Missing Dev

(Republished)  

Looking back and retracing Dev Anand's career I am convinced that my generation grew up more in an age of film persona, than in an age of films. I have been reading sporadically the tributes that have poured in upon his passing and, barring a sole contribution, what they have to say about his films takes a back seat to what they have said about the man. Perhaps there will be deeper pen portraits of his films and what made them click the way they did, even as the impact of Dev's passing really sinks in and nostalgia begins to reopen the portals of memory.  
Or perhaps they think, there is not much to be said about his films, that talking about the man and his mannerisms is enough.

But there is....  

With  the coming of independence already established film-makers found a new freedom in independent India and continued to make films that were socially conscious, reflecting the many ills that plagued a new society in its confusion. We know them all: Bimal Roy, V.Shantaram, BR Chopra, Amiya Chakravarty, Zia Sarhadi (who later emigrated to Pakistan)....and the rest. They tackled, as one critic of the time put it, "social themes, sociably."

On the flip side Dev Anand used the medium of film more radically in his early films at least, perhaps as a documentarist would, recording the twin ills of joblessness and poverty and the resulting crime, using his characters to project his own mind. He formed his own Navketan  and launched films with himself in the lead and whose direction he entrusted to his new-found friend Guru Dutt and brothers Chetan and Vijay.

The year was 1951 and film noir came to Indian cinema via Baazi. The club sets were straight from Hollywood, if a bit rickety and over-emphasized, and so were the expressions on the faces of the supporting cast more notably including Rashid Khan who, from hereon, would become a staple with Dev. Guru Dutt's direction was rather slack in this film but it did bear deft flashes of the insightful genius who was coming. The film had a lot going for it, despite its trite tale: the ambience created by the black and white photography of V. Ratra for instance, in the club, dense with cigarette smoke rising in whirls, glasses clinking and eyes roving surreptitiously, shady deals, vicious glances all round....Later film directors of the 50s would try to imitate this but would attain only an unflattering verisimilitude. The noir, as a genre, would recede after the 50s. 

And best of all there was Geeta Roy (soon to be Geeta Dutt) and her fantastic, singing voice providing the oomph and charm that the Hollywood genre styles that inspired the noir in our films rarely had. She sang for both leading ladies in this film and her seductive voice played a major role in making it a huge success. Composer Sachin Dev Burman, for whom this was a landmark vehicle (he had already given fine music for Navketan's 'Afsar' a year ago starring Dev and Suraiya), made good use of this fine talent and poet Sahir Ludhianvi provided the romantic lyrics, in this, his first ever contribution to film. He would continue to enthrall us and make us think for the rest of our lives. Dev and Sachin Dev Burman would form a partnership rare in films, which would end only with the death of the composer in 1975.

It was also interesting to see director Guru Dutt himself,  along with Johnny Walker and future director Raj Khosla in very minor debut appearances in the film. Dev's lady love was Kalpana Kartik (later his wife), while Geeta Bali shone in a major supporting role, the quintessential gangsters' moll who takes a bullet in the end to save the life of the man she loves. The film probably belongs to her. Although the accent was more on drama we see the flamboyance that was to mark Dev's unique histrionics in the years to come.

There is a trend setting, nay pioneering, song sequence style which would be imitated by many in the years to come, with very little effectiveness~that of the moll trying to warn the protagonist of impending doom. At that moment, in the closeup, the criminal is divested of his criminality (for want of a better word) and the timid, confused human who was forced into a life of crime peeks out: the perplexed eyes tell you he is still lost but understanding dawns and with that the film goes into its denouement. Fine expressions on a mobile face! 

 Jaal (1952), while not being Dev's own production, was a landmark in his career, with Guru Dutt this time doing a better job as director. Dev's anti-hero image that was conceived in Baazi grew in stature, with himself playing a common thief, a smuggler out of coastal Goa. That tiny bit of paradise was still a Portuguese pocket in India at the time, and a fluid breeding ground for smugglers. Dev and this time an impish Geeta Bali romp through the film with fine histrionics, with him combining the lovelorn with the criminal's subconscious need for punishment and redemption. The songs are a delight with both Kishore Kumar and Hemant Kumar lending their voices, with the latter giving one of his all time greats in "yeh raat yeh chandani....". VK Murthy's black and white photography swept over the Goan landscape and gave the film an authentic local colour. 

SD Burman and Sahir teamed up once again for Jaal, with the poetry becoming more sensuous (to suit the Goan milieu) and meaningful, and the tunes going beyond the merely hummable.  The two would remain a tenuous team for the next five years until 1957 and Guru Dutt's 'Pyaasa', after the brilliant critical success of which they would never work together again. But that, as they say, is another story.... 



Taxi Driver arrived in 1954 and topped off Dev's career until then as, in the title role, he depicted the nomadic life of the wandering Bombay cabbie helping a young woman (a more mature Kalpana Kartik) who falls prey to roadside criminals, as she sets out looking for the maestro who had promised her a career in music. Dev rescues her from the thugs and delivers her to the address at Worli's seaface. The sequence remains one of the most moving of film experiences of the time. Briefly, the cabbie brings her to the door, urging her to sing so that the maestro may listen to her, and slowly backs away as though from her life, his job being done. But she in fact turns around and sings to him, begging him to stay. That's his cab in the background. A fine touch from older brother Chetan Anand, as director. The plotting is similar to that of Baazi with Sheila Ramani, replacing Geeta Bali as the moll.

Once again, SD Burman tuned the brilliant lyrics of Sahir Ludhianvi. Every song in the film was a hit. The tandem track in the voices of Talat Mehmood and Lata, 'jayen to jayen kahan...,' remains an unbearably melodious classic in the history of  our films.



As great as Lata's version is, though, it is Talat Mehmood's gentle voice that is more overpowering in the sequence that follows and which leaves such an emotional impact on the listener. SD Burman did a great job in simulating the waves on the seashore, to the accompaniment of a very soft flute, with the setting sun and the waves erasing the girl's name on the sands metaphors for the dip in fortunes. That vagabond image, once again~a telling effect in silhoutte. The track follows the cabbie's attempt to get one last look at the girl he has come to love..... 
  
The lyric, while cast in the same mood as in the Lata version is different, more powerful~one of Sahir's best.



Taxi Driver was among the first films that took the cameras out into the open,  location shooting in the streets of Bombay with at least one song shot on the waves, off shore. The film reflects old images of the Bombay we grew up in and viewed today they create in us an unrelenting nostalgia for the open, uncluttered city we once lived in....

Dev Anand and Guru Dutt worked together in just one more film: the block buster C.I.D. produced by Guru Dutt and badly directed by newcomer Raj Khosla. It was 1956 and this film gave Dev an image that stayed with him for a long while. Gone was the hard-boiled, bitter criminal type, and in his place we saw a suave, flamboyant hero full of mischief and song and on the right side of the law. The film was a blockbuster mainly because of OP Nayyar's music and Majrooh Sultanpuri's lyrics. It marked also the arrival of a brilliant new actress, the multi-talented Waheeda Rehman who would awe us for decades. Shakila was the main lead in the film.



The next five or six years saw him in any number of inane films parading his new romantic garb. Not that there was anything wrong in that but many of the roles were frothy and ill conceived and the films (except for Bambai Ka Babu) badly executed: films like the forgotten Zalzala and Baadbaan, Sazaa, Milap, Pocketmar, House No. 44, Munimji, Paying Guest, Love Marriage, Jab Pyar Kisise Hota Hai, Roop Ki Rani Choron Ka Raja, while giving his career a boost, also did much to damage his prospects as a serious actor. 

He carried his films on that smile and the glint in his eye, and that devil-may-care attitiude. If Dilip Kumar moped and brooded and crooned sad, lonely ghazals, and Raj Kapoor took his pains philosophically, Dev Anand's quintessential quality was to fling his adversity back into the winds in defiance and merrily go on his way....Always that eagerness to meet life head on....to crash into the next bend in the road without caring for what lay ahead....as he mouthed in Filmistan's Munimji (1955) Sahir's 'जीवन के सफ़र में राही , मिलते हैं बिछड़ जानेको, और दे जाते हैं यादें तन्हाई में तडपा ने  को'. Freely translated it would go something like this: "people meet on the walks of life, leave their impressions and move on...leaving us to reflect upon them in our solitude......"  

  

In sharp contrast, it is actually Lata's (incomplete, in the film) version that truly brings out the inherent pain in Sahir's fine lyric...a paean to relationships past and people long gone....very much like that bend in the road.... 



Films like Nau Do Gyarah (1957), and Kala Bazar (1960) also deserve mention for the facile direction of Vijay Anand. The first told the tale of a man and his truck and the romance of the road. Driving along India's highways, he picks up a runaway bride dressed as a youth (Kalpana Kartik is a delight) and who is seeking to escape from an impending unwelcome marriage. There is also something about a 'वसिअत नामा' (a will) that adds to the intrigue. How the two unravel the tangle once Dev finds out who the youth really is, brings a lot of fun to the film with the suspenseful ending an inspired lift from William Wyler's The Desperate Hours (1955). 
  
Once again the eternal wanderer is reflected in the character and as always Burman-da's music and Majrooh's lyrics are superb and all three, Asha Bhonsle, Kishore Kumar and Mohammad Rafi, sing beautifully in the duets.



Kala Bazar was a treat indeed. All the Anand brothers Dev, Chetan and Vijay performed in it with Vijay also handling the megaphone. SD Burman composed the tracks once again  and the ever gentle Shailendra wrote the dreamy lyrics. The song 'खोया खोया चाँद, खुला आसमान , आंखोंमें सारी रात जाएगी ...'  (paraphrased: my beloved and I have a tryst under the dreamy moon...) has been soulfully sung and ranks amongst Mohammad Rafi's all time best.  Dev himself, though, came in for a lot of criticism for his antics in this sequence as he expresses his love for the woman of his dreams. The silliness was thankfully offset by the camera work (V. Ratra) that really draws one's attention as it captures that lonely windswept hillside, bathed in the moonlight.... A side note:  the echo effect heard in the song was created by something called the 'echo-machine' and this was the first instance of its use in our films. 

The story of Kala Bazar was coherent enough with Dev in the stellar role of  a blackmarketeer earning his living by scalping the film-crazy Bombayites, selling cinema tickets of hit movies at exorbitant prices, outside theatres displaying 'House Full' boards. There are some pretty authentic scenes of rivalry between gangs as members seek supremacy. A chance encounter with the female lead (Waheeda Rehman) at the local Metro theatre makes him aware of the ills of his business and a relationship develops, with Dev being aware she is already been bethrothed to Vijay Anand's character. The latter, however, returns from London (where else, in those days!) and admits to Waheeda that she is not the girl he wants to marry after all and 'releases' her, thus making the way clear for Dev.

His past, however, catches up with him and ere long he finds himself handcuffed and before the judge. Except that a lawyer (Chetan Anand) whom he once helped, steps in at the right time and fights for him in court. He goes to prison on a mitigated sentence. That's the redeeming end to most of Dev's movies: stressing that a man's penal servitude should be in direct proportion with the circumstances that led him to his life of crime: poverty and joblessness. The judge commuted the sentence: after all the man did not want to be a criminal..

And when he came out his gal was always there, waiting for him: no convict went to prison with a broader smile!

Perhaps that's why we burst into laughter every time he wept on-screen: he just could not or would not, carry pathos! Remember that scene in Kalapani (1958) where he breaks down outside the cell holding his dad (is that the actor Prabhu Dayal?), who has been wrongly accused of murder and blurts out......pi..pi..taji?. The sequence could have been handled differently in an otherwise quite effective film tautly directed by Raj Khosla with joyful music by SD Burman, tuning Majrooh's flirtatious lyrics. As it is, there is a laughable quality about it which, as you can tell, is memorable in its own way! Madhubala was his leading lady here, with the immortal Nalini Jaywant in a pivotal (Filmfare's Best Supporting Actress award) role.


And yet without reaching the heights that somebody like Raj Kapoor would have scaled, Dev Anand could be effective in conveying pathos when the situation demanded.

Naya Films' Bambai Ka Babu (1960) was a surprise package. Directed by the now firmly-in-the-saddle Raj Khosla, it told the unusual tale of a criminal (Dev) fleeing the cops in Bombay, and landing somewhere in rural Punjab in the home of an elderly couple (Nasir Hussain & Achala Sachdev), who assume he is their long lost son. He falls in love with their daughter, played by the beautiful Bengali actress Suchitra Sen (in either her first or second Hindi film venture: Sarhad, also with Dev, was released the same year), who sees through his imposture, falls in love with him in turn but can do nothing about it. The film ends beautifully with Dev as her brother, giving her away. Mukesh's immortal 'chalri sajni ab kya soche' begins to roll, with Dev helplessly watching his beloved's baraat move away. A fine, subdued black and white (cameraman: Jal Mistry)  landmark in films although it attained only average success. It was too different from the typical boisterous Dev Anand film, with SD Burman scaling new heights in adapting folk music to film~always his forte. 

The loneliness of this character caught in life's irony is beautifully captured in another song written for the film by the great Majhrooh Sultanpuri and tuned by SD Burman. Rafi's articulation of the lyric, reflects the loneliness of the man and by extension, of humanity at large....."गलियाँ हैं अपने देशकी, फिर भी हैं  जैसे अजनबी, किसको कहे कोई अपना यहाँ ...." (I rove these streets where I grew up, and yet they are only vaguely familiar because there is no one whom I can call my own!). 

To many critics Dev Anand's Hum Dono (1961) was his best effort, in which he plays a double role in a military profile. Navketan's publicist Amarjeet directed this tale of mixed identities, his first of two he would direct Dev in, with a rare aplomb and a bit of genuine humour. Here again Dev's basic personality was never lost sight of and he did both roles with relish opposite Sadhana and Nanda. To many of us this antiwar film was his best, a tale of identity and marital mixups. And poet Sahir Ludhianvi who teamed up with composer Jaidev wrote some of his finest lyrics for this movie including the Rafi solo "मैं जिन्दगीका साथ निबाहता चला गया...हर फिक्र को धुएमें उडाता चला गया...", which best reflects Dev's philosophy of life..."I walked the paths of life, casting all fear to the wind...."  


Let me sneak in here a song that I have always loved from the film Tere Ghar Ke Samne (1963). The lightweight film spoke of reconciliation between two disparate families with Dev and Nutan on opposite sides, trying to bring their parents (and by extension, the socially riven country) together. Vijay Anand directed. Once again, SD Burman and lyricist Shailendra gave us a magical treat in music and poetry in every song they did for this film. The dreamy, misty solo below is second to none in romance and rendering by Mohammad Rafi for this composer.

                                                                 
                                               *****

And with that we move to 'Guide' (1965). This was the brightest star in his repertoire....and the one film that brought him a lot of  not-totally-undeserved criticism. It is one thing to create an entire genre moulded in one's personality, quite another to attempt a film adaptation of a literate novel.

As in the book, whose aim it is to satirize the god men of India, the main protagonist in the movie is a corrupt guide who achieves sainthood by accident.  Where the book raises important questions about religion and those who propagate it, with an ambiguous end leaving each reader to interpret it, the end of the movie shows our hero transcending all humanity, achieving immortality from a predictable screenplay. Dev Anand finally, actually dies in a movie. 

Obliquely, this is one Navketan venture that deserved a full-length critique  because it had so much to offer and, in the final analysis, achieved so little. Author R.K. Narayan who wrote the novel was up in arms against it. He penned lengthy tirades (in Life magazine, I remember) against it, his way of dissociating himself from what the film had done to his book. 'Guide' vied in the 'foreign language' category at the 38th Academy Awards in the US but was not nominated. The ill-fated English language version written by no less a literateur than Nobel Laureate Pearl Buck and produced by the American TV producer Tad Danielewski, has not been much in the news.

However, despite its intrinsic demerits, Guide does remain a milestone in our films chiefly because of Vijay Anand's direction, Fali Mistry's splendid photography and Sachin Dev Burman's unsurpassed musical contribution. The composer was never better than when he was working with Dev and proved to be a major prop in the success of this film.

The songs are still sung and played today. Dev Anand's Raju Guide remains the essential romantic hero of our films mouthing evocative lines like "खंडहर में देखो रोज़ी, एक गाईड खड़ा है' ...." look towards the ruins, Rosie, a guide is waiting for you..." before breaking into song....,



....while Waheeda Rehman's Rosie dances her way through the movie, with at least one song and dance sequence forever etched in audience memory.



So, did the film deserve all those awards? Let's be kind to the man.....it did, at least for the direction, camera work and the musical score. It reflected a technical gloss not seen since Raj Kapoor's 'Sangam'  a year or two before although like in that film, its makers ended up sacrificing content for form. But while the Sangam DVD is yet to come out of its wrapper in my collection, Guide remains at hand for repeated viewing.

Nalanda Films' Teen Deviyaan, directed once again by Navketan's publicist Amarjeet,  placed Dev in a quandary with three beautiful women, Simi, Kalpana and Nanda wooing him. The man had his problems in this simple but quite appealing film and we had a musical feast with a 50s vintage musical score by SD Burman who once again tuned Majrooh's lyrics.This Kishore-Asha duet is a perennial standout.



In 1967 we saw Jewel Thief a heist caper that did not go anywhere but straight to the box office, what with Burman-da's mesmerising score (assisted by son Rahul) and Majrooh's heady lyrics (this would be the last time composer and poet would team up), and the bevy of beauties, including Vyjayantimala and Tanuja, Anju Mahendru and Faryal and Helen, who surrounded our hero all through the film. Caper indeed! 

Dev Anand once again plays a pseudo double role, this time twice over.Veteran Ashok Kumar played the jewel thief: a role that was a far cry from his distinguished career. Vijay Anand directed with his usual flair and V. Ratra's camera this time scaled the towering mountain peaks in Sikkim. Much ado about nothing:based on similar films that came to us around this time from Hollywood and elsewhere.

Tere Mere Sapnein came in 1971, based (unacknowledged) on The Citadel, a fine novel by A.J. Cronin depicting the plight of coal miners in  a small town in Wales. The setting is, of course, relocated to a similar town in India, with Dev playing an idealistic doctor, Mumtaz his wife and Vijay Anand a fellow doctor who is an alcoholic. All three turned in excellent performances, with Vijay also directing. Shorn of the sophistry that permeated Guide, the movie tells the bleak tale of a doctor at the crossroads of life, pitting the basic idealism of his profession against material wealth, finally returning to the village to once again help the poor, suffering miners. Vijay Anand proved himself to be as good an actor as he was a director, upstaging brother Dev in almost all the scenes that they appear in together. Dev looked great without his other main prop: that puff.

And yes, SD Burman teamed up with Neeraj and gave a subdued, pertinent musical score, with Lata and Kishore in top form once again. 

And Dev placed the final feather in his cap when he became director with his 1971 opus Hare Rama Hare Krishna, in which he tackled that cult so rampant worldwide in the 60s, setting it in a fractured family. The daughter (the beautiful Zeenat Aman in her debut) runs away from her parents and brother as a child, and as a young woman joins a HRHK group which is essentially a clan of thugs and drug addicts. As the brother (Dev) comes of age he decides to go hunting for his sister, finds her but is unable to save her from a sorry end.

Authentic ambience pervades the film and V. Ratra's camera work exploits it to the hilt: the drug culture is effectively portrayed but as director, Dev is unable to show us the ephemeral connect between religion and drugs: not all the 'flower people' were druggies and criminals. It's a pity he had to bring in the crime element as distraction in an otherwise well-told tale. It was left to Anand Bakshi's on-target lyrics which at least in one song emmpathise with the wandering youth of the west, more disillusioned than errant. Why else would it seek salvation in a country where millions are starving?

But it was young Rahul Dev Burman who really lifted the film and whose scoring of it gave it topicality. Dad SDB was in failing health at the time (and indeed, would move on in 1975) and suggested to Dev that his son score the music for HRHK. Good thing he did, too, for the result was a reverberating score at a juncture when the quality of our film music was deteriorating.

True, he was not SDB (no one could ever be) but he created a sound all his own. His arrangement for Kishore Kumar's rendering of Anand Bakshi's "देखो ओ दीवानों तुम यह काम न करो....",  seeking to infuse the basic spirit of the Gita in wayward youth in the den is unique, and seems to arise from the "inner spaces" of the mind. The traditional listener could not believe that something called the cosmic synthesizer could produce a sound like this. And that is a cosmic sound at the top, before the 'mukhada'  giving the composition its hoary, far-away sound. 
                                                                         *****
What more can I say people? At some point I have to stop and I would rather stop here because the decline in our movies started at the top of the 70s. A new breed of film makers was assuming centrestage. The age of romance was essentially over. Dev continued to make films but they were never the same, as we all know.

Whether or not he represented his generation artistically and histrionically is a moot point. There were better film makers and actors, to be sure.

But this was Dev Anand. We'll remember him every time a song prods our subconscious.....

R.I.P.