A plug for gunpowder...the restaurant, that is. It’s been a while since I’ve come across an eating joint that’s as aptly named as this delightful little place in Hauz Khas Village: the food explodes in your mouth, and I mean that in the best possible way (mirchi-intolerants, desist).
Gunpowder: The Peninsular Kitchen is fast developing an intense following among south Delhi’s cultural set – artists, publishers, authors. I heard about it from four different people in the space of two days (hat tips to Mary Therese Kurkalang of the German Book Office and Chiki Sarkar of Random House India) and one danger is that it may soon have more customers than it can handle (even though it isn't easy to find and you have to walk up three flights of stairs). Much like the Goan eatery Bernardo’s, which sadly moved from C R Park to Gurgaon a couple of years ago, Gunpowder is a small place, run by two people with a little help from friends and volunteers; already the owner Satish Warrier is requesting people to call up and make reservations before dropping in for dinner.
We’ve only been once so far (technically, twice: the first time we didn’t have cash, they didn’t have a card machine and there wasn’t an ATM close enough) but plan to go again very soon. We had pork in Coorg spices (a generous quantity - enough for two people with moderate appetites), the fluffiest Malabar parottas I’ve ever laid teeth on, and Andhra “meen” fish curry with steamed rice. It was all spectacularly hot and spectacularly good. The pepper chicken and beerkai mutton are next on my list, and their daal sounds promising too. The menu is small – and handwritten, in a register – but that isn’t a problem; we aren’t going to tire of this food anytime soon.
Check the Facebook page for details and updates (and dire warnings about lack of kitchen help).
Of the many children’s books I got to see at the speed-dating session/small book fair with German publishers in Berlin a couple of months ago, I was especially taken by the historical fiction titles in the dtv junior catalogue. These are books that combine fictitious plots with historical background and detail: a young protagonist is typically at the centre of each story (a boy who joins Hannibal’s army, two children solving a mystery in ancient Rome), which makes the whole thing more interesting for young readers. It’s very different from the textbook format of supplying dry detail about a historical event or setting.
Needless to say, there’s a lot of scope for doing this sort of thing in India, given the country’s vast and varied heritage. Atiya Zaidi, publisher, Ratna Sagar and a member of our traveling band in Germany, just sent me a revised edition of Of Kings and Commoners: Fact & Fiction from the Past, a children’s book that covers various epochs in Indian history, from the Indus Valley Civilisation down to Mahatma Gandhi’s salt march in 1930 (with stops along the way at the Maurya, Gupta and Chola dynasties).
The format is simple and neat: for each historical setting there’s a short story (typically not more than seven or eight pages long) followed by a separate section that provides background detail. The stories aren’t intricately plotted and they don’t need to be: their function is to present the common man’s perspective of life in those times, to make the strange and the distant seem familiar, and to throw in some authentic detail that can be elaborated on in the second section (a child playing with a clay monkey in the Indus Valley story, for instance). In one story, a boy enters the Pataliputra palace and catches a glimpse of King Asoka. In another, a young stone-carver nervously teaches the emperor Akbar how to use a chisel. A family makes a three-month journey from Dilli to Daulatabad and back to Dilli again under the reign of the volatile Muhammad bin Tughlaq.
This is an engaging way to teach history – and actually, even the non-fiction sections here are more interesting and compact than the school textbooks I recall. Five of the stories in this book are by Subhadra Sen Gupta, the remaining three by Monisha Mukundan. Both writers are quite experienced in the historical-fiction genre, though I’m not familiar with their other works. If anyone has information on other Indian publications of this sort, I’d appreciate a pointer.
Since everyone is going on about eclipses today, here's one of the funniest things I've seen on YouTube recently (link sent by Aishwarya): the "literal video version" of Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart", which retains the original music but substitutes the lyrics with descriptions of what's going on in the music video (and a gloriously cheesy 1980s music video it is too). I love the "Fonzie's been cloned!" bit. And "Now I need a mop." And "Douchebags!" And many other things. Keep the volume turned up all the way.
Others in the literal-video series: REM's "Losing My Religion" ("Is that Dennis Rodman?") and A-Ha's "Take on Me".
...is directed at people who feel all warm and fuzzy inside when they receive happy-birthday messages from their hundreds of Facebook “friends”. My wife tells me about a friend who gushed to her on the phone about how her day had “absolutely been made” by the 30-40 birthday wishes on her Wall. (She didn’t seem anywhere near as excited about the surprise party her ever-lovin’ husband and child had planned for her...in the drabness that is the real world.)
Also recently, I was surprised to see that someone on my list had written an enthusiastic “Thanks to everyone for remembering my birthday! I’m so touched!” Uh, remembering? Really? I barely use Facebook at all, but even I know that the vile thing keeps generating these sidebar reminders that tell you – starting at least four days in advance, so you can buy virtual sheep or eggs as gifts – whose birthday it is, and when. This makes it impossible, no matter how intently you try, to forget anyone’s birthday (except for those who are sensible enough not to include the date in their Profile details, like your truly). And these notifications are magnets for people who find it therapeutic to post a standard-form “Hey, happy birthday! Have a good one :) ” on the Facebook page of someone whom they’ve never met and never want to. Naturally, much cloying gratitude is directed at these unworthy posters.
The sharp-minded among you will have guessed by now that this rant stems from a deep private sorrow. A few months ago I wrote out a nice birthday message for an old school-friend now living in California and mailed it to both his email Ids (being unsure which one he was accessing more often). It wasn’t a message written in template form, it was a personal note where I also included a non-birthday-related question or two. The day passed, and another two after it, without a word of reply. Perhaps he’s met with a crippling accident or been devoured by bears in one of those national parks he visits so often, I thought, but something told me this was unlikely. Then I happened to check his Facebook account (typically, I hadn’t even remembered that we were FB friends – I’d thought that honour was reserved for people one didn’t like in real life) and discovered that he had written painstakingly composed “Thank yous” to every single one of the 30-odd happy budday messages on his Wall.
I brought the subject up when he visited Delhi recently and he at least had the decency to look shame-faced. After a weak attempt at hedging, that is.
“Um, I don’t check my email that regularly.”
“You don’t check your work email regularly?”
“Okay, sorry, I must have overlooked it. These days it’s just so much easier to reply to messages on Facebook.”
Then he tried to wriggle out of the situation in the oldest possible way – by using a word with a French accent, followed by a little laugh sound. “Email is passé, heh heh.”
Well, not yet. But birthday greetings as I once knew them definitely are.
[Earlier social-networking rants: 1, 2]
Pankaj Advani’s Sankat City has so many things going on at the same time – it's brimming over with good ideas, verbal gymnastics and visual gags – that it leaves you feeling giddy. More than once I felt sure that the film would eventually trip over its own cleverness, but it held its ground. Though it’s loud and ribald, it establishes a lunatic tone and sticks with it, right from the opening shot where a man dressed up in a gaudy Rakshasa costume is shown pursuing another man in Deva get-up through the busy streets of Mumbai. (What is this, you wonder, a Ram-Lila rehearsal gone terribly wrong or a visual metaphor for a corrupt policeman hectoring a minor – and relatively innocent – offender?) Variations on this bizarre chase will recur at different points through the film, as it cuts between many characters and sub-plots.
It would take a long time to detail the plot in a way that would satisfactorily explain the relationship between all the characters (and I’m not sure I even caught every detail), but here’s the essence of it: Guru (Kay Kay Menon), a small-time crook with a soft corner for (living) fish, makes the mistake of stealing a Mercedes that’s transporting a cash stack of 1 crore rupees for the sadistic gangster Faujdaar (Anupam Kher). Deep in trouble and given three days to retrieve the money (which is now mysteriously missing), Guru teams up with con-girl Mona (Rimi Sen) who had once knocked him over the head with a pair of handcuffs after cheating him of his share of a loot. Others involved in this unholy mess include a nervous builder in severe debt to Faujdaar, a Godman with a weakness for bathing with men who supposedly remind him of his childhood friends in the village talaab, and a D-grade film director who has just been arm-twisted into blowing up a van with his hammy leading man inside (which, incidentally, leads to a sly line implying that Amitabh Bachchan’s near-fatal accident during the shooting of Coolie might not have been an accident after all).
One of the things I liked about this film is the cleverness with which it sets up little bits of information early on (e.g. a news item about a meteor landing that will cause a minor earthquake, a Sardarji talking about his search for his long-lost brother) and resolves them later, when you aren’t expecting it. The dialogue-writers clearly enjoyed themselves a great deal, with lines that range from ribald street-slang to self-consciously shuddh Hindi in the Godman scenes (don’t miss Faujdaar’s matter-of-fact use of the word “and-koksh” – or egg-sac – directed at the Godman, who has just been kicked in the nuts). There are many good visual gags too: a colourful Goddess Durga picture covering half of a visiting card; a shot of a disconsolate Guru puncturing the moon (as if it’s a balloon); a surreal scene set on a seemingly planet-sized garbage dump where all the filth of Mumbai is presided over by a mad, gun-brandishing prophet-figure.
Most of the cast gets into the film’s manic mood nicely – it was good to see Anupam Kher enjoying himself in a flashy but well-written role – but I was particularly impressed by Rimi Sen, who has a surprisingly low profile given that she has now featured in two of the best Hindi films of the past two years. There wasn’t all that much for her to do in Johnny Gaddaar, but in this film she sinks her teeth into a very juicy part, matching Kay Kay step by step, playing hard to get with the horny builder, engaging in guy talk with a buddy who happens to be Faujdaar’s chauffeur, lapsing into a street version of her native Bengali during moments of stress.
Sankat City resembles Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! in its vivid depiction of an aspirational, amoral strata of society, but it’s ultimately a one-of-a-kind film: deliberately exaggerated and caricatured, often playing like a skit that presents characters as archetypes without worrying much about realism. This is the sort of thing that can be very difficult to pull off – and there IS a slapdash quality about a couple of scenes – but on the whole it works. It's one of the most boldly entertaining films I've seen in a while.
... make sure he’s played by Walter Huston. It’s sure to be an unforgettable experience.
The expression “You can’t take your eyes off him when he’s on the screen” probably didn’t originate with Huston’s performance as the grizzled Mr Scratch in the 1941 film The Devil and Daniel Webster, (also known as All That Money Can Buy) but it should have. He’s so mesmeric, so diabolical and so charming all at once (in a folksy, Midwestern sort of way) that the original Prince of Darkness would have been deeply envious. Jack Nicholson and Mick Jagger would have joined a church choir.
This superb movie adapts the Faust story and transposes it to rural America in the mid-19th century, where a “God-fearin’ New Hampshire family” comprising a young farmer named Jabez Stone, his wholesome wife Mary and his mother are at their wit’s end. Plagued by nature’s fury (hailstones, drought), loan sharks demanding back their money and a seemingly endless trail of misfortune, Jabez cries out in a moment of weakness that this is enough “to make a man his soul to the Devil, and I would for two cents”. Enter Mr Scratch with his little black book and an offer Jabez can’t refuse: a hoard of gold coins in exchange for his soul, contract to be renewed in seven years. “Why should that worry you?” Scratch asks. “What is a soul? A soul is nothing. Can you see it, smell it, touch it? No. You'll have money and all that money can buy.”
Soon Jabez is throwing coins about the place just to show off his wealth, driving poor people from his door, refusing to join his mother and wife at Sunday church and generally behaving boorish. When the Devil sends across a demon-minion in the vivacious form of Belle (played by the French actress Simon Simone who purrs “I’m 
not anything” when someone asks her “Are you French?”), Jabez hooks up with her, buying her a large, vulgar mansion and neglecting his poor wife. (For a once-decent, Bible-quoting family man like him, this marks a descent into perdition that’s even steeper than Priyanka Chopra sleeping with a black man in Fashion.) Eventually the great orator and people’s politician Daniel Webster (“when he speaks, the Stars and Stripes come right out of the sky”) must step in to help Jabez retrieve his soul and to show that there’s no place for the Devil in an America governed by its new Constitution. Or, at least, in New Hampshire.
The Devil and Daniel Webster was made in the same year as Orson Welles’ iconic Citizen Kane, and by the same studio – the relatively small RKO Pictures, which was doing some very good work in those years. Though it doesn’t have the formal mastery of Welles’ film from beginning to end (how many movies do?), it contains several moments of brilliance and is a more accessible film on the whole. There’s so much to recommend here that I don’t know where to start. Atmospheric black-and-white photography, Bernard Herrmann’s wonderfully varied music score, and subtle special effects (don’t miss Mr Scratch’s combustible visiting card in his magnificently shot entrance scene, just after Jabez speaks his self-incriminating words) combine to create a weird, otherworldly mood – as in the spooky barnyard dance where Jabez is smitten by Belle while the Devil plays the violin and urges everyone to go “Faster!” In some of the longer takes, the camerawork is nearly as fluid and assured as in Citizen Kane.
The great achievement of Huston’s Devil lies in the acting as well as in the conception and appearance of the character. He fits perfectly into this setting. He isn’t a supernatural figure arbitrarily thrust into the story – it’s possible to see him as a roguish farmer or tramp sitting about on the sidelines, stirring people up – but the viewer can never have the slightest doubt about who He really is; this is exactly what old Lucifer would look and behave like if he tucked away his pointy tail, hid his horns beneath a crumpled cap and visited a farmstead in the 1800s. What I also liked is that this isn’t a Devil who turns sullen when his plans are foiled. In the climactic scene, when Webster seizes the day, Scratch’s maniacal grin only becomes wider and he departs with a congratulatory nod, as if he knows that this is a temporary setback and many more triumphs lie ahead of him. ("Oh, by the way, you'll never become president of the United States," he tells Webster, "I'll see to that!")
Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought the last shot – where Mr Scratch, still very much at large in the world of men, looks straight into the camera, grins and points at us – was like a distorted version of the Uncle Sam “I want you” poster.
Perhaps a subtextual reading could tell us this film isn’t as patriotic as it thinks it is? Or perhaps one only has to look at this exchange between Webster and Scratch:
Mr Scratch: Foreign? Who calls me a foreigner?
Daniel Webster: Well, I never heard of the de... I never heard of you claiming American citizenship.
Mr Scratch: And who has a better right? When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on the deck. Am I not still spoken of in every church in New England? It's true the North claims me for a Southerner and the South for a Northerner, but I'm neither. To tell the truth, Mr Webster – though I don't like to boast of it – my name is older in the country than yours.
(Note: The film is on YouTube here, though I don't recommend seeing it in a tiny box)
Richard Widmark must be among the most atypical leading men in 1950s American cinema. He isn’t associated with a distinct screen persona and there’s nothing “starry” or especially charismatic about him: thin lips, a pallid face, slicked-back hair and a distracted expression that’s sometimes punctuated by a cocky grin, as if he unexpectedly remembered that funny things can happen in the world. But he was very effective in a certain kind of role in film noirs of the early 1950s – as a guy who was basically a heel or a loser (with maybe the odd redeeming quality) but whom you couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for. I think in particular of his con-artist-turned-victim Harry Fabian in Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (a film with a grim ending that comes like a blow to the viewer’s solar plexus).
A Widmark film I saw recently was Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street, about New York lowlifes becoming inadvertently involved in a Communist plot that could be hazardous to American security. Fuller’s movies were known for their sparse, direct quality (Martin Scorsese once said that having worked as a reporter, Fuller knew “how to tell a story, how to cut right to the quick of it...He has to hook you with the headline, with the prose”) and Pickup on South Street is among the best of them. It’s only 80 minutes long and within that running time it tells a story very compactly, with dark humour and well-etched characters.
The tone is set by a beautifully taut, economical opening scene in a crowded New York subway train. The elements of this scene include a pretty woman holding a purse, clinging to a handrail; two men – one young, the other middle-aged – watching her discreetly from a corner of the carriage; and a third man – the Richard Widmark character – slowly making his way through the crowd until he’s standing 
right next to the woman, the two of them swaying gently with the movement of the train but never really making eye contact. The newcomer takes out a paper and pretends to read it but in close-up we see his fingers opening the woman’s purse and taking out something from it. The two men watching from a distance see this and are instantly on alert. When the train stops at a station, Widmark dashes out and the two men try to follow him but the doors close on them.
“What’s going on?” the younger man asks, “I’m not sure,” says his older partner.
At this point, the viewer isn’t sure either: there are many ways in which the scene and the relationship between its four players can be interpreted. It’s only a few minutes later, as the various plot strands reveal themselves, that we understand exactly what happened. Candy (played by the lovely Jean Peters, who really should have been cast in more films of this type) was carrying a strip of microfilm that her former boyfriend Joey had instructed her to pass to one of his contacts. She doesn’t know that Joey is a Communist sympathiser and that the film contains government secrets being sold to the “Reds”, but the two men watching her in the train are Federal agents who have been tipped off. And the Widmark character, Skip McCoy, is a small-time pickpocket who just happens to choose Candy as his next victim and ends up in possession of the microfilm. Like another chance encounter on a train in another early 1950s film, this incident will have snowballing consequences for all concerned.
The most interesting character in Pickup on South Street– and the key to its theme of national interest overriding personal well-being – is a “pickpocket stoolie” named Moe, who provides the police with tips about various small-time criminals. Moe is played by the wonderful Thelma Ritter, who was one of the best characters actors of the time, particularly well known for her straight-talking or downright acerbic characters in films like Rear Window (as Jimmy Stewart’s nurse whose many memorable lines include “We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get out of their own house and look in for a change” and “He better get that trunk out of there before it starts to leak”). She never turns down a chance to make a quick buck by ratting on acquaintances, but beneath the hard-edged exterior we see a vulnerable side: she’s a poor woman and her great ambition is to die with enough money to be buried in a decent place. She and Skip are kindred spirits in a sense – Skip lives in a dingy waterfront shack (he doesn’t have a fridge, so he lowers a crate of beer into the water to keep it cool) – and they understand each other. “Moe’s all right, she’s gotta eat,” says Skip philosophically when he learns that Moe took 50 dollars from the cops for information about him.
“Some people peddle lamb chops or apples, I peddle information,” Moe says cynically at one point, but she draws the line at some things: even she won’t have anything to do with selling information to the big bad Communists. And this is where Pickup on South Street allows its social message to take centrestage. For me, the film was slightly marred by a (relatively) happy, feel-good ending that seemed incongruous. To an extent I can understand the reason for it: in another noir film there would have been no redemption for the characters played by Widmark, Ritter and Peters, but in this one, when there’s a huge external enemy to be stared down in the form of – gasp! – evil Reds, it’s possible for pickpockets and informers to become heroes. (Remember, this is 1953.)
Early in the film, Skip cocks his eyebrows at an agent who tells him that if he refuses to turn over the microfilm he’ll be as guilty as the traitors who gave Stalin the A-bomb. “Are you waving the flag at me?” Skip asks amusedly, and goes on to make an offhand comment about patriotic eyewash. This suggests that he’s so busy trying to make ends meet, to survive as an individual in a cutthroat world, that he has no time for lofty nationalistic concerns. But Skip does come around in the end, and it might be said that his decision, which in the context of the story is for the “greater good”, isn’t necessarily good for the film itself. The last couple of minutes left me with a vaguely dissatisfied feeling, as if a rude beam of sunlight had been granted entry into a place where it had no business intruding. Commie-hatred trumps the noir mood. No complaints about the rest of the film though.
P.S. More on that opening scene in the train: in an interview that’s one of the special features on my DVD, Samuel Fuller talks about his fascination with the subway as a location for a dramatic scene. “People are a million miles away from each other when they’re on a crowded subway train,” he says, “Even when they are pressed up against each other so close that their noses are practically touching, they are careful not to make eye contact or to intrude on each other’s privacy.”
The special features also include the text of an interview with Richard Widmark, who calls Fuller “the Grandma Moses of filmmaking...he was very good at a lean, tough approach” and mentions that the films they made in those days were treated as “assignments”, with very little indepth discussion about the art or craft involved. “I was under contract and in those days I was making four, five pictures a year. I finished one on Saturday, started another on Monday. They gave you your next script and you do it or you go on suspension...We just did it. No talk, no discussions about motivation, no baloney. Just do it.” It’s amazing how many high-quality movies were produced under these carefully controlled conditions.
[A few earlier posts on old films: The Killing, Eraserhead, Fearless Vampire Killers, Swing Time, The Talk of the Town, Nanook of the North, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Paths of Glory, Duck Soup, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Suspiria, Trouble in Paradise]
We’ve only been once so far (technically, twice: the first time we didn’t have cash, they didn’t have a card machine and there wasn’t an ATM close enough) but plan to go again very soon. We had pork in Coorg spices (a generous quantity - enough for two people with moderate appetites), the fluffiest Malabar parottas I’ve ever laid teeth on, and Andhra “meen” fish curry with steamed rice. It was all spectacularly hot and spectacularly good. The pepper chicken and beerkai mutton are next on my list, and their daal sounds promising too. The menu is small – and handwritten, in a register – but that isn’t a problem; we aren’t going to tire of this food anytime soon.
