In newly independent India, the metropolis, coping with migrants from across the border and from the villages, was the battleground between the exploitative rich and the hapless poor who were trying their best to find a small corner for themselves. The underbelly of the city provided the perfect setting for stories about shadowy criminal bosses, innocents caught in criminal enterprises and molls with golden hearts who took a bullet in the end. The films were set in an urban context and borrowed heavily-thematically and stylistically-from the noir dramas of Hollywood, which were already a decade old by then. Dev Anand emerged as a popular anti-hero, playing a succession of petty criminals or policemen. Things changed a bit in the 1950s with films such as Baazi, which was directed by a young new director, Guru Dutt, for Navketan Films, C.I.D. Crime dramas-as separate from the smuggler-cop films of the 1970s and the gangland stories of the 1990s-were for long perceived as “B" grade, fit for the third rung of actors. Nor did the top stars want to play negative roles. For one thing, there is no repeat value-audiences don’t come back to see crime films, thus decreasing their commercial viability. Whether it was the Prabhat Film Company or Sagar Movietone or Imperial Films Company, or indeed Bombay Talkies, the big studios largely stayed away from crime.Įven after Kismet (1943)-in which Ashok Kumar played a pickpocket-became a super hit, running for over three years at a single theatre in Calcutta, as the city was then known, film-makers avoided stories involving theft, murder, smuggling and the like. For the first four-odd decades of Hindi cinema, virtually no crime films were produced the emphasis was on reformist or mythological themes. A Wikipedia entry calls it a “musical thriller" and that is as good a description as any-but the film is much more than a clever whodunnit interspersed with memorable songs.Ĭrime stories were often viewed with a bit of suspicion in the Hindi film world. An entire book can be written just on these four films for the moment, let us look at one of them that has reached its golden jubilee this year: Teesri Manzil, which was released in 1966. But those four films-Guide, Teesri Manzil, Jewel Thief and Johny Mera Naam-remain in the collective memory of an entire generation of fans and film-makers.Īll these films were successful when they were first released and all of them have travelled well over the decades.
While Nau Do Gyarah and Kala Bazar are full of entertaining moments and terrific songs, they are too distant to evoke any memories in those who came of age in the 1970s. Though he directed 16 movies-and acted in a few too-it was in a six-year stretch that he made four extraordinary films that really consolidated the Goldie cult among his fans. In short, Vijay has fallen through the cracks, despite excellent films to his name.