Sholay

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Movie
German title Sholay
Original title Sholay
Country of production India
original language Hindi
Publishing year 1975
length 204 minutes
Rod
Director Ramesh Sippy
script Javed Akhtar
Salim Khan
production Gopaldas Parmanand Sippy
music Rahul Dev Burman
camera Dwarka Divecha
cut MS Shinde
occupation

Sholay ( Hindi : शोले , śole ; translated: Flammen ; Engl .: Flames of the sun ) is an Indian feature film by Ramesh Sippy from 1975. The "curry western" in the tradition of the Seven Samurai or play me the song from Adjusted for inflation, death is the most financially lucrative Indian film to date and a successful classic of Hindi film , which was shown in cinemas for a long time and even 286 weeks (five years) in the Minerva cinema in Bombay .

action

In a flashback, the police officer Thakur accompanies the two friends and little crooks Jai and Veeru in a freight train to prison. When the train is attacked by a band of robbers on horseback, the two toss a coin to decide whether they should stand by the badly wounded Thakur or go over to the robbers. Jai's coin - it is still needed for some decisions in the film - is upside down, and so the two stay with Thakur and drive away the gang.

At an abandoned, deserted station, a policeman visits the now retired Thakur on his ranch , where he lives very secluded with his daughter Radha, always serious and wrapped in a wide poncho . Thakur's concern for his former counterpart is to track down the two crooks who saved his life at the time.

Jay and Veeru have just stolen a motorcycle with a sidecar and are about to take their new acquisition on a musical jaunt through the imposing, bare landscape of southern India, peppered with artistic interludes; At a dubious timber merchant, there's no more fun: it's going to jail.

The prison director, a self-important, choleric but incompetent man makes life difficult for the prisoners, but is easily played out by the two experienced crooks. Your outbreak ends in an even tougher prison sentence: In the quarry.

Here she reaches the offer of Thakur: they should catch the dangerous criminal and gang leader, the Dacoit Gabbar Singh, who is terrorizing the villages around his ranch with his gang, alive. Thakur promises them a high premium for this. As usual, Jai flips his coin - and accepts.

At the train station in the village of Ramgarh, they are picked up by the lively Basanti, who provides taxi services in the area, with her little tonga , a horse- drawn cart , and Veeru immediately falls in love with her. On Thakur's farm, Jai spots the pretty, quiet widow Radha, the daughter of Thakur, and a relationship is emerging here too.

The first encounter with Gabbar and his gang ends with a victory for the two bulletproof and sure-footed crooks; Gabbar - always in camouflage suit and boots - on the other hand kills three of his gang leaders with his own hands because of their failure.

Victory is now being celebrated in the village, but Gabbar Singh's gang attack again, shoot, loot and burn down; when Thakur does not intervene, Jay and Veeru accuse him of cowardice. In a flashback, the viewer learns that the Thakurs family were cowardly murdered years ago by Gabbar and his gang; Thakur, who was pursuing the gang at the time, had been captured and cruelly mutilated: Gabbar had cut off both of his arms.

After the riddle of the poncho worn by the Thakur and its strange passivity has finally been solved, Jay and Veeru no longer hesitate to help him - now without a bounty - and to hunt down the devil Gabbar.

When an arms dealer is attacked, who supplies Gabbar with weapons, the ammunition dump is blown up; Radha's love for Jay and Basanti's affection for Veeru increase with their moral improvement; But when Veeru hides behind an idol and gives advice to Basanti, who is asking for divine advice, Jay can no longer contain himself, intervenes and thwarted the deceit of his friend, whom he has known long enough to be completely incapable of a serious relationship to classify.

By murdering a poor student from the village, Gabbar tries again to intimidate the people, who are now, encouraged by Jay and Veeru, to resist.

Meanwhile, between Radha and Jay and between Veeru and Basanti there is a possible wedding; with Veeru it is his unreliability and his alcoholism, with Radha their widow status and with Jay his rascality that creates resistance. When Veeru and Basanti fall into the gang's hands and the young woman in the gang hiding place in front of Gabbar has to dance until she drops in order to save Veeru's life, Jay intervenes with targeted shots and enables them to escape.

With his obligatory coin, Jay decides that it will be he who covers the risky retreat over a narrow bridge. He drives the gangsters back, but sinks to death, and Veeru discovers that the coin Jay used to make so many decisions had heads on both sides: Jay sacrificed himself for his friend.

Thakur now gets Gabbar to grasp in his loophole and avenges himself in a cruel way: since Gabbar's arms had been cut off from him, he kicks the monster with nail shoes to death.

The final scene shows a Radha who has lost her loved one again. The happy ending is embodied in Veeru and Basanti, who together want to start a new beginning elsewhere.

effect

  • Sholay enjoys exceptional and cult status in India through its combination of love story, comedy, musical drama and gangster film to this day, and there are few adults who have not seen the film at least once in their lives. “In a survey, quite a few Indians said they had seen SHOLAY… more than fifty times. Another part of the respondents even went so far as to say that they would no longer be able to count how often they had seen this film. In the list of the most successful Indian films of all time, SHOLAY is unchallenged at the top. "
  • In the list of the best Indian films, Sholay ranks 16th. This is largely due to the cast of the main roles. The inevitable Kalnayak (villain) was congenially cast with Amjad Khan in the role of Dacoit (robber) Gabbar; he (born in 1940, died in 1992 from the aftermath of a car accident) was one of the few negative heroes to have a steep advertising career; the undisguised portrayal of violence, cynicism and unpredictability in his form, which embodies evil in the film, made Sholay a cinematic event that was previously unknown in India.
  • Even Amitabh Bachchan's popularity is largely based on this classic of Bollywood genre in which he delivers a differentiated, humorous character study in the guise of the little rascal Jai.
  • To this day, core sentences of the film are cited, including a. the monologues and sayings of the villain Gabbar, unsurpassed by Amjad Khan ("Bahut na insafi hai!" / "That is an injustice!" - "Kitne admi the?" / "How many men were there?"). Even after more than 35 years, the main songs are still sung, accessed on the Internet and are still rated highly today.

Others

  • The fictional film village of Ramgarh, in which the action takes place, was built especially for the film near Bangalore and is now a tourist destination.
  • The sometimes breathtaking stunts were staged for the first time in the history of Bollywood with the help of foreign stunt experts.
  • All sorts of erotic entanglements developed on the edge of the shoot: Amitabh Bachchan played with his wife, who is his film widow Radha ( Jaya Badhuri ), and was already pregnant with their daughter. Both are happily married to this day. For Hema Malini, who played the Basanti, a fierce competition broke out between the distinguished, older Sanjeev Kumar (Thakur) and his rival Dharmendra (Veeru), in which the younger won the day.
  • The real background of the story is the Indian gang creature Dacoity , who from the Chambal Valley in Madhya Pradesh made central and northern India unsafe for a long time and defied all attempts to pacify the region. The gang leader Phulan Devi (1963-2001) became known, who made it up to the level of parliamentarian and who - like Gabbar - was said to have killed some of her enemies with her own hands. Dacoity is still a problem in the country today.
  • Govardhan Ashrani's role with uniform, beard and hairstyle alludes to Charlie Chaplin's Great Dictator .

literature

  • Matthias Uhl, Keval J. Kumar: Indian film. An introduction. transcript, Bielefeld 2004, pp. 73-83
  • Wimal Dissanayake, Malti Sahai: Sholay, a cultural reading . Wiley Eastern, New Delhi 1992. - Scientific study that places film in the context of the history of Indian popular film.
  • Anupama Chopra: Sholay, the making of a classic. An account of the making of Sholay, a Hindi motion picture. Penguin Books India, New Delhi 2000 [and Viking 2001]. - Insider impressions of the production based on interviews with the director, the stars and team members.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hindi-English for bandit , derived from the Indian word
  2. ↑ So in the original version ( Director's Cut ); In the theatrical version, the police intervene at the last second due to censorship and arrest Gabbar before Thakur can kill him.
  3. ↑ rediff.com: Why Sholay is a Cult Classic (accessed September 1, 2012)
  4. ^ Matthias Uhl, Keval J. Kumar: Indian film. An introduction. transcript, Bielefeld 2004. p. 73.
  5. ↑ molodezhnaja.ch: The best Indian films (accessed September 1, 2012)
  6. ↑ musicplugin rating ; Sequences and quotations (accessed September 1, 2012)
  7. ↑ On The Ganga Mail: Ramgarh Revisited (accessed September 1, 2012)
  8. ↑ Mala Sen : India's Bandit Queen. The true story of Phoolan Devi . The story of the Phoolan Devi. Goldmann, Munich 1993. (EA: India's Bandit Queen. The True Story of Phoolan Devi. London: Harper Collins 1991). Phoolan Devi: I was the queen of the bandits. Bastei-Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1996. (EA: I, Phoolan Devi. The Autobiography of India's Bandit Queen. Fixot, Paris 1995.). - See also Kathleen Kuiper: Devi, Phoolan. In: Enc. Brit. 2008 Ultim. Ref. Suite (until 1995); Year in Review 2002: Phoolan Devi, obituary (1995-2008). In: ibid.