Where might a young lady such as myself find a copy of the Paapi soundtrack? Hmmm? Seriously! It is good!

Please enjoy Zeenat Aman and Padma Khanna scamming Prem Chopra and some thugs!



Also, has anyone seen the Zeenat Aman/Rajesh Khanna skiing movie that also has Padma Khanna in it? I'm kind of morbidly curious. I bet it's really awful....

Okay, okay, I know it's been O.P. Ralhan fanatic month, but seriously, Paapi is a wonderful 1970s masala film. Who would have thought that I would ever find the Sanjeev Kumar/Zeenat Aman jodi so burning hot or desire to see more of Padma Khanna....

Backed with a killer soundtrack by Bappi Lahiri - and I mean a killer soundtrack - Pappi tells the story of Ranu, an orphan, who is separated from her brother at a young age when their older sister/caretaker is raped and killed by an Evil Thug in an amazing sequence where we cut back and forth between Ranu's didi struggling for her life and a religious devotional song in the building next door. Ranu's brother falls in a deep puddle trying to get help and Ranu assumes that he's dead, too. She runs off afraid that Evil Thug is going to kill her, too! Her bhai survives and is taken in by a kindly policeman and grows up to be a Tough On Crime Cop (Sunil Dutt, looking scarily like Sanju) and Ranu becomes Rani, a Master Thief (Zeenat Aman). ( Read more about Pappi and then watch the movie so you can discuss it with me! )So, there is the basic set-up. Some of the things I loved:

* The film is packed full of wonderful tension between Dr. Sanjeev's admiration of Zeenat - his ability to see beyond her crimes to the sweet person within - and Zeenat's longing for some kind of release from her life of crime. She doesn't feel worthy of him and wants to protect him from himself. *swoon* ( screencaps under here... )

* Sanjeev Kumar's character was really well done. What could have been a whiny, impractical doofus of a guy is instead extremely sympathetic. ( A couple of spoilerly screencaps... )

* I was also really pleased with the depiction of female friendship between Padma Khanna as Miss Kitty and Zeent Aman. Instead of having the secondary female lead be a stereotypical vamp who is after the hero, Padma Khanna's character has her own story where she grows from being frozen in a life that she hates to taking action against the men who have trapped her there, with a little courage borrowed from Zeenat. ( spoilery screencaps under here... )

* Reena Roy's saree in this scene was divine. I want one, too!



In the end, what strikes me most about Paapi is how it takes the masala conventions and just does them better. Instead of the tired two-hero film, we get a two-hero film where one of the heroes is Zeenat Aman. Instead of the vamp who dies for the hero's love, we have a vamp who is totally kick-ass and best friends with the female hero. And O.P. Ralhan fits in some great commentary on crime and the criminal element. In short, I don't see how it gets any better than this. Why is Paapi not mentioned up there with Don and Johny Mera Naam as a great 70s masala film?

( A final image... )

Hulchul was a fun movie, although not very traditionally masala as there was no romance. Instead, O.P. Ralhan cooks up a satisfying mix of comedy, suspense, and thrills for a more Hollywood-style potboiler of a film. The only Hollywood comedy/thriller to come to my mind at the moment is Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965 - starring Frankie Avalon and Vincent Price), which perhaps tells a little more about my movie preferences than I'm comfortable admiting to the general public.

( But really, you should read more about Hulchul under this cut... )

This film raises some interesting issues. One of which is the power imbalance between husbands and wives. I've found that O.P. Ralhan's films are very sympathetic towards women - at least the three that I've seen. In this film, we see three women who have all have genuine feelings of fear towards their husbands when they get the call from Peter. Not one dismisses the call as a prank. These underlying feelings must come from somewhere - the power imbalance. To Ralhan's credit, not one woman comes off as crazy and that includes Tun Tun.

Other great things about Hulchul are: ( In list form.... )