Download Film Zanjeer The Chain Full Movie Mp4
Melva Simons
A saviour is also a self-sacrificer. The Zanjeer (Chain) of the title is the chain of domesticity. The hero has to choose between a domestic life with his beloved or the deadly fight in the world outside. What is new about the new hero is his quiet, unostentatious morality. But the form of the masala (curry) film forces glamour on the hero. The quiet periods of reflection and analysis vanish and the hero is lost in the giant battles which have become now a permanent part of cinema. From this point on, the hero becomes a plastic figure. He cannot wait to take up causes. He may do it reluctantly as in Sholay or zestfully as in Muqaddar Ka Sikander. But he does it with deliberation, gusto and bravura and goes to his death in style. Sacrifice has become a knee jerk reaction. Not a human act with its mix of trepidation and courage.
The petite bourgeois vision informs many of seventies Hero films. In Naseeb Amitabh slaves to keep his brother at a public school; in Sholay he is attracted by aloof cultured Jaya, playing a young widow while tongawali Hema Malini is allotted to the more peasant-like Dharmendra. In later films like Sharabi, the hero behaves towards Jaya Prada as a lord to a maid. In Lawaris the hero fights to claim his respectable position which is denied to him because of his unrecognised descent. In this sense the seventies hero is a sheep in wolf's clothing. Perhaps it truly reflects the secret - or not so secret - wishes of the petite bourgeoisie and the lumpens among the audiences.
It takes an objective reality - corrupt system and exploiters - and twists it in such a way that the cinematic image actually justifies the existing reality. As the oligarchic group turns into a single hero despotism, megalomania supersedes heroism - see the eighties films Coolie and Mard.
The hero is in fact a veil for an unappetising mix of elitism and egoism. If you watch the films of the seventies closely you'll find an implicit contempt for the ordinary decency of ordinary people. A study of the wardrobe of the hero in the seventies and eighties would be illuminating. The dresses are not merely flashy. They convey oneupmanship, even domination. Gradually the black boots of the hero come to dominate the close ups. A fascist symbol if ever there was one.
Another consequence of the hero image is the contemptous attitude towards women. The tongawali Hema Malini image of Sholay is phony and its phoniness is exploded in the sado-masochistic last scene of the film. But for its prudery it could be well out of Sade's books. The men of Sholay may be stagey, they are not phony.
The idea is not foreign to the Indian tradition. It is echoed in Guru Dutt's self image in Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool. But it is strange to find it surfacing in the bogus macho world of the seventies hero. But it does, and this is what gives some complexity and dignity to the hero. Its reverberation is strongest in Zanjeer and Muqaddar Ka Sikander. The hero in both the films is, at some level, profoundly unhappy. Even in the trashy ambience of these films, he conveys a sense of the basic tragedy of life itself - at least as Amitabh plays it. The vulnerability of domestic life or the impossible love for Raakhee are no doubt the ostensible causes for unhappiness. But the performances display a deeper psychological disturbance explored further in the next section.
The Introvert Noble Hero: Hrishikesh Mukherjee's three films, Anand, Namak Haram and Bemisal show the tragic side of the hero in a more explicit fashion than the action films. (...) There is an interesting line of development here. In Anand, the hero's agony is the incurable condition of humanity itself. There are echoes of the famous awakening of Prince Siddhartha to human misery. In Namak Haram the hero gets into the crossfire of class war. He wants to reach across the class barriers to his old friend - but in this war no prisoners are taken. Bemisal is the most interesting of the three. Superficially, the theme here too is male bonding; the women are marginal. But if you put that issue out of the way, certain other resonances emerge. The hero is maimed for life by his early poverty. Something of the early deprivation and injustice has burned an incurable wound, a hatred into his psyche. Even when he befriends a rich doctor,these hurts persist. He loses the girl (Raakhee) to him. But an undertone of sexual play persists even after marriage. He pursues an early femme fatale of his elder brother (whose life she had ruined) with a vengeful ferocity and vulgarity unmatched in the Amitabh oeuvre. Amitabh nobly saves his doctor friend by blackmailing a nurse and falsely accepting the blame.
I think in Bemisal most of the ingredients of the seventies hero are trapped in a highly visible fashion - upstart, clown, incurably wounded victim, savagely resentful and revengeful despot, death wish obsessed man. His nobility conceals all this under an acceptable mask. Nevertheless the tragedy is real. A flawed, bogus but tragic hero for a flawed, bogus and tragic age.
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