Sholay (1975)

Sholay is one of the most famous and successful examples of the 'curry western', the Indian counterpart to Italy's more famous 'spaghetti western'. Though set in then contemporary India Sholay borrows a number of prominent tropes from American westerns including a lot of horse ridding, a train robbery, and a small frontier community beset by a band of merciless marauders. Sanjeev Kumar is Baldev Singh the Thakur or leader of his small high desert community, Baldev is also a former officer with the national police who, when his family and community are menaced by Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan) a character that was such a good villain that in 2013 Hindi language Filmfare magazine named him the most iconic villain in the history of Indian cinema, Baldev brings in two skilled yet lite hearted bandits with whom he'd had previous dealings (as portrayed in flashback) to help him protect the community.

These two fun loving bandits, who are in many ways reminiscent of Disney's Chip and Dale chipmunk characters, are Jai (Amitabh Bachchan) the straight man, and Veeru (Dharmendra) the funny one. We get a fair bit of backstory on these two, including a roughly ten minute sequence, of very little story importance for the rest of the film, in which the pair are in a prison together under the command of a warden played by the multi-talented Govardhan Asrani who looks suspiciously like Hitler and acts suspiciously like Charlie Chaplin's spoof of Hitler in The Great Dictator. After their release from prison the two, after some convincing, agree to help Baldev defend his community, at first for money, and later out of respect for Baldev, hatred for Gabbar, and love of their respective love interests, Jaya Bachchan for Jai and Hema Malini for Veeru, Malini (who is super winning in the film) in fact later became the real life wife of Dharmendra and is today a member of India's parliament.

The film has some really interesting tonal shifts, its very lite at places but also gets rather gruesome, particularly towards the end. Being an Indian film it has a number of musical numbers in it, and they are all pretty good, with "Yeh Dosti" and "Holi Ke Din" being the most memorable, in fact you should really watch "Holi Ke Din" its like what you would imagine every Indian musical number would be like. Sholay is a fun movie and there is a reason that it is one of relative few Indian films to be fairly well known outside of the subcontinent. ***