The Great Gambler

The Great Gambler

1979

Directed by: Shakti Samanta

Music: RD Burman

Starring: Amitabh Bachchan, Zeenat Aman, Neetu Singh,  

Utpal Dutt, Madan Puri, Prem Chopra, 

Roopesh Kumar, Sujit Kumar

Jai (Bachchan #1) is a hard-drinking, hard-hitting but otherwise easygoing professional street gambler. After a guy tries to cheat him during a game, Jai is forced to break out his amazing Hindi-fu skills. He is observed by a casino owner named Ratandas (Madan Puri), who hires him as a card sharp. Jai’s job in the casino is to fleece rich clients so that they end up in debt to Rafiq, leverage he can then use to his advantage.

Jai soon puts his skills to good use, beating a government type named Nath (Jagdish Raj) at cards and leaving him with a huge debt to the casino. Ratandas agrees to waive the debt if Nath gets him the blueprints for a top-secret military device called the K-2. Ratandas and his boss Saxena (Utpal Dutt with a very scary beard) are going to sell the plans to the highest bidder, the K-2 being an atomic-powered laser weapon that can completely vaporise an enemy ship or aircraft. We see the amazing device in action in an animated demonstration reel which wouldn’t have looked out of place in a bad 1980s toy tie-in cartoon.

 

In order to get information out without arousing suspicion from the cops, Saxena encodes his messages into dance routines – yes, you read that correctly – which are performed by a dancer named Monica (another cameo by Helen) and filmed. The resulting filmstrips are sent to Saxena’s goon in Italy, Marconi (Sujit Kumar), who decodes the dances - which seems like it could be fraught with difficulty; “Hmm, was that a shimmy or a shake?” - and passes on the info to the Criminal Underworld.

One of Saxena’s men (Roopesh Kumar) is on his way to hand over the latest film to Marconi when he’s intercepted by the cops. He manages to escape but drops one of the film cans, which is captured and brought to the attention of no-nonsense cop Inspector Vijay (Bachchan #2) and his boss Senverma (Om Shivpuri). Although they don’t know what, they assume that there’s something suspicious about the film for the gangster to have been carrying it. Vijay tracks down Monica, but before he can question her she’s murdered by the hood, and only manages to gasp out his name... Sethi.

Saxena is pretty mad at Sethi for screwing up so badly, and sends him off to Rome to stay with Marconi. This is ostensibly so Sethi can lay low until the heat dies down, but in reality it’s so that Marconi can kill him. Meanwhile Saxena needs to find a new girl for the coded films. Luckily his number one henchman Ramesh (Prem Chopra) has a sexy cabaret dancer girlfriend in the form of Shabnam (Zeenat Aman, scorching the screen as usual).

Sethi arrives in Rome and meets up with Marconi, but manages to thwart the attempt on his life. He also steals the decoder book Marconi uses to interpret the dance moves. Sethi radios the cops in India and sets up a meeting in Venice, but he wants Vijay to come alone – he saw Vijay with Monica and wants somebody he can recognise. verma decides that Vijay should travel under an alias, and for want of a better one they pick... Jai.Sethi's phone call comes in on the same wavelength as the gang's, and his call is intercepted by Romesh and Saxena. Hearing of the plan to get back the blueprints, Saxena deputises Romesh to find out who the police agent is.

 

 

Speaking of which, how are things going back with Jai and Ratandas ? I’m glad you asked. Ratandas has a scheme to get his hands on the fortune of an old guy he knows, by marrying off his son to the old guy’s daughter. The only flaw is he doesn’t have a son, so he convinces Jai to go along with the plan and they’ll split the money. Jai has to travel to Lisbon to meet his new family, but he’s due to be picked up by his fiancée when he changes planes... in Rome.

 

The bad guys arrange for Shabnam to be on the plane with Vijay, but he misses the flight. Inevitably she spots Jai, and only knowing the inspector from a photo, assumes he’s Vijay. The two strike up a flirtatious conversation, and when the flight is delayed at a stopover in Egypt they start to grow closer, backed by travelogue footage of pyramids and Sphinx. But soon Shabnam’s treachery is revealed, as Ramesh shows up and demands ‘Vijay’ work for them. Jai (rather too easily, I thought) convinces Ramesh that he isn’t Vijay, but they decide to keep him around to use in Vijay’s place.

 

 

Meanwhile Vijay arrives in Rome, and is instantly mistaken for Jai by his prospective wife Mala (the lovely Neetu Singh). She has a photograph of the real Jai, which worries Vijay – having a look-alike is a dangerous thing for an undercover cop. For this reason Vijay decides to go along with Mala, and after a short romantic interlude in Rome (it’s fun to discover that there was a time and place where eating a pizza was seen as an exotic novelty) he travels with her to Lisbon. Mala quickly falls for the virtuous, considerate Vijay, and in spite of himself he begins to have feelings for her too.

 

 

 

Jai and company make it to Rome and intercept a message from the police. A contact will deliver the money Sethi wants for the codes, to ‘Vijay’ at the Coliseum. Ramesh drags Jai along to the meeting, where he kills the contact and takes the money. Ramesh tells Jai that he’d better cooperate, as they can now frame him for the cop’s murder. Shabnam goes along with Ramesh’s plan but starts to feel guilty about betraying her country and what the gang are doing to Jai. Meanwhile Vijay calls in to the Rome office and finds out the plan has gone wrong. Leaving a ‘dear Mala’ note he hightails it to Venice for the rendezvous.

 

Jai shows up at the Venice casino where the deal is going down. He meets up with Sethi but double-crosses him, grabbing the codebook and making a run for it. He escapes from Ramesh and beats a hasty retreat towards his original destination, Lisbon. 

Shortly thereafter, Vijay arrives at the same casino and is met by an unsurprisingly hostile reaction from Sethi and his gang. Vijay has to fight his way past a black guy in a meat locker – and by black I mean literally, his skin and clothes all painted a uniform shade of jet black. I’m also a mite concerned about a luxury casino that stores fresh fruit and vegetables in a freezer with raw meat and fish; movie botulism is still botulism.

 

The real Jai shows up in Lisbon, but Mala isn’t fooled; the boozing, gambling Jai is a far cry from the stoic Vijay. When the villains show up shortly afterwards, Jai is forced to admit that he isn’t the guy who was there before, and feeling guilty he admits the scheme Rafiq put him up to. In the course of the conversation, Jai mentions his real father, which is enough for Mala’s Dad Deepchand (Iftekhar) to figure out that Jai and Vijay are twins. Their father was an old army pal of Deepchand, but the kids became separated from him and were raised apart.

These reminiscences are cut short when Ramesh and Marconi show up. The good guys end up bound and gagged in the garage as a time bomb ticks down.

 

But fortunately Vijay arrives in time to defuse it. He’s pretty mad at Jai, but his hostility evaprates with the discovery that they are brothers. 

  

Meanwhile Shabnam, now working for the good guys, has left them a message revealing which train she, Ramesh and Marconi are escaping on. The brothers board the train in disguise and manage to recover the codebook.

 

Saxena is so furious with this turn of events that he orders Ramesh to kidnap Jai’s previously unmentioned (and presumably adopted) sister Madhu. The villains also grab Mala and her Dad, who have gone to stay with Madhu pending the brothers’ return. It’s up to Jai and Vijay to break into Saxena’s secret island fortress near Goa – complete with such James Bond villain-esque features an army of uniformed guards, booby traps and its own gas chamber – and save their friends.

 

There are also some staggering lapses of logic in the film, even for a Masala movie. I managed to strain my disbelief enough to accept all the honking-great coincidences in the script, right up until Vijay decides to go along with Mala for no reason I could fathom. His justification, that he wants to find out more about Jai, just doesn’t work for me. I guess the writers needed some way for Vijay and Mala to fall in love, and just made up any excuse in order to get to the next song. After that I just kind of let the assorted plot twists wash over me, since there was really no way for things to get more ludicrous.

For once, the separated twin brothers do not get a song or a tattoo or a birthmark to recognise each other. They are more believably identified by a family friend. (Shakti Samanta does not seem to believe in one of the most important canons of missing siblings. Even in China Town, the separated siblings had to depend on their mother to inform them of their shared brotherhood.) Secondly, turning the trope even more on its head, both brothers look, sound and act the same - they don't have any identifying marks to let even the audience know who is who. That leads to a certain amount of confusion as to whether we are watching Jai or Vijay-as-Jai onscreen. In that sense, Samanta invites us to guess quite as much as the characters. And yes, the sister is neither raped nor murdered. Nor does she fall in love with one of the villains who use her to get to the brothers. (Are we sure this is really a masala?) 

What is even better is the role of the heroine/vamp. Talk about subversion. Helen, who is automatically slotted into the role of vamp, gets her comeuppance quite soon into the film. (She only has a cameo here, not even a song.)  Zeenat steps into the bad girl's shoes. By all the trusted foundations of masala cinema, a woman who is one man's girlfriend, who doesn't mind being part-criminal, is quite unconcerned when a man is murdered in front of her, who betrays the hero, and is plotting against the security of the country, should come to a bad end. She certainly does not deserve a chance at happiness. Not so in this film. Zeenat, who gets a meatier role than Neetu Singh, the regulation heroine (who gets only one song to Zeenat's three), not only falls in love with two men, but gets to redeem herself and have her own happy ending. What is even more of a sock in the jaw of patriarchal morality is that the hero loves and accepts her - without casting aspersions on her moral character, or even bothering about the inconvenient fact that she had a previous lover. Neither does she apologise for her past. This matter-of-fact, and mature treatment of a masala romance was refreshing, to say the least
  
 As for Neetu Singh she does not have much to do in the plot except some romantic moments and played a stereotypical heroine of 70's who needs a hero to save her from damsel in distress situation. I think she has her longest part during the reunion of  brothers and in that too she does not have to say much (as much of dialogues are from either the jay/deepchand or Ramesh/Marconi and she had tape on her mouth!! LOL) 

 But appreciate  her acting of a damsel tied and gagged saved by hero from getting blown up by a milk shape time bomb!!!(lol)

It’s not all bad though; this movie was filmed in some glorious locations, and director Samanta makes the most of them. I especially liked the scenes in the Coliseum, half-expecting Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris to appear around a corner and start fighting. And the action, while horribly over cranked in the Bollywood style, is still a lot of fun, with kung fu, car chases and shootouts all present and correct.

This may not be on many peoples top list or an obvious Amitabh Bachchan classic but I absolutely love it. There are many reasons .It is a great adventure story , stars Amitabh Bachchan and the gorgeous Zeenat Aman. It has everything from comedy, action to drama. The music is superb. Especially the song 'Do Lafzon Ki Hai Dil Ki Kahani' which takes you to a different place. So many great scenes such as when Amitabh finds out that Zeenat is a bit of a villain. The scenery when they go to exotic locations is another favourite scene of mine.