With The Death Of Chandra Barot, Revisiting His Catcher In The Rye

Don is to Chandra Barot what Catcher In The Rye is to J. D Salinger. Barot’s entire reputation resides in that one Hindi film, which he could make during his lifetime.

47 years later, I saw the film again for the second time. The first time in 1978 was in a rickety Patna theatre when a man sitting behind me got so revved up during Khai ke paan banaras wala that he spat the paan on my back.

Eeew, and all that. Luckily, I had no one breathing down my neck this time. The film has aged rather well, though its budgetary considerations are sometimes glaring. To cite an example, we are never shown how Kamini (Helen) is killed by Don (Bachchan). Characters just speak about it and we just have to take their word for it. Amen.

Helen’s drizzle of sizzle in Yeh mera dil pyar ka deewana comes early in the show. All I can say about the dance of the devi(l) is that we love Helen, and there is so much of her to love.

Funny how the definition of seductiveness has changed over the years. One man’s whiskey is another man’s poison. And hats off to Zeenat Aman for her hourglass figure at a time when the trend was towards khaate-peete ghar ki ladkiyan. Zeenat is svelte and sexy as hell as Roma, the cool kitten with a chic haircut on a vendetta prowl against the diabolic Don (yeah, the same one who is wanted in 11 countries, blah blah).

Zeenat is a crackerjack. But she can’t act to save her life. There is a sequence in which tries to shoot down Don. When she realises the gun has no bullets, she fakes a laugh about how she was only kidding.

Even the faking looks fake.

There is only one other notable female character: Don’s girlfriend Anita (played by Arpana Choudhary). And she is, unintentionally, a bit of an enigma. For the first 45 minutes of playing time, Anita has nothing to say. Not a word. The first words she utters are, “Yaad karo, Don, Yaad Karo.”

This is after the dead Don is replaced by his paan-chewing Allahabadi lookalike Vijay. Later, Anita is gagged and brought by Don among the party guests. Salim-Javed seems to have a problem with Anita speaking up: an anti-dote for Basanti in Sholay, perhaps?

The other characters in Don have a lot to say. Pran as JJ, wearing a white belt over his tight trousers and an ill-fitting wig throughout the film, enters after fifty minutes of the show, and goes on and about “Deepu aur Munni” his two missing children. We are told he is a trapeze artiste gone rogue: a detail that crops up before the climax when, in a ridiculous stunt, JJ must cross from one skyscraper to another with the ubiquitous “Deepu aur Munni” to another.

Elsewhere, Zeenat’s Roma has Bachchan’s don hanging by a rope. That makes two Great Indian Rope Tricks in one Salim-Javed film. Who says the writing dup was not repetitive?

The other important character is DSP D’Silva, who has a cross to bear from truth to dare, as he brings the fake Don into the plot. Even when D’Silva is shown asleep, his Jesus cross around his neck peeps up. Even when he is dead in the morgue, the cross is in camera range. This is the most religious character in a tongue-in-cheek in heathen film laden with allusions to the ungodly behaviour of those who worship wealth over wisdom.

Don (jissko pakadna mushqil hi nahin naamumkin hai) and his bloody-double Vijay are played with lipsmacking paanchewing relish by Amitabh Bachchan. He towers above the rest of the cast like a colossus, bringing to the narrative a sense of fun that the violence otherwise shuns. I wonder what Don would have been without AB. A lot of ham and cheese, topped by some chuna-laden paan.