Of red roses and hanky pankies: the strange case of Rajesh Khanna, ladykiller

There are some films so bad that they are just plain bad, and there are some films so bad they are hair-raisingly awesome. Somewhere in the large wasteland between these two extremes (but no one knows exactly where) falls the 1980 Rajesh Khanna-starrer Red Rose, about a psychotic killer who hates women because of the things some of them did to him when he was a boy (or more specifically, when he was the ever-suffering Master Mayur).

What makes Red Rose terrible and sort-of-excellent at the same time is the way it combines disparate elements: on one hand, it’s a cheap rip-off of psychological-horror classics like Peeping Tom and Psycho, presented in the B-movie style of the Ramsay Brothers; on the other hand, you can't fully appreciate this movie without reference to the long-defunct superstar persona of Rajesh Khanna.

Khanna plays a wealthy man introduced to us as “Mister Anand” (not to be confused with Simple and Inspirational Anand), who lives alone in a mansion full of bright red sofas. He has a plush office too; we never learn exactly what his business is, though the words “import-export” are muttered, and at one point someone remarks that “the consignment of 2,000 buckets hasn’t reached Dubai yet”. This invokes immense pity for all those poor labourers toiling to turn a desert settlement into a showy metropolis; how will these sweaty men have their baths now?

However, Mr Anand has other things on his mind. This being an idyllic era in Hindi cinema where everyone worked from 9.30 to 5 and not a second longer, he has plenty of time for a homicidal night-life, and Khanna conveys the tortured mental state of his character by adjusting his glasses every few seconds and looking distracted, as if he has misplaced an important pencil. Our first hint of the general spookiness of things (well, apart from the background score, the grubby gardener played by Om Shivpuri, and the dead rat in the opening scene) comes when one of Anand’s employees tells him that the women who have applied for the post of secretary are in the waiting room. “I’ll interview half of them, you interview the other half,” says Anand.

But there are five girls! This isn’t an even number, and so, for the first time, we begin to worry for the safety of the women in this film.

Snow White and Rose Red

Red Rose is a remake of the Tamil film Sigappu Rojakkal, starring Kamal Hassan and Sridevi. Knowledgeable friends tell me the original is better, and I can imagine Hassan giving a more convincing performance in the lead, but who cares: the use of Rajesh Khanna in this remake is so much more intriguing. For an inexplicable period between 1969 and 1972, Khanna had the loins of every Indian woman (and most Indian men) all a-flutter. Now, a decade later, when his market value had plummeted, this film casts him as a Lothario who slays women immediately after seducing them. It’s the sort of thing that howls out for subtextual analysis.

The main plot of Red Rose begins with Anand meeting the woman who might yet redeem him. (Think Norman Bates and Marion Crane. Or Mark and Helena in Peeping Tom.) This is a garment-shop salesgirl named Sharda and played by Poonam Dhillon (who looks fearful and uneasy, and is possibly wishing she had stuck to maturer assignments like “Gapuchi Gapuchi Gam Gam”). He engages her in double entendre.

“Kya chaahiye aapko?” she asks sweetly.

“Aap...” he says, and after a significant pause that gives her time to gasp, “...ke paas koi roomal hai?”

This scene is creepy because we already know there’s something very wrong with Mr Anand. But note that if exactly the same scene had occurred in a straightforward romantic Hindi movie where the (roguish but basically goodhearted) hero was teasing the heroine, it would have been seen as acceptable, even cute. Heck, if Khanna himself had played it 10 years earlier, everyone in the hall, including the projectionist, would have swooned.

Anyway, Anand asks Sharda for a handkerchief with a rose on it, which she is strategically wearing around her waist. That particular design isn’t available, she says, but it will come soon. “Aap mujhe jaldi de denge na?” he asks pointedly, and she blushes and requests him to wait just a while longer. Perhaps they are still talking about roses on hankies, or perhaps not; the screenplay at this point is what a highbrow critic might call ambiguous and multi-layered. (One is tempted to make a vulgar pun involving the words “rose”, "meri" and “le lo”, though being a genteel culture blogger one shall naturally do nothing of the sort.)

Soon love blossoms in Sharda’s heart. Again, this is very hard to believe within the world of the movie itself (Anand is an oddball to put it kindly), but it makes sense in the old subtextual way: in real life, Poonam Dhillon was on the cusp of adolescence when Rajesh Khanna first appeared, gently bobbing his head, on the personal horizon of the Hindi movie-watching schoolgirl. Now he comes to her shop, engages in innuendo-filled chatter and even hurls a handkerchief at her face. Wouldn’t you fall head over heels?

The romance persists to the point where they get quickly and improbably married, but he turns out to be a (gasp!) atheist who scoffs at the little Durga Ma toys, sorry, idols, that she collects and puts in her playroom. He goes to the temple to make her happy, but only so she will reciprocate by coming to his “temple”, the bedroom. (He also has a library with books titled “Sex Energy” and such, and a games room where he plays table tennis with himself by knocking a ball against the mirror, thus giving a whole new meaning to Mukul Kesavan’s observation about “Rajesh Khanna’s awesome capacity for self-love”.)

There are many other things going on in this film. These include Satyen Kappu as a cuckold, a nasty black cat (though the house has a “Beware of Dog” sign on the gate), a nosy waiter who gets his just desserts in the men's toilet, strange insert shots that suggest Anand’s tormented childhood memories, much misogyny, lots of bad acting, and perplexing dialogue (“Main sab kuch bedroom mein hi karta hoon: I am a very lonely man, you see”). For once, even Master Mayur looks embarrassed.

There is also the theme of a prim young rose holding the monster at bay by refusing to go to bed with him before marriage (the way all those other "forward" women do before her) - it might be said that Sharda's chasteness and piety are the garlic to Anand's vampire. (Picture Bela Lugosi having to take off his shoes before entering his victim's prayer room, and you'll know what I mean.) But to my mind Red Rose is most interesting as a commentary on its star’s fading career. By the time the film reveals itself to be a cry of outrage against depraved women who lust for young boys, you have to wonder if the reference is to all those aunties who turned the baby-faced Rajesh Khanna into a sex symbol in the late 60s, thus inviting damnation on the rest of their kind.

[Did a version of this for my Business Standard film column]