The best parts are the ones where they talk about their process… It’s interesting to know that Salim usually came up with the storylines, Javed’s strength was dialogue, and they both, then, worked on the screenplay.
In 1962, Shammi Kapoor played the lookalike of a gangster whose gang he would be asked to infiltrate, by the police. The film was called China Town, and it played like a regular “Hindi movie” of its time, with plenty of songs and comedy and dances. Only Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar can tell if they were inspired by China Town to write Don, but despite the similarity of the switcheroo-double role plot, the two films couldn’t be more different. Don is a far tougher beast, with far better lines, far less sentimentality. The point here isn’t that Salim-Javed may have crafted one of their biggest hits from the DNA of an older movie. The point is that they didn’t care. At one point in Namrata Rao’s Angry Young Men, Salim cheerfully says that originality is the art of concealing the source. It’s a great line. It would have fit right into one of the duo’s scripts.
Most of this three-part documentary about Salim-Javed is a rehash of material that is already out there, delivered through observations and anecdotes from a series of famous people – and while it is a pleasant walk down memory lane, you keep wanting more about the two great writers who established “masala” as a legitimate genre with a very specific tonality (as opposed to a few loose bits of various unrelated flavours coming together in a movie.). This flavour / tonality already existed in earlier films like Mughal-e-Azam. For instance, when father Prithviraj Kapoor attempts to reason with son Dilip Kumar and the latter – quite the angry young man himself – pulls out his sword in defiance, the father bows his head and says, “Bete ki zid agar baap ke sar se poori hoti hai to baap haazir hai.” The characters, the situations, the emotions, the dialogue, the buildup to this single line – everything was larger than life. But how did this flavour, this tonality creep into a film like Deewar, set in a more “realistic” world that depicted Bombay from the docks to the highrises?
More questions! When Ramesh Sippy bought the rights to the Sivaji Ganesan hit Thangapadhakkam, which was about an upright police officer who kills his wayward son, what made Salim-Javed want to bookend the film with a grandson who was never there in the original – so that it seems like a morality tale is being passed down to another generation? (Incidentally, this 1982 film, Shakti, featured a climactic chase through an airfield, with moving aircraft, long before Michael Mann’s Heat.) When there is so much talk about Amitabh Bachchan, why not trace the “Angry Young Man” trope back to Sunil Dutt in Mother India in the 1950s or Dilip Kumar in Gunga Jumna in the 1960s? Javed Akhtar mentions that there were other good writers at the time, but who did not get the recognition or the money that Salim-Javed did. Who among his contemporaries did he consider good writers?
More questions! Why is there zero mention of Salim-Javed’s work in Kannada cinema, which includes the Rajkumar-starring reincarnation drama Raja Nanna Raja? This film is interesting for many reasons. One: craft-wise, it’s interesting to know how Salim-Javed “wrote” for a language they didn’t know. (Did they just draft out a template and hand it over, or were there constant discussions about whether a scene that might work in Hindi would also work in Kannada?) Two: The narrative of Raja Nanna Raja shares quite a few similarities with SS Rajamouli’s Magadheera that came thirty years later. Three: Raja Nanna Raja is one of the few times Salim-Javed wrote a non-social film, the other two instances being Manoj Kumar’s British-era mega-blockbuster Kranti and Shekhar Kapur’s sci-fi superhit, Mr. India. That these three films are not mentioned at all is a bit surprising. And speaking of the South, there’s no hint that the Salim-Javed flavour spread through even non-Hindi-speaking people, thanks to remakes starring the likes of MGR, NT Rama Rao, Prem Nazir, Sivaji Ganesan, Mammootty, Kamal Haasan, and most importantly Rajinikanth, who achieved a new level of stardom through Billa, a remake of Don.
But even as I raise these questions, I am aware of two things. One, maybe the intention was only to talk about the very famous Hindi films, in an anecdotal way, with nostalgic nods to lines like “Kitney aadmi the!”. And two, maybe they just wanted an intro-level course, so to speak, to the vast subject of Salim-Javed. So we get scraps of an origins story. We learn that Salim Khan’s first bouts of writing were the love letters he wrote for his friends. We learn that Javed Akhtar wanted to assist either Guru Dutt or Raj Kapoor, and then become a director himself. We get a brief snapshot of how Salim and Javed came together, both professionally and personally. I was very moved by how Farhan Akhtar described this union, as something almost holy. It appears to have been a relationship of two creative minds that went beyond (and was more satisfying than) the relationships they shared with their spouse and family. Farhan appears almost jealous that this hasn’t happened with him. Or maybe, as Arbaaz Khan says, it’s the fact that the families never got their true share of either Salim or Javed until the duo split up.
Very few of the stars / big names in this documentary say something really insightful. We get comments from Aamir Khan, Hrithik Roshan, Zoya Akhtar, Shabana Azmi, and Karan Johar, who reduces all of the 1960s to a time “Hindi cinema decides to take a holiday”, and makes it seem that the only thing on screen were the fluffy hill-station romances. Why bring in Shweta and Abhishek Bachchan, or Kareena Kapoor, when they add so little? Were their parts heavily edited? Are they just there for star value? We hear from Yash, but I wished they’d spoken to Prashanth Neel, too, given how KGF subverted the mother figure from Deewar, and transformed her from someone who rejected ill-gotten riches to someone who tells her son to get rich at any cost. Okay, so maybe they tried for Prashanth Neel, and he was not available – but heavens! The great Amitabh Bachchan – who made Salim-Javed as much as they made him – barely says anything interesting. I wish they had asked Amitabh and Farhan Akhtar and just a couple of others to speak more, in detail, rather than asking a star-studded lineup to say one or two things. I mean, it’s fun to know that Sriram Raghavan saw Sholay 26 times in theatres, but is that all this super-connoisseur of older Hindi cinema has to say about Salim-Javed?
But it’s lovely to hear from Shyam Benegal, a contemporary who existed on the other side of the commercial spectrum and who frankly says he envied them. He says that the 1970s needed a hero who would get things done, someone who would clean up the System on behalf of the people. There’s some interesting analysis about the centrality of the mother figure in Salim-Javed’s work, given that they both lost their mothers pretty early on. Anjum Rajabali makes a superb point that Salim-Javed’s women characters did not measure up to the men. Singling out Trishul, he says that Hema Malini is shown as a working woman at the top of her game, but after she meets one of the men, she is reduced to singing songs. Absolutely true! But I would argue (mildly) that, considering earlier decades of Hindi cinema, it was refreshing to just see a woman in a workplace (and not just as a secretary named Rosie or Suzie), or a woman taking revenge, like Zeenat Aman in Don.
The best parts of Angry Young Men are the ones where they talk about their process, a lot of which seems inborn rather than inherited. At the beginning of Episode 1, Salim is asked to wipe his sweaty forehead, and his reply makes you smile. He says his taqdeer / destiny should not get wiped out. Javed gives a crash course on the art of narrating a film, with “rhythm”. At another point, Javed says that they did not actively set out to write socio-political films, and that it’s a good thing they were innocent about it. But because they were a part of the society and because they breathed the same air, the anger around them reflected in their writing. Javed speaks passionately about why Gabbar Singh became so popular: because we are bound by morality and here was the thrill of seeing a man with no moral code. Given Javed Akhtar’s recent criticism of Animal, it would have been interesting to hear his reasoning for why one glorified, psychotic anti-human works for him while another doesn’t.
It’s interesting to know that Salim usually came up with the storylines, Javed’s strength was dialogue, and they both, then, worked on the screenplay. This may explain why they did not fare so well after they split up. With the exception of Salim Khan’s Falak and Naam and Javed Akhtar’s Arjun and Dacait, we did not see flashes of the earlier fire. Episode 3 talks about the split, and is easily the most memorable, in that we get to hear things we haven’t heard before. For most of the documentary series, Salim and Javed speak separately, and they are kept in different frames – never together. There’s the hint that success went to their head and they started taking the audiences for granted. There’s the hint that they could have been more diplomatic, less arrogant. The most affecting confession comes from Javed Akhtar, that they did not realise the value of goodwill, and that despite their big hits, there were no producers lining up at their door.
Towards the end, we hear from modern-day screenwriters about how writing for the screen is still such a struggle for money. It is in this context that Salim-Javed are such stars – because, as Aamir Khan points out, they were the only screenwriters whose names were familiar to the audience. Who, today, goes to a film based on a “written by” credit, however good the writing is! Dibakar Banerjee makes the excellent observation that writers, in order to get the power they are denied, become writer-directors – and thus, we often lose good writers to mediocre directors. Angry Young Men could have used more such moments. But then again, it’s probably hard to sell a film that dives so deeply into craft. So we get “human moments” like Shabana Azmi talking about her relationship with Javed’s family, and we learn that Salman Khan taught Zoya Akhtar to ride a bicycle. The feeling persists that, yes, all this is heartwarming and nice, but the full Salim-Javed story is still out there somewhere.
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