Like doctoral dissertations on hip-hop, here’s a highfalutin’ take on the original Bollywood ass-kicker by David Chute of Film Comment. It was written in honor of the Amitabh retrospective at Lincoln Center last month (via Hollywood Masala):
… he is most fervently admired for his verbal gifts: the sonorous baritone that makes all his setpiece speeches sound like Mosaic proclamations, and the flair for mimicry he exploits as one of the first Bollywood actors to adopt authentic Bombay street slang in his gangster roles… In contrast, Bachchan’s typical terpsichorean style is about as basic as it gets, a sort of blue-eyed Punjabi variant on one of Zorba the Greek’s “hoop-hah” strut ‘n’ shrug routines… Decked out in what looks like a gaucho outfit in Don (78), prancing and preening next to the staggering Zeenat Aman (India’s answer to Claudia Cardinale), he looks less like a performer working through a carefully choreographed routine than a man enjoying himself, and enjoying life…… even when Bachchan was playing proletarian characters he always walked “with the posture of an aristocrat.” … this guy never feels outclassed. “You see a certain grace about that character… So many other actors have tried to ape Amitabh, but they’ve failed. Because they don’t have the sophistication and the tehzeeb [culture] that he grew up with. As an actor, Amitabh’s anger was never ugly. Other actors mix anger with arrogance. Amitabh’s anger was mixed with hurt and tears…”
In an ironic reversal, Bachchan has begun playing establishment roles against Shah Rukh’s angry young man:
… in Mohabbatein, he looks more like something carved from granite… the ne plus ultra of all the stern father figures his Vijay characters rebelled against in the Seventies.
The reviewer too lightly skips over the intense Ajay Devgan, who starred in just this kind of role in Yuva:
… as no one in the current crop of younger actors has anything like Amitabh Bachchan’s moral authority… there was really only one viable choice for the voice-of-reason title role, an honest policeman fending off both Muslim and Hindu demagogues.
An accident on set, not to mention Big B’s entire career, inspired a chapter in Shashi Tharoor’s filmi novel Show Business:
The mid-Eighties marked the pinnacle of Bachchan’s superhuman stardom: news of his near-fatal accident in 1982 on the set of Coolie brought the country to a standstill.
The author also takes an interesting look at Jaya Bachchan’s career:
A throwaway shot early in Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham drew affectionate chuckles from the mostly-NRI (Non Resident Indian) crowd when I saw the movie in Los Angeles: Bachchan’s real-life wife Jaya standing on a chair to adjust her husband’s necktie… It plays upon the Indian public’s sense of the Bachchans as one of Bollywood’s most durable couples, and upon the affection due to Jaya herself as a performer, a diminutive firecracker whose headstrong teenage characters in the Hrishikesh Muhkerjee films Guddi (71) and Mili (75) brought a recognizable type of modern, urban woman to the Hindi screen for the first time. Jaya and Amitabh met when he played a strong second-fiddle role in Mili, at which point she was much the bigger draw…
