The totemic Hindi hit Sholay is back on screens this week to mark the film's 50th anniversary, presented in a richly textured restoration going under the billing The Final Cut. What we're getting is the full roadshow kit-and-caboodle: all 204 minutes of it, just as director Ramesh Sippy originally wanted audiences to experience before the opening weekend's box-office numbers proved unexpectedly soft. The new suffix gives Sippy's film an air of the Apocalypse Now, the classic that took a while to arrive at a definitive version and find its popular feet. In fact, this was Sippy and screenwriters Javed Akhtar and Salim Khan looking towards the globetrotting Westerns of the late Sixties and early Seventies for inspiration, and coming up with a Once Upon a Time in the East. The movie opens with a train pulling into a remote station; some three hours later, it concludes with a train pulling out of a station. In between, there are men with guns on horseback, shawls worn like ponchos; R.D. Burman's Morricone-aping score, which prefers whistles to devotional chants and found sounds to traditional instruments; our heroes - Dharmendra's Veeru and Amitabh Bachchan's Jai, roguish types of the kind Dean Martin and Bob Mitchum used to play in Westerns - are dispatched by a local sheriff, Sanjeev Kumar's Inspector Thakur, to bring in the fearsome bandit Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan) dead or alive. These were simpler times for Bollywood, for India and for (at least some of) the wider world: should you seek an antidote for the toxic ugliness being provoked by current India First sensation Dhurandhar, lurking coiled and defensive in the screen next door, all one need do is revisit Sholay's ever-hearty opening number "Yeh Dosti", being two best buds in a stolen motorbike-and-sidecar, armed only with a harmonica that recalls Manfred Mann ("5-4-3-2-1" in particular) as much as it does Charles Bronson. Here - in glorious 70mm and retouched Technicolor, not to mention stereophonic sound - is cinema that thrills to the possibilities of the big country and the open road.
This was also a time when a Bollywood film could roam in every which direction, which may present as a challenge to the contemporary cinemagoer. Even 21st century viewers immersed in the house style of the masala movie have been known to raise an eyebrow at the sudden handbrake turns Sippy applies in matters of genre and tone. Sholay's opening reels veer from western to musical to broad pantomimic comedy, as Veeru and Jai find themselves behind bars and at the mercy of an incompetent warden (Asrani) modelled after Chaplin's Hitler in The Great Dictator; late on - approaching the three-hour mark, and a point where you might start to think it'd be a good idea for the lads to saddle up if they're ever going to capture this Gabbar Singh fellow before midnight - we are invited to spend a good ten minutes chuckling at Dharmendra's drunk acting as a lovelorn Veeru threatens to throw himself off a water tower. Veeru and Jai famously make critical decisions on the flip of a coin; early on in Sholay, at least, it sometimes seems as if Javed-Salim (as the screenwriters are credited) were doing likewise. History has led us to regard Sholay as the beginning of something (Bachchan's career, notably), yet it's as much of a magpie-movie as any other genre piece of the time, filching from films its cultured makers admired: when Inspector Thakur sends on a pair of high-kicking assailants to test Veeru and Jai's combat skills, it's as though we've suddenly strayed into one of those newfangled Bruce Lee pictures that had started gaining traction by 1975. Certain elements don't quite blend at first. In their jeanjackets, Dharmendra and Bachchan are the image of 1970s antiheroes. (The latter spends his non-action scenes looking for the best place to lie down and get forty winks; real moviestars know when and how to conserve their energy.) Yet Hema Malini's love interest is conceived and styled like the heroine of a Fifties Bollywood extravaganza; she seems to exist in another time and place to, say, item girl Helen, who wiggles through a post-intermission song dressed like one of Pan's People.
I retain reservations about Sholay's pick-and-mix first half, to these eyes very much the work of creatives feeling their way tentatively into this world. In the thumping second half, however, these disparate elements come together and absolutely body you. The bits of Sholay you remember are exceptionally vivid. A game of Russian roulette that prompts several minutes of manic laughter before the murderous punchline. Bachchan brushing dust off his shoulder in the laconic Eastwood style. Stuntmen tumbling from rocky outcrops in perfect Greg Louganis curls. The bandits' midfilm assault on the Thakur family home, being refried, still-potent Leone: the victims frozen in their death throes, a gust of wind blowing the shrouds off the corpses. Jaya Bhaduri, the future Mrs. Bachchan, framed from below against a cloudless blue sky like one of the supplicants in Black Narcissus, having been handed only one eccentric note to play: someone who's really into Holi. (How eccentric: the Western equivalent would be a character who eats nothing but Easter eggs.) Yet that screenwriters' quirk may actually be key to why Sholay endures so as entertainment. At its very best, Sippy's film is nothing if not all-in, demonstrating a total commitment to its particular cause. It's Malini dancing barefoot over broken glass in the noonday sun in an attempt to keep her man alive; it's the same full-throttle derangement you see in later, devil-may-care spaghetti westerns, only sustained for the running time of Dances with Wolves. What Sholay has spent the past half-century proving is that we spectators will forgive a lot if the images set before us attain the desired intensity; even as the film wobbles, meanders and confounds as narrative, it's all movie. No surprise to learn that its biggest contemporary fans should include V. Vijayendra Prasad, screenwriter of choice for his son SS Rajamouli: the embers of Sholay burn on in RRR, both in the bond between twin heroes who operate as left hand and right hand - an image that assumes even greater meaning once you've witnessed what Gabbar Singh does to Inspector Thakur - and in the relentless delivery of cool stuff that looks amazing on a big screen. Sholay remains a landmark film, if not a perfect film. But you could say the same thing about Gone with the Wind or even The Searchers.
Sholay: The Final Cut is now showing in selected cinemas.
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