The empress's new clothes

All book-lovers have funny stories about display goof-ups in bookstores - whether it's Vikram Seth's The Humble Administrator's Garden being placed in the shelf labelled "Gardening" or Alan Moore's sexually explicit comic Lost Girls showing up in the children's section, at the eye level of a four-year-old. Twice now I've seen The Popcorn Essayists in a "Food and Cookery" shelf, and one learns to smile bravely in the face of these injustices. But yesterday, at the Om bookstore in Saket's MGF mall, I saw a particularly inappropriate case of book-placement. Prominently visible in the section marked "Textiles" was:

How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, by Jenna Jameson

(Perhaps she left her hat on?)

Up above the world so high...

One of the many pleasing things about Hindi cinema’s multi-starrer culture in the 1970s was the phenomenon of the “And Above All” in the title credits. This was fuelled by ego clashes and by a general tendency to fawn and mollycoddle: when two or more stars were equally popular and had been in the industry for around the same length of time, who would get top billing?

Such insecurity wasn’t peculiar to Bollywood, of course. In his book Tracy and Hepburn, Garson Kanin observed: “Billing appears to be as important as breathing to some actors and actresses. Important films with ideal casts have fallen apart on this issue.” Old Hollywood came up with inventive methods to keep prima donnas happy – for example, two names might be lettered in the shape of an “X” so that neither star could be said to have taken precedence. (If “Humphrey” was placed above “Ingrid”, at least “Bergman” was above “Bogart”.)

But in our movie industry “Above All” was the preferred solution, and if that failed it was always possible to proclaim a “guest” or “friendly” appearance – even when the actor in question had a substantial role. For a good example of title credits gone awry, I offer you Raj Kumar Kohli’s magnificent horror film Jaani Dushman, about a werewolf-like Shaitan with chest hair that would make Anil Kapoor look like the Glaxo baby.

The film’s title sequence begins well enough with straightforward “starring” credits for Sunil Dutt, Sanjeev Kumar and Shatrughan Sinha (the hierarchy of seniority being apparent enough in this trio), but then things get murky. The next credit has Vinod Mehra with a parenthetical “Special Appearance” next to his name, almost as if he were reluctant to get too deeply involved. Likewise Rekha and a bevy of starlets including Neetu Singh, Bindiya Goswami and Sarika (all playing village belles ripe for abduction). But doing a solo number in the middle of all these special appearances is poor Reena Roy, whose name appears without any qualifiers at all. Possibly her agent failed to read the fine print?
 
Then comes a “Guest Artists” series – Yogita Bali, Aruna Irani and suchlike – followed by one of the more intricate credits I’ve seen:

And Above All
Jeetendra
(Special Appearance)

And so it goes. Briefly, here is a movie whose opening titles could be the subject of a thesis. (You can see them halfway through this video, but to get there you’ll have to watch Amrish Puri reading “The Sixth Pan Book of Horror Stories” and making a monstrous transformation. The scene gives new meaning to the phrase “that book made my hair stand on end”.)

Come to think of it, Jeetendra had quite a romance going with special titles; his “Above All” billing in The Burning Train conjures images of the actor sitting mournfully by himself on the roof of the train compartment while the rest of the cast travels in comfort. (Alas, the credits of this film were so preoccupied with the male stars that they turned the luscious Parveen Babi into a man by spelling her name “Praveen”. Unforgivable.)

In that awful decade commonly referred to as the 1980s, some films exhausted all their creativity within the opening five minutes. Watching something called Do Qaidi on TV, I discovered the title “Dynamic Appearance by Suresh Oberoi” imposed on a still of the thus-honoured actor (who played a fairly inconsequential part in the film). What, one wonders, were these performers and their families thinking as they watched preview screenings? Did little Vivek Oberoi beam with delight when he saw daddy’s name appear on the screen? Did he tell himself, “I’ll grow up and become a movie star too, and then everyone in the whole wide world will call me Dynamic Vivek?” If so, think of the human tragedy unleashed by five words that appeared ever so briefly in a long-forgotten film. It gives new meaning to Larkin's verse about man handing on misery to man.

P.S. Here is Kanin on the subject of Spencer Tracy’s name always appearing before Katharine Hepburn’s in the films they did together:

Tracy’s position as a Metro superstar meant that there was nothing to discuss [...] It was always “Tracy and Hepburn”.

I chided him once about his insistence on first billing.

“Why not?” he asked, his face all innocence.

“”Well, after all,” I argued, “She’s the lady. You’re the man. Ladies first?”

“This is a movie, chowderhead,” he said, “not a lifeboat.”

Two links

1) An interview that Spark magazine did with me, mainly about films and film writing. (Here's the PDF version of the magazine.)

2) A review (PDF format) of Jaane bhi do Yaaro: Seriously Funny Since 1983 in the new issue of the journal Wide Screen.

PoV: at the other end of the camera

From Subhash Ghai to Vittorio de Sica, and Karan Johar to Roman Polanski ... my Persistence of Vision column this week is about directors in unusual acting roles. Here goes.

Boy and wolf: thoughts on Stanley ka Dabba

The figure of the Big Bad Wolf is central to fairy tales about the fears and trials of childhood, and there are many variations on the character. The Wolf doesn’t have to be the villain-in-chief: he can be watching from the shadows, a potential rather than explicit threat. Or he might be revealed to be something very different from the bogeyman of the child’s nightmares (see Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, for example). But that doesn’t necessarily make the nightmares any less vivid.

In the Red Riding Hood story the Wolf has big, sharp teeth and reckons that the little heroine might make a tasty dinner. The villain of the new film Stanley ka Dabba isn’t that fearsome, but he’s a nuisance at the very least – a school-teacher with a wolfish appetite, who bullies children into sharing their tiffin lunches with him. The role is played by the film’s writer-director Amole Gupte, who also wrote the very popular Taare Zameen Par (and was originally going to direct that film, before Aamir Khan took over the production). In the Acknowledgements, Gupte mentions director Vishal Bhardwaj, with whom he has worked in the past – and indeed his own shifty-eyed portrayal in this film reminded me of the avaricious shopkeeper in Bhardwaj’s The Blue Umbrella, a man who thinks nothing of taking a little girl’s precious umbrella away from her.

Gupte plays a “khadoos” in Stanley ka Dabba, but his own empathy for the interior world of children is visible throughout this well-written and acted – if somewhat unevenly paced – film. It’s about a boy named Stanley (wonderfully played by Gupte’s own son Partho), popular among his classmates for his storytelling skills – though none of them realise just how good he is at making up fictions about himself. We sense early on that something is wrong when he tells a colourful but unconvincing tale about fighting with a bigger boy, and when he makes a hurried phone call to an unseen mother to tell her he’ll be late coming home from school. But things come to a head when Verma, the Hindi teacher, insists that he bring his own lunchbox to school (mainly so he put his own grubby hands in it). In the face of adult hegemony of this sort, the happy-go-lucky boy starts to wilt.

(Minor spoiler alert) As it turns out, this story is building up to the revelation that Stanley is an orphan who spends his non-school hours performing menial tasks at an uncle’s rundown little dhaba. The closing credits turn this into a commentary on child labour in India, complete with relevant statistics, and I was ambivalent about this ending – I thought it was a little too hurried, with too much centred on the revelation. But there’s no doubt that the film’s structure as a whole is a clever and effective exercise in viewer manipulation – it pulls the carpet out from under the feet of the urban, English-speaking viewer, by giving us a seemingly middle-class, Convent-educated boy to identify with and then presenting him in an unsettlingly different avatar at the end **.

But what I personally found more interesting than the ending was something the film chooses to be nebulous about: the way it hints lightly at Verma’s human side. This isn’t done in an obvious or sentimental way, and there is no real attempt at redeeming the character – certainly, his back-story is never revealed to us in the way that Aamir Khan’s teacher in TZP was revealed to have been dyslexic himself. But many of the scenes involving this gruff, hairy man make it possible for us to wonder about his own background, and where his great hunger springs from. It’s possible even to speculate that he and Stanley might have more in common than either of them realise. In any case, he is by no means the only – or the most dangerous – wolf in the little boy’s life.

** Note: there is of course a distinction to be made between 1) “viewer manipulation” as done in an artistically satisfying way, without upsetting a film’s internal equilibrium, and 2) yanking indiscriminately at the heartstrings of the most easily manipulated viewer. But there are times when the line can be a surprisingly thin one, and I thought this was one of those times. (While on that, do read this excellent piece by Trisha Gupta.) Stanley ka Dabba has greater integrity in some ways than Taare Zameen Par, but it does make its own small compromises; there's no losing sight of the fact that it was made specifically for a complacent multiplex audience.

P.S. Gupte's performance as Verma can be included in a (very lengthy) hypothetical postscript to my Yahoo! column about directors in acting roles.

In which Philip channels Groucho

One of the funniest things I’ve read in a while – the Independent’s list of 90 gaffes by the peerless Prince Philip. Some of this stuff is deeply offensive (while also being very funny) and some of it isn’t particularly funny at all – but I thought much of it was plain brilliant. In any case, how can you not admire a man - and a Royal at that - who invites the editor-in-chief of a newspaper to a press reception and then tells him “Well, you didn’t have to come!”

Some other favourites:

"What do you gargle with – pebbles?" To Tom Jones, after the Royal Variety Performance, 1969.

"Aren't most of you descended from pirates?" In the Cayman Islands, 1994.

"You have mosquitoes. I have the Press." To the matron of a hospital in the Caribbean in 1966.

"Your country is one of the most notorious centres of trading in endangered species." Accepting a conservation award in Thailand in 1991.

"So who's on drugs here?... HE looks as if he's on drugs." To a 14-year-old member of a Bangladeshi youth club in 2002.

"Reichskanzler." Prince Philip used Hitler's title to address German chancellor Helmut Kohl during a speech in Hanover in 1997.

"It's a vast waste of space." Philip entertained guests in 2000 at the reception of a new £18m British Embassy in Berlin, which the Queen had just opened.

"I'd much rather have stayed in the Navy, frankly." When asked what he felt about his life in 1992.

In a world that can get idiotic at times about political correctness, this is equal-opportunity insulting of the highest order, and some of it is worthy of Groucho Marx. I can just see the Queen standing next to her errant spouse during some of these very public exchanges, rolling her eyes like a long-suffering Margaret Dumont.

Speaking of which, here are two versions of the same photo.

Welles, Laughton, Ozu and other goodies

It's been a very difficult couple of weeks for various reasons, so it's good to have something to smile about. My friend Tipu, who gently nudged me towards the honest life last year by helping me buy original Criterion DVDs (details in this old post), continues the good work. Just yesterday I laid my paws on these treasures:

- The Night of the Hunter: with a two-and-a-half hour documentary on the making of the film, titled "Charles Laughton Directs" - really looking forward to seeing that.

- Late Spring (Ozu): I love Ozu's three "Noriko" films with the beautiful Setsuko Hara, and while I have pirated copies of Early Summer and Tokyo Story, I thought I'd indulge myself with this one. Also included in the DVD-set: Wim Wenders' tribute film Tokyo-Ga.

- F for Fake (Orson Welles): an old favourite which I look forward to seeing again. The mouth-watering list of Extras, including the documentary Almost True: The Noble Art of Forgery, is here.

- The Complete Mr Arkadin (Welles): easily the most daunting of these disc-sets, a 3-DVD package with three different versions of Welles' enigmatic 1955 film Mr Arkadin. Again, plenty of Extras, including a novel that may or may not have been partly written by Welles himself.

- La Jetée/Sans Soleil (Chris Marker): the 30-minute La Jetée, made almost entirely of black-and-white stills, is a longtime favourite, but I haven't seen San Soleil yet.

- Cronos (Guillermo del Toro): just to remind myself that movies have been made in the past 30 years as well!