Friday, June 17, 2011

Your weekly dose of 70's Bollywood mayhem

This is a new feature from your friends at Doc Bollywood and we racked our brains trying to come up with an appropriate title and in the end settled on the only word that would really apply to this decade - mayhem. The outfits, plot twists, sets, hairstyles and most importantly the incomparable tunes were all just over the top madness and of course our favorite Bollyweed movies came out during this time period as well. Encompassing the works of maverick film directors from the West along with infusing the songs with a healthy dose of disco gives this decade it's own look that was leaps and bounds different than the one that preceded it. It was the decade that brought us Bollywood's arguably biggest star in Amitabh Bachchan and was the heyday of my favorite singer Kishore Kumar.



But the inaugural song in this series is from a lesser known movie of the era - 'Des Pardes' (1978) starring Dev Anand and the much under appreciated Tina Munim. Dev Anand was one of the original 'Big 3' of Bollywood (along with Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor) whose movies shaped Indian Talkies from the 1940's onward. Starting in the 1960's he started making avant garde art movies and in the 1970's he went gloriously overboard and made a series of memorable films that continue to define that era to this day.



Nazar Lage Na Saathiyon
sung by Kishore Kumar and Mehmood has ALOT going on in it - else why would we begin the mayhem series with it in the first place? A great song on it's own the bonus features include (but are not limited to) - set in a bar in Switzerland(?) complete with European tourists, bad guys getting the tables turned on them via copious amounts of booze, a trapeze swing IN THE BAR and Dev/Tina doing their thing like few others could. Let the mayhem begin and full review of the movie coming next time...