August 15, this year, is the official date that marks 50 years of ‘Sholay’. But yesterday, why I do not know, the golden jubilee year of Bollywood’s iconic film was celebrated with a screening of its restored, uncut version on a large, open-air screen at Piazza Maggiore, a sprawling plaza in Italy’s Bologna. The show was described as the world premiere of the classic film held at the annual Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival. This “original” version has the ending that Ramesh Sippy first shot and which was turned down by the orthodox Indian Censor Board in 1975 for being far too violent. It shows the amputee Thakur Baldev Singh, played by a stoic Sanjeev Kumar, getting his long-awaited revenge by killing ruthless Gabbar Singh (debutant Amjad Khan in the role of a lifetime) with his spiked mojadis after a gritty fight to death in the dacoit’s mountain lair. Sippy had to reshoot the climax which then ended with Thakur beating Gabbar to pulp before the police arrive to arrest him (as they famously do in Hindi films). This is the ‘Sholay’ we saw. And which ran for five continuous years at Minerva. Every show playing to Housefull audiences. The restoration of the original print which was found in a Mumbai warehouse was an intricate process and took three years. All good to know. But I don’t understand why this world premiere of the new ‘Sholay’ was held at Bologna and not in Mumbai. Which apart from being the home of Bollywood also has a more understanding and appreciative Indian audience than the Italians of Bologna.
Time was when Hindi films, the really good ones, ran for weeks and weeks and celebrated silver, golden and platinum jubilee anniversaries in single screen theatres of Bombay. People queued up from the evening before to book first day, first show tickets when the advance booking opened on Mondays. See the serpentine line outside Minerva for ‘Sholay’? That’s an advance booking queue in the film’s 35th week! There was no pre-publicity back in the day. Just black-and-white ads in the dailies during the week of release. Which brought in the audience. No exclusive interviews for the Bollywood press, no chat shows on TV to go on and promote the film, plain word-of-mouth sold a release. That, and the excitement of reading about it in Screen, Filmfare, and Stardust at the barber's shop. Today, the opening weekend makes or breaks a film. Most have only a three-day run at the box office. After the film has starry events to launch its poster, teaser, trailer, first song, and road shows by the cast across the country to take the film to the janata, interviews done with big media houses, and big budgets spent on hoardings, print and digital media advertising, followed by the release in multiplexes having several screens and shows from dawn to midnight. And still, films don’t run for even two weeks. Makes me wonder, are we getting more snobbish as an audience? Or are filmmakers producing utter rubbish and passing it off as entertainment? ‘Sholay’ is a fine case study. Even 50 years later in an uncut, restorAvatarar.
