‘Sholay’ turns 50

A tale of friendship, romance, action, revenge, and musical frolic, Sholay is an ostensible remake of several films, from John Sturges’ Old West saga The Magnificent Seven—itself a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai—to Raj Khosla’s action-drama Mera Gao Mera Desh (My Village My Country). Sippy’s amalgam of styles and influences was lightning in a bottle, but as any avowed fan will note, it would take a few weeks for viewers to catch on. Deemed a box-office failure at first, the “masala western” went on to have a fabled run at Mumbai’s Minerva theatre, where it ran sold-out for nearly six years, while also becoming one of the highest-grossing films in the Soviet Union.

In the Hindi-speaking parts of India, it’s nearly impossible to grow up without its influence, or without knowing every other line of dialogue from the movie’s memorable minor players. It’s equally difficult to translate its enormous cultural cachet in western verbiage—what if Star Wars was also The Godfather, with a touch of Singin' in the Rain?—but what these discussions of its legacy often miss is just how effective Sholay remains on its own terms. More than just a beloved curio, it’s an aesthetic triumph.

Opening with a mysterious, retired police inspector, Thakur Baldev Singh (Sanjeev Kumar), searching for a pair of roguish thieves he once arrested—the smarmy, cocksure Veeru (Dharmendra) and the stoic, sarcastic Jai (Amitabh Bachchan)—Sholay quickly hopscotches between tonal modes, seasoning viewers to its hybrid charms. A propulsive train robbery on horseback, a friendship ballad on a stolen bike, and a slapstick, Chaplin-esque prison detour quickly follow before the plot even comes to light. Once the old foes reunite, the stern, embittered Thakur offers the inseparable duo a reward to protect his village against a notorious bandit, the maniacal, scenery-chewing Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan).

Along the way, Veeru falls for a motor-mouthed village girl, the horse-cart driver Basanti (a livewire Hema Malini), while Jai similarly courts a foil of his own, Thakur’s quiet, widowed daughter-in-law Radha (Jaya Bhaduri). This pair of sweet, amusing romances turns deeply serious once the movie’s tragic, life-or-death stakes fade into view. This is perhaps Sholay’s biggest on-screen achievement: the script, by story-and-lyricist duo Salim-Javed, crafts a sense of comfort and familiarity, before gradually piercing this veil.

Similar in its tonal transition, across the mega-hit’s 198 minutes (204 for the soon-to-be-released director’s cut), is its use of song and dance to thread a distinct emotional arc. Take, for instance, the revelrous, salacious “Mehbooba Mehbooba”—composer R.D. Burman’s riff on Demis Roussos’ Greek folk-pop—in which cameoing actress Helen dances for Gabbar’s entertainment. It’s an earworm track whose colorful visual conception is a feast for the senses. But the next time a woman is seen performing for the villain, it involves Gabbar forcing Basanti to dance on broken glass to keep Veeru alive. The reappearance of visual and musical motifs is stark and obvious throughout Sholay, but its unapologetic extremes are afforded the time to settle during its gargantuan runtime. Even the aforementioned, breezy friendship ballad appears as a reprise nearly three hours later, underscoring one of Indian cinema’s most agonizing death scenes.

These seemingly immiscible extremes are all obsessively fine tuned, and bound together by Burman’s spaghetti western score. The performances exist in a space of theatrical melodrama, but they never leave the realm of believability. And when the action scenes begin—dovetailing smoothly between dance or dialogue—they’re stylized, but physically grounded. The film’s sweeping opera is especially aided by cinematographer Dwarka Divecha’s use of space, between sweeping motions that create momentum even in unassuming open spaces, and the sheer imposing nature of Gabbar’s towering, cliffside hideout—perhaps the one element that will be lost when the director’s cut re-releases in the 2.2:1 aspect ratio of the film’s original 70mm release, compared to the un-cropped 4:3 version found on some DVDs.

Make no mistake: the forthcoming restoration is a blessing, despite this minor gripe. Sippy’s darker original ending—which he sanded down on recommendation from the Indian censors—is a more thematically fitting denouement, especially in light of other, more violent scenes being re-instated too. While the movie’s theatrical cut has been streaming for some time, the version most widely available is a washed-out transfer of a gaudily over-saturated 3-D print from 2014.

However, India’s Film Heritage Foundation has painstakingly accumulated numerous source prints, and after a years-long cleanup effort, they premiered the brand-new 4K version of the director’s cut at the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna, Italy in June. Its Canadian and U.S. premieres are slated for the Toronto and New York Film Festivals in the coming months, after which the world will likely have the chance to experience its magic all over again on the silver screen. It’s an opportunity to not just be moved and entertained, but to truly understand why Sholay has eclipsed the cultural reach of other movies of its ilk. It remains, even 50 years later, one of a kind.