There is always a seminal moment in the history of any kind of cinema when the old conventions give way to
the new. The crime film is an old Hollywood genre. But nobody ever shot a realistic underworld movie till Francis Ford Coppola made the first Godfather film in
1972. The story of the first Godfather has been told again and again. The Mario Puzo novel on which the movie is based was the typical pot-boiler of its era. When the studio hired Coppola to make a movie from the book, they expected an action quickie. But Coppola saw beyond the bare outlines of the plot and recognised that there was a sweeping family saga lurking within the book.
The first Godfather was followed by the sequel which was much more Coppola’s kind of film and introduced the young Vito Corleone in a role that would make Robert De Niro famous. De Niro then collaborated with Martin Scorsese on a series of gangster movies which totally altered the paradigm. Even when other directors attempted gangster movies – Brian De Palma and his remake of Scarface is a notable example – all they did was to update the conventions that had already been put in place by Coppola and Scorsese.
In Bollywood, the gangster genre was really overhauled by Salim-Javed. There had been underworld films before starring the likes of Ajit as the entirely improbably villain but Salim-Javed created the mobster as anti-hero with Deewar, loosely based on the life of Haji Mastaan.
The Deewar paradigm remained in place for many years. Even when an older Amitabh Bachchan revisited the genre in the original Agneepath, all he did was to build on the Deewar character by borrowing the wardrobe that Al Pacino used in Scarface. No significant change occurred till Ram Gopal Varma made Satya, a decade and a half ago. I spoke last week to Manoj Bajpayee, whose portrayal of the gangster Bhiku Mhatre has become the gold standard against which all performances in underworld films are now measured. Manoj is not from Bombay and he said that he had never ever met a mobster from India’s crime capital before he accepted the role.
But like Francis Ford Coppola and the Godfather, Manoj and Ram Gopal Varma looked beyond the specifics of the story to the universality of the characters. Manoj says he based Bhiku Mhatre on a north Indian gangster because the Maharashtrian touches were only superficial. Crime is universal, he said. And gangsters are the same, whether in Bombay or in Bijnore.
| "What intrigued me about Sanjay’s style of film-making is that he has researched the real stories of the Bombay underworld and is determined to make movies about real people and real events." |
Ram Gopal Varma has mined the Bombay underworld for lesser films but Satya still remains the best movie about gangsters ever made in India. Nevertheless, there is a trend towards a newer, more operatic style of underworld movie.
Most people liked Once Upon A Time in Bombay though I am not a fan. I believe it distorted the realities of the era and wasn’t even a particularly good film. On the other hand, I loved Shoot-out At Lokhandwala, which had Sanjay Dutt and Vivek Oberoi playing real characters and was based on real events.
Last week, at the same event where I met Manoj Bajpayee, I spoke also to Sanjay Gupta who is making a prequel to Shoot-out At Lokhandwala called Shoot-out At Wadala. This film also stars Manoj Bajpayee though his character is far removed from Bhiku Mhatre. The biggest role goes to John Abraham who has been cast against type as the mobster Manya Surve.
What intrigued me about Sanjay’s style of film-making is that he has researched the real stories of the Bombay underworld and is determined to make movies about real people and real events. Shoot-out At Wadala, for instance, is about the murder of Dawood Ibrahim’s older brother at a petrol pump. There are uncanny echoes of the first Godfather: of the killing of Sunny that pushes his brother Michael Corleone to centre-stage.
Though the murder at Wadala is largely forgotten, it changed the history of the underworld. It was the beginning of a gang war that included shoot-outs on the streets of Bombay and even in a courtroom. When the war was over, Dawood Ibrahim had managed to vanquish all of his rivals and his open defiance of Haji Mastaan signalled that the old underworld was dead and that a new order had begun.
Dawood crops up as a character in many Bombay movies these days, though not always under his own name. But in Shoot-out At Wadala, Sanjay has used the real names of all of his characters. I asked him if he was not frightened about doing this. What if an angered Dawood took revenge on the film and its maker?
“Oh no,” he said, “these guys all love publicity.”
It’s too early to say whether these grittier, more realistic underworld movies will set a trend. But it’s good to know that directors are examining the history of India’s own underworld and documenting it on celluloid.
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