists as "the Hindu rate of growth," referring to socialist India's sluggish fiscal performance in the decades since independence, as compared to the booming economies of other Asian countries. The poverty-stricken lower classes seemed to be just getting larger and poorer, and social discontent was in the air (as it has been for so many postwar societies, including America's). Indian movies tended toward the melodramatic and romantic - that is, until Zanjeer, which channeled the Indian proletariat's frustration and rage, with a tale hinging on insatiable vengeance and chockablock with brawls, executions, persecutions and righteous kick-ass. Famously, star Amitabh Bachchan became a generational icon, a pure-hearted and fearless "angry young man" whose ethical balance was only compromised by how disposable he thought the rules of law and order were if they got in his way.

"Zanjeer" is Hindi for "shackles" or "chains," here being taken metaphorically as every kind of socioeconomic burden, but also literally, in reference to the tell-tale chain bracelet worn by the story's ultimate super-villain, a wealthy gangster sitting atop a Mumbai moonshine ring. But consideration of the story per se must take a backseat, at least initially, to the formal attack of Bollywood films as they thrived in the mid-century - that is, for American viewers something like Zanjeer is a rashly different kind of experience, a film apparently made in a state of panicky, breathless emergency, without the slightest minute to spare on cinematic niceties like establishing shots, steady zooms, and tidy shot-counter-shot close-ups. Indeed, Indian actors were used to shooting a full movie in a week's time, and often shot more than two or three simultaneously. By 1973 it was already a movie culture that did not prize smoothness, continuity or convincing illusion, in the Hollywood vein - rather, Bollywood movies prized propulsive forward motion, totemic emotional peaks (no visual or aural emphasis was too strong), and theatrical soap-opera hyperbole. (Ironically, for such rapid-fire cinematic style, Bollywood films are routinely three or more hours; at nearly 2.5 hours, Zanjeer was modest in scope.)

What might pass for crude, harried amateurishness in other cultures is actually in India an expression of native attitude toward cinema; like the Chinese, another ancient culture beloved of order and etiquette, the Indians saw movies as an outlet for quick, dirty, simple enchantment. They also, famously, prioritized musical dance numbers, five of which stop the plot of Zanjeer dead for more or less extraneous folk dancing and "filmi" songs, some last six minutes or more, a dynamic that sounds trying but is actually the most entertaining part of almost any Bollywood film. You have to appreciate the strategy: no matter how dire the circumstances, or tragic the drama, nothing could or will stop the film from erupting at virtually any moment into keening melody and torso-shimmying boogie-woogie. As aesthetics go, it's pure life-affirmative folk culture, and clearly addictive. Here, once Jaya Bhaduri (the future Mrs. Bachchan) begins dashing around warbling "Get Your Knives Sharpened," changing outfits in mid-song, you know that whatever disasters will befall the characters, the visceral energy of movies will prevail.

Acted in "Hinglish," Zanjeer begins with a father embroiled in the "spurious medicines!" trade deciding to go straight and quit his syndicate, thereby bringing assassins to his door. Guns blaze, but the man's little son is saved hiding in a closet, and in short order grows up to be Bachchan (looking quite like an Indian mash-up of Ray Romano and George Hamilton), who as a rookie cop is already being reprimanded for hotheaded police brutality. After brawling with a local gambling-den hood (Pran), who subsequently goes straight and becomes a lifelong ally, Bachchan's Vijay begins tracking down shipments of poisonous and illegal hootch, and eventually discovers that the operation is run by the aforementioned gangster (Ajit), who has more than the air of an untouchable. Vijay is undeterrable, but Mehra's story gets twisty, in ways that always revolve around the use and abuse of money - bribes, debts, loans, payments, interest, ad infinitum, some forms mistaken tragically for others - as if to offset the film's huge emotional gestures with careful plotting atomized down the rupee. There's little doubt Vijay will triumph in the end - but at what cost?

Zanjeer was violent by 1973 Hindi cinema standards, and that was why audiences responded - here finally was a film, amidst a nonstop flood of movies, that voiced the population's anger and put the rod to the corrupt one-percenters responsible for the country's wretched inequity. Bachchan became 1970s India's James Dean figure, and after making five more films in 1973 went on to become one of the preeminent figures in the world's nuttiest film culture. As conventional as Zanjeer's narrative appears to us, in 1973 it was a breathtaker for Indians, and was imitated and sequeled to dizzying degrees, before being remade outright in 2013. The movie's stature as a historical touchstone - equivalent to our understanding of The Graduate (1967) or Breathless (1960) or Blow-Up (1966) - is a phenomenon that occurred and sustained largely outside of the western purview, for a hundred million Asian film fiends besotted finally with the catharsis of violent movie justice.

By Michael Atkinson