The great actor Amitabh Bachchan (the “Big B”) starred in many of the best Bollywood films produced in India during the ’70s and he has millions of devoted fans all over the world. There is probably no actor more loved and respected in India and since I love Amitabh too, I couldn’t resist sharing this bit of news from MSN Entertainment.

Recently one of Amitabh Bachchan’s fans by the name of Jitendra Shivhare penned a Sanskrit poem on a 101-metre-long scroll of paper as an “invocation to the Bollywood actor whom he treats as a god.”

“Amitabh is my God
and I am his priest.

Whenever I land in any trouble,
I always remember him to get out of it.”

- excerpt from the poem by Jitendra Shivhare

Jitendra Shivhare titled his creation Bachchan Mahakavya and he is currently pursuing a BA in Sanskrit from Devi Ahilyabai Vishwa Vidyalaya University in India.

All hail the great Big B! Sign me up for the church of Amitabh. That’s a religion I could get behind.

A trailer for my favorite Amitabh Bachchan film Don (1978)

“I could never walk on the streets. I had to wear a veil.
They used to go berserk when they saw me.” - Helen

I’ve been feeling rather awful about forgetting to include any of my favorite Bollywood films such as Jewel Thief (1967) and Gumnaam (1965) when I wrote up a list of Favorite Foreign Films recently so in order to rectify that I thought I would do something that I’ve been eager to do for awhile and that is celebrate the work of my favorite Bollywood star, the stunningly beautiful and incredibly talented Helen.

Helen is known to Bollywood fans by one name and one name only, but she was born Helen Richardson-Khan on October 21, 1939 in Burma to a Anglo father and a Burmese mother. By all accounts Helen’s early life was not easy and after her father died during WWII her mother was forced to leave Burma and flee to India with little Helen and the rest of her children. Helen’s mother could not earn enough money on her own to support her family, so Helen left school and started working in films to help with the family’s financial burden. By age thirteen Helen was getting small roles in Bollywood films as a chorus girl or back-up dancer. In 1953 she started to gain recognition for her dancing skills and Helen began performing solo dance numbers in musicals like Alif Laila (1953). As Helen grew into a beautiful young woman casting directors started offering her more adult roles and her big breakthrough role came in 1958 when she was only 16 years old in the popular Bollywood film Howrah Bridge (1958).

Like most Bollywood stars, Helen did not sing her own songs. Her vocals were provided by some of the industry’s greatest female playback singers such as Asha Bhosle and Lata Mangeshkar, but Helen managed to infuse her musical numbers with her own exotic charm and lots of energy. As the sixties approached she was becoming a recognizable name in the Bollywood film industry and in the following two decades Helen was offered plenty of opportunities to showcase her stunning beauty and impressive dancing abilities, as well as her great comedic timing. She is said to have appeared in over 500 Bollywood movies during the height of her career, which is an amazing accomplishment for any performer.

Helen was known for wearing very revealing and sexy costumes in her films as well as various wigs and colored contacts. This made her easily standout and combined with her beauty and talent, it was easy for Helen to steal just about any scene she appears in even though she was never a huge Bollywood star in the traditional sense. In many movies Helen was reduced to being the bad girl or “other woman” who was often rejected at the end of the film by the handsome male star for a less interesting good girl that he could bring home to mother. She also plays a bit of a lush in many films who enjoys drowning her sorrows and forgetting her cares with a drink or two. Helen could be called the “Queen of Bollywood Bad Girls” as well as “Queen of the Nautch Girls.”

Helen in Teesri Manzil (1966) and Don (1978)

Most of my limited knowledge about Helen came from the wonderful, but all too brief Merchant & Ivory documentary called Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls, which is available as an extra feature on the DVD for their full-length film Bombay Talkie. According to the documentary and various online sources Nautch Girls are traditional Indian dancers who perform for the pleasure of human beings instead of performing solely in Hindu temples. Helen is also what would be called a “Cabaret Dancer” in Bollywood films or “Cabre Dancer.” Cabre is a type of Bollywood dance that combined traditional Indian dancing with more modern and vigorous beat driven dance moves inspired from Hollywood musicals and no one could out dance the seductive Helen during her heyday in the sixties and early seventies.

Helen semi-retired in the early eighties and now she only occasionally appears in Bollywood films or television dramas. She’s almost 70 now so instead of wearing skimpy costumes and seducing her male co-stars, she’s often playing mothers and grandmothers in her more recent films, but she’s still as lovely as ever.

Many of the early Bollywood films featuring Helen are often crime thrillers or secret agent spy dramas clearly inspired by the worldwide success of the James Bond films. If you enjoy these types of films as much as I do, as well as musicals from the same period than I highly recommend giving some of Helen’s early films a look. Many of them are available on DVD from Eros Entertainment and can be bought cheaply at Amazon or you can find them for rent at Netflix.

It’s impossible to write about Helen’s films without sharing some clips from a few of my favorite Bollywood films featuring knockout performances from Helen. Youtube is overflowing with Bollywood clips and it can be hard to navigate through them to find the good stuff, especially when popular early Bollywood films are often remade countless times. Here are a selection of six great clips from ’60s and ’70s era Bollywood films that are all well worth viewing. Each of these films contain great musical numbers featuring the talented and beautiful Helen, but they’re also terrific films on their own.

Gumnaam (1965)

Jewel Thief (1967)

Night in London (1967)

Caravan (1971)

Anamika (1973)

Don (1978)

There’s a lot of mixed information about Helen online from various sources, but I’m limiting my own write-up to include information I’ve gathered from the Merchant & Ivory film Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls, as well as the online sources listed below.

Recommended Links:
- Helen: Bollywood’s first sophisticated seductress
- Helen Portrait at Bollywood501
- Helen at Wikipedia
- Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls reviewed at Senses of Cinema

Over the weekend I had the chance to watch Sholay (1975), which was my introduction to curry westerns. I enjoy 1960s-70s Bollywood films, but I’ve only seen a limited amount and the ones I have seen tend to be crime/caper films or horror movies. Since I love spaghetti westerns and have seen plenty of them over the years, I figured it was time to spread my wings a bit and experience a western done Bollywood style.

Bollywood westerns are often referred to as "curry westerns" and these Hindi language films borrow basic plot ideas from American and Italian westerns, but have the added bonus (or deterrence, depending on how you view it) of musical numbers and they give the drama, romance and comedy aspects of the film’s plot almost as much screen time as the action. This all makes for a very long movie and at 204 minutes, Sholay is indeed a very long film. I personally would have enjoyed the movie much more if it was trimmed down to about 2 hours, but it was still entertaining and an interesting introduction to curry westerns.

Sholay is directed by Ramesh Sippy and stars the charismatic Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan as Jai and Dharmendra as his fun-loving partner Veeru. Jai and Verru are career criminals who get hired by a retired police officer named Thakur (played by Sanjeev Kumar) to help him capture a dangerous bandit called Gabbar Sing (Amjad Khan) and his band of outlaws who are terrorizing the small village where the retired police officer lives. What follows is an epic tale about revenge that includes plenty of romantic as well as funny moments.

Sholay borrows it’s basic story-line and some of it’s best ideas from two of my favorite westerns, The Magnificent Seven (1960) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) with a little bit of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) tossed in for good measure. I’ve read complaints from people who like to point out how unoriginal curry westerns are since many of their plots are borrowed from other movies, but these complaints seem to come from people who don’t realize that many western directors over the years have borrowed their plots from other sources as well and have still managed to create entertaining and fresh films that offer new insight into old ideas. John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven was inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s wonderful Seven Samurai (1954) and Bernardo Bertolucci (who co-wrote the screenplay for Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West) has said that he was inspired by earlier westerns like Robert Aldrich’s The Last Sunset (1961).

Director Ramesh Sippy should be given credit for being able to take well-worn ideas from other westerns and giving them an entertaining Bollywood twist. He does a terrific job of filming the action packed opening train chase that should impress even long time western fans and the "festival of colors" musical number is really spectacular.

The two stars (Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra) seem to be having lots of fun in this unusual buddy movie. The two lovely female leads (Jaya Bhaduri and Hema Malini) also do a great job with their roles and it was interesting to watch romance blossom between them and the lead actors, since both couples in the film actually fell in love during the production and were later married in real life. I was especially impressed by Amjad Khan who played the bandit Gabbar Sing. He does a terrific job of playing the lead villain and steals just about every scene he’s in.

One of the most impressive things about Sholay is it’s terrific score by Rahul Dev Burman (aka R. D. Burman). The musical numbers (which are often the highlight in any Bollywood film) are very catchy, but the background music is especially well done. Burman obviously found inspiration in the film scores of composers like Ennio Morricone and Elmer Bernstein, but he brings a worldly Indian flavor to the music which is especially interesting. I plan on purchasing the score in the future since it’s well worth listening to again.

Sholay isn’t without it’s faults and besides the obvious need of a good editor, the film has a few unintentional laughs that fans of cheaply made exploitation flicks might still enjoy. I know I did! Early big budget Bollywood films clearly had production limits when compared to major Hollywood and European films from the same period.

The Eros DVD release of Sholay is really dissapointing. The film is shown only in fullscreen and the picture quality is lacking. It comes with no extras and considering it’s price, you would expect a little more for your money.

To it’s credit, after 30 years Sholay is still the highest grossing movie in India and is considered one of Bollywood’s greatest achievements. The movie has definitely got me interested in seeking out more curry westerns and hopefully I’ll find them as entertaining as Sholay.