Manmohan Desai's Enchantment of the Mind

by Connie Haham

  Sound, of course, includes dialogues. Kadar Khan, whose work for a large sector of the industry in great part defined dialogue writing during the seventies and eighties, is credited for the dialogue of seven Desai films—from Roti to Coolie. Desai recognized his debt to Kadar Khan and gave a name to the language that developed from their association:

  If I use roadside dialogue, it is because it is easy to follow. Of all the dialogue writers I’ve worked with, Kadar Khan is easily the best. He knows the colloquial idiom. I’ve learned a lot from him.6

  Extra sounds that it would be difficult to categorize complete the audio tableau. Many are unforgettable. During the chase in the leper colony in Desh Premee, for example, a manual cotton separator sets the jarring pace of the scene. In Coolie a sound like percolating water complements the actors’ body work as Sunny the reporter (Rishi Kapoor) and the newspaper owner (Mukri) bob up and shoot down on opposite sides of the desk in a chance game of see-saw-like hide and seek.

  Once sounds, music and dialogue tracks are created, they must be ‘mixed’ or put into their final form shortly before a film is released. A rather extraordinary man was for a very long time the key figure at this stage in the filmmaking process. Until l5 October l985, when Mangesh Desai died at the age of 62, he was the chief recordist, the person responsible for almost all of the re-recording in Hindi cinema. This man, whom Manmohan Desai referred to as ‘an ace sound technician’, began his career working with V. Shantaram at Rajkamal Studio. With 35 years in the industry he had a determining role in the development of sound technology in Indian cinema. For six days a week, nine hours a day he sat at his button-panelled desk in Bombay watching the best and the worst of the films produced and taking the decisions that would increase the four tracks of sound furnished by the sound editor to the twelve tracks that would go on the finished film. With ears so finely tuned that he could immediately pick out a tiny flaw in the mixing, Mangesh Desai, at the same time, made a conscious effort to identify with ordinary people in order to imagine exactly how the inexpert listener-viewer would react during a showing. Mangesh Desai testified to Manmohan Desai’s desire to perfect the sound tracks of his films. ‘The average film is mixed in eight to ten days,’ he said. ‘Mixing Coolie took a full thirty days. Manmohan Desai sometimes gets new ideas as he goes along and follows them up. He spares no effort to get the sound just right.’

  visuals

  Desai proudly remembered the scenes that involved difficult but successful visual work, e.g., the scene in Dharam-Veer in which Indrani Mukherjee and Pran ride a horse around the ramparts of a castle wall before their escape from the palace grounds. Likewise, he was the first to notice and regret scenes that lacked a perfect finish. Both Dharam-Veer and Parvarish, made during the Emergency, suffered from the limitations set on filmmaking at that time. Desai lamented:

  There was a rule then. There must not be more than l50 feet of action at a time. The end of Dharam-Veer is disjointed because of this. The linking shots have been cut. Also, when Zeenat hits Dharmendra, I had to cut the shot before the whip hit the skin. It looked ridiculous.

  Visuals were important for Manmohan Desai, but not exaggeratedly so. If he was totally implicated in the audio component of his filmmaking, he was less involved with the camera:

  I like to handle everything in a film except the cinematography. I still don’t know how to light up a shot. Editing is my forte, music, scripting, and the performances of my artistes.

  I don’t like to monkey with the camera. Like Chaplin said, the camera is mainly there to record what you want to film. It shouldn’t be used like a monkey... Your scene must convey what you want. If it’s an emotional scene, it must convey emotions. The camera is there only to record. Don’t use it as a gimmick or a gadget. Look at Billy Wilder’s taking; it’s simple.

  In a comedy scene, let the artistes perform. I don’t give that many points to the camera, like 90% of our directors are doing here. The reason they do this is because they don’t know what to do with a scene. Needless trolley shots, needless zooming—zooming has become a fad. Raj Kapoor: here is a man who does good neat camera work.

  Desai insisted on the importance of content over form when he fumed against the almost pure form that has sometimes defined art cinema:

  People like Mani Kaul should understand the difference between a movie and a still. Giving l00 marks to good photography is like giving 100 marks to good handwriting. But what is the director saying? It’s no easy job to entertain, to cater to 400 million people. You need a careful study of their psychology, their likes and dislikes.

  Like Desai, cameraman Peter Pereira, who shot Sachaa Jhutha, Aa Gale Lag Jaa, Amar Akbar Anthony, Desh Premee, Coolie, and Mard, and N. Satyen who did Chhalia and Bluff Master, all learned camerawork and special effects under Babubhai Mistry, director of many mythologicals7 and revered as a special effects artist. Pereira’s work was consistently pleasing to the eye. Likewise, in Bhai Ho To Aisa and in Dharam-Veer N.V. Srinivas’ work maintains a recognizable quality and continuity of style.

  The choice of background and the composition of frame can make a film visually memorable. Among Desai’s earlier films, Bhai Ho To Aisa stands out in this domain. Shooting on location in such a beautiful setting as Laxmi Vilas palace in Baroda was unusual in the seventies. The choice of these premises for a drama of a traditional (read: reactionary) Thakur family lent a rare magnificence and credibility to what could otherwise have been a cliché-filled story. The final confrontation in which the good brother Bharat (Jeetendra) must defend himself in a sword fight against his corrupt older brother Ram Singh (Shatrughan Sinha) could easily be rated the best serious climax Desai made. Neither too violent nor overlong, the sequence is shot from a multitude of angles so as to bring the palace alive. Not only does the camera carry us along with the two men as they duel from parapet to turret to terrace to ledge, but longer shots catch the shadows that the two towers cast on the lawn below, bigger than life images that reinforce the drama of human conflict taking place above. Significantly, Desai’s teacher Babubhai Mistry is credited with the special effects for this film.

  In contrast to this excellent filming, two of Manmohan Desai’s films are particularly lacking in plastic beauty. In Raampur Ka Lakshman (director of photography: Sudhin Mazumdar) and in Chacha Bhatija (director of photography: V. Durga Prasad) colours are poorly blended; some scenes look cluttered, and the decors of the expensive villas that often serve as settings are less than tasteful.

  colour

  Some directors and some genres are more effective in black and white than in colour. Suspense films, films noirs, and any film that relies on the use of chiaroscuro for a haunting, shadowy atmosphere can benefit from shades of grey, e.g., Guru Dutt’s beautifully lit Kaagaz ke Phool (1959). Certain scenes in Chhalia, such as the one of the couple alone in the ruins, have a romantic quality that would have been jarred by the addition of colour. However, apart from this and a few other exceptions, the absence of colour in Desai’s three black and white films is precisely that, an absence. From the time of Kismat in 1968, all of Desai’s films were in colour. Quality varied in the late sixties and seventies, probably partly in keeping with the talent of different cameramen, partly depending on the film stock used. The colours in Dharam-Veer provide the rainbow array that one would expect in a long-ago-and-far-away never-never land tale. During the gypsy dance, the dresses and turbans splash the arena with the pink and yellow, assuring an atmosphere of gay abandon. Of all Desai’s films, Coolie probably presents the most thorough control of colour, calculated to add beauty and to show character progression as well. When we meet her, Julie’s (Rati Agnihotri) spoilt-rich-girl image is reinforced by her white dress and simple red accessories to match her red car. Later, as the avenger on the motorcycle, she is appropriately attired in red and black. When she declares her love to Iqbal, though, she is wearing a yellow dress, as sunny as her newfound disposition. During the song ‘Allah-rakha’, the consecration of their love,
she appears in one colourful costume after another, as bright as a garden of flowers.

  the players

  Acting is supreme when it is done by a madman or a child.

  —Shashi Kapoor

  In Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa (1954) the fictitious film director Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart) is asked by the promising discovery Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner), ‘Could you teach me to act, Mr. Dawes?’

  ‘If you can act,’ he answers, ‘I can help you. If you can’t, nobody can teach you.’

  Manmohan Desai considered his ability to get the best performances from his artistes to be one of his fortes. Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini searched the streets for the face to match the scene, then turned the person behind the face into an actor for the time needed for the shooting. Desai did not go so far, but it is clear that he generally chose actors and junior artistes carefully and guided them well. Like Harry Dawes, he could not teach just anyone to act. Dan Dhanoa, the young villain in Mard, was not a professional actor before Mard, and his presence is a distraction. Likewise, though it is commonplace to see actors working well outside their age range in Hindi cinema, the practice is often confusing and always annoying. In Naseeb Prem Chopra plays the son of Kadar Khan even though both actors are approximately the same age.

  Generally, though, his performers gave their best. Shabana Azmi described how Desai often whipped his actors into a sort of altered state by radiating energy and fervour. Looking back at her work in Parvarish and Amar Akbar Anthony, she said:

  He was extremely demanding with his stars. He would shout, ‘Don’t go into remote control. Come on! What am I paying you for?!’ He would encourage us to take risks to get the best performances. When we did a good job, he would be full of praise. He would say. ‘You’re my doll!’ He is completely convinced of what he is doing. He shows great involvement and his enthusiasm is contagious. He jumps up and down, yells, claps his hands. He infuses the actors with a sense of fun. I had a ball working with him.

  Later, speaking with Nasreen Munni Kabir, Shabana Azmi described the draw of working in popular cinema:

  …Your imagination is tested in the extreme. For instance, there was Manmohan Desai’s film Parvarish, for which we had to shoot the climax for thirty days. And Neetu Singh and I had to hang in the villain’s den over a river where any moment a crocodile could eat off our legs. So can you imagine trying to pretend this whole thing is real, and to do it with any degree of conviction? That’s quite, quite wonderful. I think that what commercial cinema does is to require you to create an alternative reality. And to bring any semblance of truth to that alternative reality is a real challenge for an actor. You have to suspend your belief system entirely, and go along with it.1

  Desai tended to call on certain actors and actresses repeatedly. Desai was full of praise for Hema Malini, who starred in four of his films:

  Hema Malini is the most beautiful actress we have in India, a very good dancer, and besides, I think she is a very good actress too. In Desh Premee we had one sequence with Amitabh in which the old Amitabh brings this girl home and tells his son to find the boy who has ditched this girl—though he doesn’t know the boy is his own son. The scene where they talk to each other without seeing each other and she describes the boy who has ditched her—and it’s the same boy—was taken in one shot only. The way she performed that scene, I think, is absolutely incredible and I remember sending her flowers afterwards.

  Desai could be unrepentantly exacting:

  I remember an incident, where he (Shammi Kapoor) had to walk across a roof. He said, ‘I can’t walk on the roof. How can I do that?’ I said, ‘All right, I’ll go up. If I can do it, you can do it.’ So I went up on the roof and did the shot. I said, ‘If I’ve done it, now you do it.’ And he went up and did the shot.

  During the seventies, when Desai made the maximum number of films, Kadar Khan, Nirupa Roy, Amjad Khan, Indrani Mukherjee, Pran and Ranjeet appeared frequently, always giving very good supporting performances. Another regular during this same period was Jeevan, who worked in eight Desai films: Bhai Ho To Aisa, Roti, Dharam-Veer, Chacha Bhatija, Amar Akbar Anthony, Suhaag, Naseeb, and Desh Premee. At the risk of oversimplification, one could separate actors into two basic categories: the instinctive and the analytic. Nirupa Roy was an actress who gave excellent performances, apparently intuitively. She enjoyed working on films with good story lines and interestingly developed relationships between characters. Jeevan, on the other hand, was cerebral in his approach. He analyzed his roles and asked directors for background information on his characters; his performances were studied. In real life, Jeevan would hardly have caught one’s attention. On screen he was another person entirely. His nasal twang and spectacular gestures were calculated to call attention to himself, as well as to add to our pleasure. In Amar Akbar Anthony, during a police raid on a group of smugglers, as Robert, he shoots a policeman and hides behind a rock to avoid arrest. Now, many thousands of actors have ducked behind rocks in film history, but rarely have any thrusting and dipping been so eye-catching. This bodywork, rather fashioned on mime, lasts only a second; yet the discrepancy between the effort needed and the energy mobilized enlivens the entire scene. His use of voice, like his bodywork, was often unforgettable, as in Dharam-Veer when he liltingly calls out behn to his sister just before treacherously hurling a knife at her.

  Generally in Desai’s films, the stars tend to harmonize with one another, with the supporting actors and with the extras. Shabana Azmi offered an explanation for the liveliness Desai achieved in group scenes:

  Manmohan Desai really encourages everyone on his sets. I remember after one shot he went to a junior artiste way back on the sixth row and told him what a good job he had done. The man was elated. He couldn’t believe that the director, who must have his eyes on the whole set and especially on the stars, would notice the efforts of one person in the background.

  While he cared about all the actors on screen, Desai knew that big name stars sold his films. The semi-deification that stars undergo, in India more than elsewhere, is a fascinating phenomenon. Stars are not simply actors. They are the repositories for the public’s hopes and fantasies, and probably more importantly, to a certain extent, blow-ups of our individual dream selves. It has been said that cinema puts our dreams on screen, the implication generally being that cinema relates to our waking dreams. A much deeper connection, and one that explains part of the power of cinema, is to be found in our sleeping dreams. Several times a night each person’s subconscious takes on the role of film director, creating images and playing out scenes, often with much better special effects than have yet been invented for the seventh art itself. The dreaming individual is more often than not the central player in these disorganized ‘movies.’ We are, in fact, the stars of our own ‘unconscious’ scripts. A real film can ‘flesh out’ not only certain of our daydreams but also some small percentage of our sleeping dreams. We are programmed, then, for living within stories, whether they be mysteriously self-generated or fabricated by the hundreds of people who have worked to bring a film into being. The same confusion that exists when we are half awake and cannot tell dream from reality can also take place in the theatre. A great part of a film’s success depends on the extent to which each member of the audience steps into the hero’s or the heroine’s shoes. The oft-mentioned ‘star quality’ is above all this ability to engage people’s psyches, to elicit identification, to give people a bigger-than-life view of how they envision themselves. A good actor can make a woman identify with a man, a man with a woman, a young person with an elder; a grandparent can suddenly feel like a 20-year old with the youth-like raging emotions of attraction, anger, or desire for justice. The switches from identification to identification can take place in fractions of seconds within our brains. Or our left brains can put us into analytic mode. With a thud we land in reality. We are in a movie theatre, suddenly aware of ourselves, aware that the life we have been living with the screen character
s is but fiction. We notice an itch or a leg that has gone to sleep. We wonder how long it took the heroine to change costumes and hairstyles. The magic spell of the screen is momentarily broken until, as often happens, the characters and the story whisk us back once more to live through them.

  amitabh bachchan

  When Manmohan Desai spoke of the importance of keeping the audience in their seats, it was no doubt this complete immersion in the film that he was aiming for. He had many tricks to maintain audience attention, but probably none outweighed the draw of the star and the star’s role. Individual taste on the part of members of the public must be factored in; nevertheless, the saleability of top stars supposes that certain actors, at certain times in their careers, have a much greater percentage of the public under their spell.

  Amitabh Bachchan’s screen magic is legendary. His collaboration with Manmohan Desai brought success both to him and to the director. From the time of Parvarish to that of Gangaa Jamunaa Saraswathi, Amitabh Bachchan appeared in and gradually became the cement for every successive film that Manmohan Desai directed. Desai did not simply employ him as an actor; he organized entire films in keeping with Amitabh’s talents. In the search for ‘items’, the salient moments that the scenario linked together to form each film, Desai and his team would prime their creative pumps by asking themselves what the audience had never before seen Amitabh Bachchan do on screen.