To Star Trek on its birthday – thanks for the adventures, the wisdom and the cheese

(For the Sunday Times of India, I wrote a little nostalgia piece about Star Trek: The Original Series - this week marks the 60th anniversary of its premiere)
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Sometime in the late 1980s, thanks to a videocassette owned by a US-returned aunt, I discovered – for the first time – the colours of the shirts worn by Captain Kirk, Mr Spock, Dr McKoy and their colleagues. 

 Here was the Starship Enterprise’s crew, clad in vivid yellows and blues and reds, striding purposefully around the giant ship’s corridors (even when there wasn’t any particular reason to stride). The episode on the cassette – “The City on the Edge of Forever”, scripted by the great Harlan Ellison – also had the amusing sight of Kirk and Spock in Depression-Era clothes after they land in 1930s New York. 

This was how I learnt that Star Trek had been a brightly coloured show, not the monochrome I remembered from the Doordarshan telecast years earlier – having then watched it only on a black-and-white TV. 

Even when experienced in dull shades of grey, though, there was nothing dull about the series itself. It was a weekly highlight for us pop-culture-deprived waifs, making our Sunday mornings very special. Like countless other Indian kids of the mid-1980s, I waited breathlessly for the black background – showing the vastness of outer space – to appear on my TV screen. The familiar theme music played. Tiny white dots appeared, representing celestial bodies – but one of these dots would soon resolve itself into the comforting shape of the Enterprise as it hurtled towards us. “Space: the final frontier...” began Captain Kirk’s voiceover.

For a child watching Star Trek – even if we knew nothing of its background or antecedents, or the international cult followings and Trekkie conventions – the thrills were immediate and visceral. There were those hyper-dramatic scenes where some external power acted on the Enterprise and the crew swayed about, holding on to walls to gain stability as generic alarms went off. There were the many wondrous planets, topographies and alien creatures (this being long before most of us had encountered serious sci-fi literature, or knew that some hefty names – Ellison, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch – had contributed to the Star Trek screenplays). Or the fight scenes, which can seem laughably quaint or tacky now, but on which so much seemed to hinge at the time – not least when circumstances forced the central characters into a physical confrontation with each other.

And most of all, the bantering – and the hint of an unsentimental, inexpressive but deep “yaarana” – between the two leads, Captain Kirk (who was the conventional hero) and the emotionless Mr Spock, whose very oddness made him the more compelling character for some viewers, like yours truly. Those of us who idolised Spock for his stoicism, for the Vulcan nerve pinch, and for being above such base things as romance, felt a little betrayed by the “Pon Farr” episode when he needs to go home for a mating ritual: a “cool” character was suddenly on heat; it was if Jughead in the Archie comics had begun chasing girls.

Other iterations of Star Trek would come later: the feature films of the 1970s and 80s (which I had mixed feelings about because the characters looked older and pudgier, and wore different uniforms), or the more technically sophisticated series Star Trek: The Next Generation, which substituted the line “...where no man has gone before” with the politically correct (and banal) “...where no one has gone before”. But the original show remained incomparable for those of us who grew up with it. 

Around the same time as the Star Trek telecast on Doordarshan, we also got an English-dubbed version of the cheesy Japanese series Giant Robo. These twin experiences made for my first encounters with visual fantasy, and it’s amusing now to think of the cultural gap between the two shows. One was an American series about a distant future where mankind is exploring new worlds with the hope of forging peaceful new relationships (with the Starship Enterprise being a melting pot of earth cultures, from Scotty the Scotsman to Sulu the Asian); the other was made in a Japan that had suffered an American-dropped nuclear bomb and was using cautionary motifs about atomic radiation in its pop culture. And here were both shows being telecast in the soft-socialist India of the early 1980s, influencing scores of children. 

Some of these young fans would later go on to careers as astronauts or scientists, playing a big part in space exploration and furthering the breadth of our knowledge; the aerospace engineers Swati Mohan and Sirisha Bandla, among others, have spoken about how Star Trek fuelled their interest in outer space. And yet perhaps the final, tempering word should belong to the man who played the Enterprise’s best-known captain. Five years ago, after he visited space for the first time (in real life) at age 90, William Shatner wrote movingly about his epiphany that Earth, a fragile planet, “is, and will remain, our only home. And that we have been ravaging it, relentlessly, making it uninhabitable”.

For decades, Star Trek acolytes like me thrilled in Shatner’s authoritative voice speaking of exploring strange new worlds, seeking new civilizations, boldly going where no man had gone before – and of course, we will continue to love the sense of adventure conveyed by that voiceover, and to delight in the many good things about the series, including the hope and inclusivity it fostered. But now, it’s also possible to see the wisdom of the old captain’s words that we need to spend as much time looking inwards as outwards, that preserving our pale blue dot – and our own future on it – may be the boldest thing we can do. 

"I'd rather not know" - Kate Hepburn and MJ (and the old Spencer Tracy cottage)

My feelings about Katharine Hepburn shifted a bit over the decades, from adolescent hero-worship to something more cautious (among other things, I feel her long professional and personal association with Spencer Tracy ended up limiting/diminishing her as an actress**), but she is still easily one of my favourite public personalities of the last century. Revisited this book a few days ago - the author, A Scott Berg, was more than 40 years younger than Hepburn but became a close friend of hers in the 1980s.

It’s a strange, rambling book in many ways, and I can see why it was controversial, being published just two weeks after Kate’s death in 2003, and employing a very personal tone while describing conversations and meetings during a time when she was living a reclusive life. But there are many amusing things in it, including a bizarre dinner party in 1984 with Michael Jackson (who wants Kate to introduce him to Greta Garbo). And a long-winded account of Warren Beatty ardently pursuing the 86-year-old Kate to play a small part in his remake of Love Affair/An Affair to Remember.

And many deeply moving passages too. There is one where Berg takes Hepburn around Los Angeles (after her many years being away from the place), down the streets that she once knew very well. Including the house that has replaced the cottage where she once lived with Spencer Tracy.
And then comes this bit: Berg tries to show her his own house for the first time (their previous meetings have only been during his trips to New York). And she is about to go up the stairs to see it, but then decides not to, and says “I’d rather not know that you live somewhere.”

(Some excerpts below.)

** During a recent discussion on my online film group, I expressed my view that if Kate had done more films with Cary Grant and fewer with Tracy, she may well have ended up as a better screen actress overall (and also a less awarded one!). I think David Thomson wrote something similar - that she was often subdued and restrained with Tracy, as if she was over-awed by him.

One reason this feels personal to me is that as an adolescent I had viewed Hepburn as a tremendous proto-feminist figure, the pants-wearing actress doing roles that were ahead of her time etc etc (and conducting herself unconventionally offscreen). Had watched some of the early films like Alice Adams, Little Women, Sylvia Scarlett etc. But then, over the years, as I watched some of her later work, especially the Tracy films, I felt a bit let down by how maudlin and smaller than life she allowed herself to be in his presence. (Naturally, some of this has to do with the nature of the roles they were playing, and the requirements of the films – but that wasn’t all there was to it.)
I’ll never let go of my Hepburn super-fandom, but eventually I came to find actresses like Barbara Stanwyck and Carole Lombard and Miriam Hopkins more interesting.  

P.S. a very old post here, mentioning Garson Kanin's book about Hepburn and Tracy.

Ray Bradbury, an automated house in 2026, and Hemingway's parrot

Here's something I should have remembered to post on August 4. Earlier this year I bought an Everyman’s Library edition of a Ray Bradbury short-story collection, and came across his plaintive 1950 story “There Will Come Soft Rains”, which I knew of but hadn’t read before. And discovered that it is set on a single day in the (then) distant future – August 4, 2026. The premise: in the aftermath of nuclear holocaust, an automated house continues to busily go about its daily routine - making breakfast, cleaning up, offering reminders - even though its flesh-and-blood occupants no longer exist. (Alexa, don’t mind us - we are all dead.)

On a much lighter note, another story I enjoyed was “The Parrot Who Met Papa”, about a parrot who hung out with Ernest Hemingway and is consequently worth a great deal to literature connoisseurs as well as blackmailers - since this chatty bird is capable of repeating confidential information about Hemingway’s friends and associates. Funny, irreverent, but also an affectionate homage – and it has a sweet little nod to Edgar Allan Poe at the very end. 

A couple of excerpts from both stories below…

Some love for Ohh My Dog

It was interesting to see a poster for Amit Rai’s new film Ohh My Dog on a wall just across the road from my flat, near the Malviya Nagar metro station. I have never seen this space used for such promotions – wonder if it has anything to do with the good work done by Stray Buddy across Saket (and other colonies).

I am not usually keen to watch dog films (for too many reasons to get into here), but I went for Ohh My Dog and liked it a great deal. For the first two-thirds or so, anyway. The cross-cutting between stories (one about a boy searching for a lost dog, the other about a dog leading the search for a lost boy) was well done and moving, but I thought the film became protracted and too expository in the last stretch (with an overlong semi-comedic track involving Pawan Malhotra and a precocious kid). Also, at some point, it turned the main dog Oscar into a super-hero, which didn’t quite work for me.

But there are many good things overall in this very well-intentioned film (good intentions aren’t normally a big criterion for me as a viewer, and as readers might have gathered I tend to be suspicious of virtuous/affirmative cinema and the discourses around it; but I’m happy to make an exception for a film that champions street dogs). Also there was a nifty little performance by Pankaj Tripathi, whom I hadn’t much liked in the last 2-3 things I saw him in. He and Sulakhyana Baruah play two teachers who diligently aid the rescue efforts (in the two separate stories which never intersect) – their reassuring presence being an important counterpoint to the film’s depiction of cops, which isn’t complimentary.

P.S. a small thing that struck me as being off in the opening scene – a nice, sentimental scene where a deceased service dog is being given state honours. There are three other (living) dogs, standing in attendance, and when the loud gunshots begin as part of the tribute, there is no reaction from them – no flinching, nothing. Maybe I’m over-triggered by my horrendous Diwali experiences with street dogs, but I couldn’t help flinching myself in anticipation at those sounds.
(Much later in the film, there is also a scene where loud firecrackers are flung out of a car with the intention of disorienting a dog – but again, the canine’s reaction seemed too placid to me.)

P.P.S. I had heard beforehand that this "small" film is gaining attention through word of mouth, but it was still very nice to see firsthand that the hall was packed - and the audience, though I didn't get the impression it was made up of dog-obsessives, was receptive and sympathetic.

Short take: One, Two, Three

As a big James Cagney fan, I can’t believe it took me so long to get around to One, Two, Three – a crazy, breathless political comedy that is everything you might expect from the only ever collaboration between Cagney and Billy Wilder. This story about a middle-aged Coca-Cola executive in West Berlin – and a ditzy 17-year-old girl in his charge who crosses the border and falls in love with an East German Commie – is chockful of verbal digs at Capitalism and Communism, and everything in between. And Cagney, even in his sixties, is that tremendous force of nature – rat-a-tatting his way through the Wilder-IAL Diamond screenplay, and probably making those two writers feel slow for the only time in their careers. (No one in any Wilder film has tossed off so many lines so quickly. This is stuff to equal the best of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. And some of the situations are as deadpan-absurd and chaotic as the ones in another Grant-starrer, Arsenic and Old Lace.)

Of added interest: here you see Horst Buchholz, who played Nathuram Godse on screen two years later (in Nine Hours to Rama), as the fiery young America-loathing Otto.

Also, Cagney pays tribute to one of his most famous scenes from 30 years earlier – the grapefruit-smashing in The Public Enemy.

P.S. those two commas in the film’s title feel like a sly joke – this film’s script plays like it is from a universe where commas never existed and can only cause unnecessary trouble. 

Shades of nostalgia, from 1920s Minions to 1980s henchmen

(from my Economic Times column. Don't miss my profile illustration, further down in the post – I'm quite chuffed with it)
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Sometime last month I was sitting in a fancy auditorium watching what, in common parlance, is a “children’s movie” – with more than a dozen kids (and a few adults) at a birthday screening for my nine-year-old. It was an animated feature, wonderfully imagined and realised, and perfectly suited to the 3D format we watched it in. Laughs and titters emanated from the seats around me. And yet I’m certain that I appreciated Minions & Monsters more than any of the younglings in the room.

Because apart from being perfectly enjoyable on its own terms, this film is also a reverential, homage-drenched fever dream for anyone who loves deep cinema history. The plot has the squawking yellow Minions stumbling onto a movie shoot in silent-era Hollywood, getting employed in films, and having to negotiate the transition to the sound era – and this is rich ground for many cinematic references.

I was spellbound by the opening moments, where the present-day Universal Pictures logo transforms – in reverse chronology – into its earlier iterations, bright colour yielding to grainy black and white. After which we get vignettes ranging from Eardweard Muybridge’s 1870s series “The Horse in Motion” (which heralded the “motion pictures” we know) to the Lumiere Brothers’s train arriving at a station. And the legendary “moon gets it in the eye” shot from Georges Melies’s 1903 film Le Voyage dans la Lune (with a Minion-face in place of the Moon-face).

A kid in the hall made whimpering sounds as all this happened: “I hope this won’t be a black and white film!” he said. If this plebeian wretch had been sitting next to me, I would have emptied a sack of hot buttery popcorn over his head, but I ignored him, much as I have done undergrad students who say monochrome makes their eyes hurt.

Meanwhile, onscreen, there were recreations of classic scenes featuring Chaplin, Keaton and Harold Lloyd: from Steamboat Bill Jr, Safety Last, Modern Times. And later, films like The Maltese Falcon, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Citizen Kane (with a Minion as the dying Kane in the opening scene, saying everything but the required “Rosebud”).

Watching all this as someone who fell in love with early cinema as an adolescent, it was magic. If this movie had come out when I was teaching a film-history course a few years ago, I would have shown these scenes alongside the originals.

For many grown-ups, watching a good (contemporary) animated film is like a time-machine ride to a past when they loved such movies without filters, without the terrible burden of being an indulgent “adult” (or having to perform adultness, for themselves or for others). Minions & Monsters gave me that sensation (a memory of being rapt by the 1960s version of The Jungle Book, for instance) as well as a different form of nostalgia – "Anemoia", a wistful yearning for a time and place that one never actually knew firsthand (in this case, early Hollywood at the dawn of movie-making).

But a month ago I also experienced a nostalgia that had to do with my training in mainstream Hindi films as a child. And again, it involved a henchman. If the Minions universe gets laughs from its audacious premise – cute little yellow creatures who end up serving the most evil masters they can find – 1980s Hindi cinema was populated by sidekicks who stood by, drinks in hand, smirking at every booming proclamation made by Amrish Puri or Kader Khan, leering at the heroines as they performed the climactic dance number (before the heroes showed up to save the day).

Those films were my pop-cultural wellsprings, and so it was gratifying to encounter Dan Dhanoa – who was one of those minions in beloved films like Tridev and Zalzala – in Chandigarh. “Captain Dan”, as he is widely known, runs a homestay called Anchorage42, a warm space filled with photos from his stint in films.

Walking through this shrine was as exciting for me as those Old Hollywood scenes in Minions & Monsters had been. But there was nothing silent-movie-ish about this experience. For days afterwards, I watched song sequences like “Gajar ne kiya hai ishaara” – with Dan and other rogues jiggling along in the background – on loop. Oye Oye, went my cinephile heart.

Ways of seeing, and not seeing: on Shoma Chatterji's The Male Gaze Redefined

(Wrote a version of this review for The Hindu's Sunday paper)

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A book reviewer – or a film reviewer – often falls into the trap of judging a work by pre-set notions of what it ought to be, fixating on exclusions rather than what it contains. This is something any serious critic should be mindful of. Yet I must confess that some of my reservations about Shoma Chatterji’s The Male Gaze Redefined are along those lines.

Subtitled “Through Mother India and Other Classics of Indian Cinema”, this book examines the works of nine major male directors in terms of the attitudes to women revealed in their films (spanning several decades). To elucidate her points about ways of looking and depicting, Chatterji also discusses – and occasionally argues with – Western film theory by Laura Mulvey and others.

This is an unquestionably worthy project, and Chatterji, like any writer, is free to choose her area of study and to stay within its limits. In actual practice, though, things get trickier, because here is a freshly published book – not a reprint or a revised edition – which makes many broad-based statements about Indian cinema, and doesn’t define itself as dealing only with distant history. That being the case, one might raise an eyebrow at the datedness of some of its content.

For instance: right at the end of a generally insightful chapter touching on idealised goddess representations of women, as well as the suppressing of the voices of flesh-and-blood female characters, comes an observation about trends changing for the better. “The final note comes from two young directors,” writes Chatterji, “[whose films] speak of women, and for women, in a language we all understand but are afraid to speak.”

Who are these “young directors”? One is Mahesh Manjrekar, now aged 68, and the other is Rituparno Ghosh, who passed away 13 years ago.

In fairness, the chapter containing this assertion does specify a timeline of “1935 to 2000” for its study. But in all other respects, The Male Gaze Redefined asks to be assessed as a 2026 publication, and there is a randomness in what it chooses to include or leave out. In one sub-section about political films, Chatterji refers to recent works such as Indu Sarkar (2017) and Thalaivi (2021). Shyam Benegal’s Zubaida (2001) is one of the films selected for close study. But otherwise the 21st century rarely impinges on this canvas. Some passages feel like they were excerpted from papers written decades ago. The Mother India analysis cites a couple of later films that attempted to follow in the tracks of Nargis’s iconic role as Radha – but even here the films mentioned (two Smita Patil-starrers) are from the 1980s. A section titled “Silent Submission in Some Contemporary Films” boldly ventures to the mid-1990s (Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge), but no further.

This created a conflict for me as a reader. As someone whose most intense engagement has been with very old films, made decades before he was born, I can relate to and appreciate Chatterji’s study of classics. But even a reader who is invested in deep film history (neglected or treated patronisingly at a time when so much current “content” is always vying for our attention) may be perplexed about this book’s unwillingness to engage with more recent developments in feminist (or pseudo-feminist) cinema.

Timelines aside, there are other exclusions. In a work that makes generalisations about “Indian cinema” (and even observes that some Western pedagogy may not be applicable to our filmic culture), the focus is almost exclusively on Hindi and Bengali films – with only a few quick notes at the very end about directors like Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Jabbar Patel and Girish Kasaravalli.

Further, Chatterji’s main engagement is with a certain type of cinema: the filmmakers discussed are largely auteurs who come from relatively progressive, modern backgrounds (e.g. Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen) or those who worked in what is called parallel/art or Middle cinema (Benegal, Gulzar). These are directors who can be seen as essentially sympathetic to and interested in their women characters – even if there are some inevitable blind spots in their work, since they are to varying degrees affected by patriarchal conditioning.

Notwithstanding the inclusion of Vijay Anand’s Guide (and observations about his other big-budget work, such as Jewel Thief and Teesri Manzil), there is not much effort here to discuss the many ways in which “male lens” cinema operates within the truly popular or mainstream. Or to engage with the more openly or unapologetically “male” directors. A case can be made that a comprehensive analysis of this subject would have to consider the myriad ways in which women have been depicted in commercial films too – especially since these films, more than self-consciously “serious” cinema, are open to many conflicting readings. Internationally, for instance, there have been many cases of filmmakers who have been widely dismissed as objectifying women, but whose work is subsequently reassessed in other terms. Camille Paglia – always a deeply divisive figure herself in feminist studies – responded with both verve and nuance to allegations that Alfred Hitchcock was a misogynist. Brian De Palma, often derided for sleazy content in his films, has been passionately defended by women critics such as Stephanie Zacharek or Pauline Kael. Closer home, writers like Paromita Vohra and Madhavi Menon have offered layered analyses of aspects of the work of, say, Sanjay Leela Bhansali or Karan Johar, which have by and large been treated with derision by other liberal commentators. 

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How best, then, to approach The Male Gaze Redefined? By reading the individual essays on specific films, entirely on their own terms – without bothering much about the larger picture. Seen this way, the book contains some thoughtful analysis and attention to detail, as you’d expect from a scholar of Chatterji’s standing. Writing about Mehboob Khan’s Mother India, she compares it with his earlier treatment of the same story, Aurat (1940), noting that the older film treats the protagonist Radha’s story in more personal terms while the later one, made a decade after Independence, places on her the additional burden of being a symbolic village-mother and nation-mother. Elsewhere, she looks at the treatment of women characters by the Bengali masters Ritwik Ghatak and Satyajit Ray, with an emphasis on the “cannibalising” of the hard-working Nita in Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara by her own family (all of whom are, in their own ways, also victims of circumstance), or Ray’s treatment of the friendship between Arati, the protagonist of Mahanagar, and her Anglo-Indian colleague Edith who can be seen as a victim of racism in reverse (at the hands of a male boss).

As she has done in her earlier work, including The Woman at the Window, Chatterji writes about objects as signifiers and markers: a scarf in Zubeida, a lipstick in Mahanagar. She celebrates the revitalising power of Waheeda Rehman’s great snake dance at a pivotal point in Guide, and remarks on the ambivalence that a viewer may feel about the attitudes of the guide Raju, played by Dev Anand. And she raises interesting questions, allowing them to hang in the air: does Mother India’s heroine, for all her framing as an inspirational figure, really have any agency when it comes to the important things (including the killing of her own errant son)? What is the purpose – and what conflicting feelings might it evoke in a viewer – of the very brief close-ups of “the naked breast of a nursing woman” in Nabyendu Chatterjee’s Parasuramer Kuthar (1989)?

Inevitably, with a work like this, a reader’s interest will vary based on his familiarity with the films being discussed. Having re-watched Meghe Dhaka Tara, Guide and Mahanagar recently (all on big screens in excellent prints), I was better equipped to appreciate the segments on those films. On the other hand, not having seen Budhadeb Dasgupta’s Andhi Gali, reading that section was an abstracted process (though Chatterji’s observations made me keen to seek the film out).

As for the writing itself, some of it is dry and repetitive. In one passage, listing the different layers of meaning carried by Radha’s kangans (bangles) in Mother India, the author says exactly the same thing in points one and two: “First, they symbolize her uncertain marital status” followed by “Second, she does not know whether she is married, widowed, or a deserted wife; the kangans are a sign of this flux”. There are other examples of such tautology, a problem that has long afflicted much cinema writing in India (in both the academic and general spheres).

Regardless of my overall reservations, though, one thing I appreciated here is Chatterji’s open-endedness and handling of complexity. At one point she suggests that though writer-director Gulzar is sensitive to his women characters, and careful not to subject them to an objectifying gaze even when the narrative might offer such opportunities, he does also seem conservative about the idea of the working woman or the woman in a position of power. That these contrary impulses exist in all artists, and often create conflicting energies in a film – this is something that Chatterji, unlike many other analysts, is attentive to. And that attitude is important when it comes to a subject as contentious and polarising as gender politics in cinema. You can disagree with some of her analyses while also appreciating the seriousness that lies behind them.

A shout-out for The Poisoned Chocolates Case (Anthony Berkeley, 1929)

Most of my fiction reading in the past 3-4 months has been in the form of short stories, but I returned to a full-fledged crime novel (Golden Age, naturally) after a while, and it was a very good choice – Anthony Berkeley’s The Poisoned Chocolates Case, which had been high on my to-read pile.

“In the pantheon of detective fiction, there is nothing quite like [this book],” writes Martin Edwards in his Introduction (this is in the British Library Crime Classics edition), and while that’s the sort of claim one takes with a pinch of salt, I think it can reasonably be made here – especially when you consider that The Poisoned Chocolates Case was written nearly a hundred years ago. This book manages to be a cosy, drawing-room mystery typical of the period (with an easy-to-follow crime and a limited cast of characters) *but is also* a meta-novel that examines and comments on the process of detection and what it might reveal about the person(s) doing the mystery-solving.

This is ingrained in the playful, self-reflexive structure: six members of the Crimes Circle, a group of amateur detectives, apply themselves to the task of solving a real-life mystery, a fatal poisoning, that has lately baffled the police. The salient facts of the case are laid out for them (and for us readers) in the first couple of chapters, then lots are drawn to decide the order in which the members will present their case. The chapters that follow give us the (usually self-important) disquisitions of each member in turn, the method for arriving at their pet solution, the solution itself (with the murderer’s identity often dramatically concealed for as long as possible)… and then the wind is taken out of the speaker’s sails by a counter-point or two showing flaws in the deduction.

For me, the book – though engrossing all the way through – really picked up steam around the halfway mark. The first two or three solutions, though well-thought-out (and interspersed with some entertaining banter amongst the rival characters), also felt a little long-winded in the telling, perhaps because of the personalities involved: the first “detective” to speak is a pedantic barrister, the second is a lady playwright much concerned with the Eternal Triangle as a dramatic trope. But around the time that Roger Sheringham (president of the Crimes Circle, and one of Anthony Berkeley’s regular sleuths) begins his own investigation – which involves a certain degree of legwork – things get more interesting; and even more so when Sheringham’s proposed solution (which is the one I had been expecting to see and had vaguely worked out in my own mind) is debunked as well! (This isn’t a spoiler: we know from the start that Sheringham will be the fourth to present his case, meaning that two more solutions are to follow his.)

It’s just about possible that The Poisoned Chocolates Case won’t work too well for some Golden Age readers who want a pure mystery with a single clear-cut solution (minus quasi-academic reflections on inductive and deductive processes) – but there would be very few such readers, in my view. Most mystery buffs should have a very good time with this book’s multiple false solutions, culminating in the sly “real” solution.

Ah, but IS that the real solution after all? By the very nature of this narrative, you feel the deductions could carry on and on (if there had been more than six members in the circle). And as it happens, this British Crime Classics Library edition includes two Epilogues – further solutions provided by other writers many decades after the book was published. The first of these is a short solution, written in 1979 by Christianna Brand, whom I have become a big fan of over the past year. Perhaps because I have very high expectations of her now, I wasn’t bowled over by her contribution (though it has some of her characteristic wicked humour). The second epilogue, very well done I thought, is by Martin Edwards himself – a solution that takes the mystery in a fresh but plausible new direction, *and yet* stays faithful to the tone and the terms of the original novel.

Purists might suggest, though, that you should forget about those two add-ons and just concentrate on the book itself, as it was originally written – in which case you’d have a perfectly satisfying ending (satisfying for the reader, I mean – not so much for the sleuths, who find themselves in a state of limbo at the end). Meanwhile I’m looking forward to reading a few more Berkeleys soon (once I have finished a couple of Brands and Josephine Teys on my list). 

[A few earlier posts on crime fiction are here]

Mango-hunting in Rataul

Scenes from last week's day-trip to nearby Rataul, to visit the mango orchards (with a few friends who were more experienced in this sort of thing than I was). The walk was led by the mighty Sohail Hashmi, who has been doing this for many years, and who cautioned us beforehand that Rataul hadn’t had a good crop this year. This didn’t affect the quality and variety of the mangoes we encountered, though. After a traditional monsoon lunch (it being advisable to not have the mangoes on an empty stomach) at the Salma Public School (proceeds from the walk go here), we dug into the fruit. I hadn’t expected to sample more than two or three mangoes – mainly from the local Anwar Rataul variety – but as ambition and courage grew I ended up having many other types too, including the Gulab Jamun, the Laziz Baksh, the Doodhiya Gola and others whose names have slipped my mind.

We ate them with our hands after peeling the skin off from the top, the best way – and I suspect that having liberated myself thus from the tyranny of cutlery, this is how I will have mangoes at home too from now on; at least the ones that aren’t too big. I also brought back 3 kg of the Anwar Rataul mangoes, which then vanished very fast.

Pics include the start of the trip, on Safdar Hashmi Marg (where my friends Nikhil Kumar and Eshan Sharma diligently helped Sohail keep track of the more than 100 people piling into three coaches). Others encountered included long-time acquaintances Shivam Vij, Amitava Sanyal and the excellently erudite Ambarish Satwik.

P.S. more about Sohail’s Rataul walks (including the rudely named Haramzada mango) in this report.

From Hitchcock to Shyamalan – on logic, plausibility, and the joys of being manipulated

(From my Economic Times column)
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Reading a book about Alfred Hitchcock recently, I saw one of his quotable quotes, a response to viewers who demand plausibility in every scene. “Film should be stronger than logic,” Hitch said.

People who have low tolerance for “escapist” films, or for exciting genres like suspense, horror or fantasy, might see this as an artistic cop-out – a sign that a massy filmmaker is taking the “anything goes if I can provide easy thrills” route, and mounting a cheap defence of his approach. (“My films aren’t slices of life, they are slices of cake,” Hitchcock also glibly said once.)

But for some of us, this makes perfect sense: when we put ourselves in the hands of a director who is in control of his material, we are willing to be “played like an organ” (to cite yet another Hitchcock quote!) in the dark hall. By the way, I’m also waggling my eyebrows now at dull champions of subdued realism who disapprove of lush background music in a film – even if it’s a gorgeous score – because it manipulates their emotions. As if such manipulation hasn’t always been one of the many functions of cinema, or of any art.

These things don’t follow an easily quantifiable pattern, of course – we all have deal-breakers. One of my favourite Hitchcock films is the 1951 Strangers on a Train**, but I am conflicted about its famous climactic scene where the hero and the villain battle on an out-of-control fairground carousel. The first time I watched that scene, I felt an adrenaline rush, but the effect only lasted that one time. On subsequent viewings I have cringed at the shot when a cop fires randomly in the direction of the round-about (which has plenty of people, including children, on it!) and plugs the fairground attendant by mistake – which is what sets the action going. That crazy act took me out of the narrative, and it wasn’t helped by the shaky back-projection that followed.

In recent weeks, though, I had some very good experiences with suspension-of-disbelief movies – including three different types of horror films, each requiring that you submit to a particular improbability. The horror-romance Obsession gives us a new spin on the Monkey’s Paw trope (your biggest wish is granted, in a horribly twisted way), the creepy Hokum offers the possibility of a witch haunting an Irish hotel (in an otherwise realist narrative), and the agoraphobia-inducing Backrooms is about mysterious endless liminal spaces on the other side of a basement wall.

I happily succumbed to these conceits, went along for the ride. But my viewing highlight of last month was by a director many of us are ambivalent about (not least because he is one of “us”, who made a name for himself in Hollywood – and invited some brickbats, amidst scattered successes). Watching M Night Shyamalan’s 2024 thriller Trap alone, on a big home screen, I was riveted despite its loony premise (no spoiler: this is revealed in the first 10 minutes) of a serial-killer-cum-family-man learning that a trap has been set for him at a pop concert where he is accompanying his adolescent daughter.

As is the case with most of Shyamalan’s films, there is some clunky dialogue in Trap, and a case of unbelievably stupid behaviour by a character, in a scene that’s essential for the narrative to proceed. But awareness of these flaws didn’t affect my response to the film. I loved the pacing, the sense of claustrophobia, Josh Hartnett’s performance, the music score by Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka, who also plays the narrative’s pop-star, Lady Raven. And the sly little touches, such as the casting of 80-year-old Hayley Mills – who had played the twins in Parent Trap (1961) – in a story about a trapped parent.

With films that have a kinetic, emotional effect on you while you’re watching them – but which are sketchy in matters of logic or character behaviour – you often feel sheepish later in the cold light of day. But tellingly, I was just as engaged by Trap on a second viewing, and am still thinking about the film after weeks. Emotion overrode rationality, and that’s how it stayed. It’s great when that happens.

(More about Trap here.)

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**The book I mentioned at the start of the piece was about Strangers on a Train too - Criss-Cross, by Stephen Rebello. Rebello’s book about Psycho was another favourite back in the day, and this one is just as detailed, and perhaps even more personal. In his Author’s Note, Rebello mentions watching Strangers on a Train at a time of his own sexual awakening and being fascinated by the Bruno character – coded gay – and how the film views him. This bit reminded me of that great personal essay by Robin Wood in his Hitchcock book, about watching Rope in 1948 as a teenager and identifying with the John Dall character at a time when he was still trying to come to terms with his own homosexuality.

Among other things, this new book has some good stuff about the artistic clashes between Hitch and Raymond Chandler, who was initially hired to do the screenplay. A sample below.

An encounter with Dan the man

Guess who. (Fans of 1980s mainstream Hindi cinema *might* get it.)

 

 

 

 

See pic below for the answer…👇

I had a short but very pleasant Chandigarh stay at (Captain) Dan Dhanoa’s homestay, Anchorage42 – filled with artworks, artefacts from his sailing days, and photos from his stint in the film industry (when he played villain’s henchman in such classics of my childhood as Mard, Tridev, Zalzala, and Vishwatma). Chatted with Captain Dan for 15-20 minutes: he was never really a film-watcher, he said – mainly an army kid who enjoyed horse-riding and sports – but he did form close friendships in Bombay, and spoke about his recently deceased pals Pankaj Dheer and Satish Shah, as well as others: Jackie Shroff, Sham Kaushal. And about the “old girls” whom he still keeps in touch with – including Kimi Katkar, Anita Raaj, and Sangeeta Bijlani.

Also met him briefly at breakfast the next day, where he was chatting with a few other guests his age, and exchanging stories about their boarding schools (including Doon, where Dan went). Just a sweet, bearish man, chuckling gently, worlds removed from the sleazy-rapey bad guys of 1980s cinema. But I did spend the rest of the day with Tridev’s “Gazar ne kiya hai ishaara” playing in my head…. 

Faces and facets (as presented by the bug on Satyajit Ray's windowsill)

(Did this short piece for Reader’s Digest, about the new Nemai Ghosh-Satyajit Ray exhibition. Some photos from my walkthrough last month are here. And here is my "50 Shades of Ray" essay from an earlier DAG catalogue)
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A cliched way of describing the relationship between photographer Nemai Ghosh and legendary filmmaker Satyajit Ray is that the former was a “Boswell” – working with camera rather than pen – to the latter. From their first collaboration in 1968, on the sets of Ray’s classic fantasy Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, a kinship formed: Ray appreciated the shooting stills taken by Ghosh, and for the next twenty-four years Ghosh would devotedly chronicle the life and art of the man he admired so much.

But a more amusing description of their working relationship can be found in the book Faces and Facets: Satyajit Ray in Colour, published by DAG (formerly Delhi Art Gallery) to accompany an ongoing exhibition of Ghosh’s photos. Ray – no doubt with great affection – once said, “Nemai is like a bug on my windowsill.” It’s a droll image that makes sense when you look at these images, which are intimate and expansive at the same time, effortlessly bringing together Ray the person and Ray the multi-talented artist.

Though many of Ghosh’s Ray photos have been displayed before, this exhibition presents a series of carefully restored colour photographs, divided into two broad categories. The first comprises solo images of the maestro in various moods, ranging from pensive to busy to goofy, as well as family photos; the second category centres on the films themselves, capturing behind-the scenes vignettes from such works as Shatranj ke Khiladi, Sonar Kella, Ashani Sanket, Agantuk, and Sadgati.

We see Ray at work, as well as in quotidian situations. Here he is, consulting the rough-bound notebook – or the kheror khata – that he maintained for each film, full of his storyboards, scribbled ideas and stated intentions for each scene. In another photo he is painting, with his own hand, the opening title of Joy Baba Felunath on a Varanasi ghat – a reminder that he wanted to be involved in every possible aspect of his cinema, even making the promotional posters and booklets. There are images with Hindi-film actors such as Sanjeev Kumar, Amjad Khan, Smita Patil and Om Puri, who were among the few Bombay stars who got to work with him. Elsewhere, he rehearses with an orchestra, supervising musical arrangements for a film.

One striking image from the Ghare Bhaire shoot has Ray seated by a river bank, having walked away to be by himself; in his notes, Ghosh said he was like a rishi in meditation here, but this might also be a view of a troubled artist in a predicament, trying to find a solitary space away from the hurly-burly, even as he practised a collaborative art.

There are location photos too, such as a group shot with the great dancer Balasaraswati during a beach shoot in Tamil Nadu for Ray’s documentary Bala – evidence of the director’s admiration for artistes in other fields, including classical music. Or a shoot in Rajasthan with camels in the background, where Ray apparently joked – alluding to his budget constraints – that he had to make do with one camera set-up for an adventure film like this, while someone like Akira Kurosawa would have used nine cameras.

And then there are the more personal photos, including the wedding-anniversary pictures that Ghosh took of Ray and his wife Bijoya over the years – images which Ray was reticent about, asking that they not be published at the time.

Worshipful as Ghosh was towards his subject, much of his work also performs the function of demythologising an artist whose very name can be daunting for some people (especially those who have only grappled with the reputation of “Satyajit Ray” without experiencing his work, which is usually tender and accessible). For instance, in some photos, taken just months before Ray’s death in 1992, we see him at a point when his health was deteriorating fast. One poignant photo has him walking in his verandah to get the exercise he needed because of his health problems – an unusual image, given that most shots of him at home show him at his desk, surrounded by creative tools. To see him older and frailer is to be reminded that everyone slows down, and even the greatest achievers eventually do only a fraction of what they set out to do.

Many film buffs are familiar with the phenomenon of a second-hand “nostalgia” for a place and time that they never actually lived through: certainly, many of us have wondered what it would be like to be a fly on the wall – or a bug on a windowsill! – when Satyajit Ray was in full flow in his study, or on set. These photos give us many iconic moments frozen in time, with much to relish and revisit – not just for the Ray fan but for anyone who worries about the carelessness and neglect that has marked cultural documentation in India.

[The Faces and Facets exhibition is on at DAG, Janpath Road, till July 4]

On M Night Shyamalan’s delicious thriller-musical Trap (and emotional vs logical viewing)

A couple of weeks ago I made the time to go to my (generally neglected) screening room in Panchshila Park for a few evenings, and watch some films by myself – after carefully picking titles from my OTT watchlists that I thought might fit my mood. This worked out quite well – the films watched included Send Help (mentioned in this post), Richard Linklater's Hit Man, A Different Man, and the 1956 adaptation of one of my favourite novels, A Kiss Before Dying. But possibly the most riveting experience for me during this stretch was M Night Shyamalan’s 2024 thriller Trap, with its premise (no spoiler: this is revealed in the first 10-15 minutes) of a serial-killer-cum-family-man learning that a trap has been set for him at a pop concert. Cooper (Josh Hartnett) is accompanying his adolescent daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to the show, the star of which – and the cynosure of teen eyes – is Lady Raven (played by Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka, who wrote and performed the film’s soundtrack). Then things happen to make him feel very paranoid.

What was really unusual (for me) is that I was sucked into the world of Trap within the opening seconds by its music – as the song “Don’t Wanna Be Yours” (one of Saleka’s many compositions) plays over the stylishly designed opening credits. It normally takes me some time, and some re-listening, to appreciate a music track, but the effect was immediate here. And I enjoyed the aural segue at the end of the titles, with young Riley (in the car with her dad on their way to the concert) singing the same number in a shakier, quavering, excited-teen way.

It is silly to assume a film will be great because it begins well, but at this point I was already feeling the familiar, visceral excitement that I have felt with some favourite films by other directors – Brian De Palma being an obvious example – whose tradition Shyamalan sort-of follows in. I had a sixth sense that this was going to go well. And it did.

As I have probably said in earlier write-ups on Shyamalan’s films (especially Unbreakable and Split), even his “flawed” or bordering-on-ludicrous work can be more stimulating (in some ways at least) than the solid, Consistently Good work of many other directors. As is the case with practically all his films, there is some clunky dialogue in Trap, and at least one case of seriously implausible (if not outright stupid) behaviour by a character, in an early scene that’s essential for the narrative to proceed – but even as I was aware of this convenience-device, it didn’t affect my engagement with the film; emotion overrode rationality. I loved the pacing, the sense of claustrophobia, and Josh Hartnett’s performance – the old trope of creating some anxiety for the bad guy by putting us in his shoes is well executed here. For me the film was at its best in the first 50 or so minutes when the setting is the concert, but it maintained the overall momentum, even if the intensity sags for a while in the second half.

I also liked Saleka’s music *a lot*, and thought it worked very well within the story; I don't agree with the criticism that this was purely an ego project or a “concert movie” that Shyamalan made as a showcase for his daughter (presumably at the expense of the narrative).

And, small as Hayley Mills’s role was, it was nice to see her after a long time – witty casting of an actress still perhaps best known for The Parent Trap, in a film about a trapped parent.

Looking it up online, Trap seems to have been a polarising film, which again is usually the case with MNS. But I wasn’t too surprised to see that Cahiers du Cinema (which still has a tradition of bold/off-kilter choices and certain forms of auteur-worship) had it on their top 10 films list for 2024. Also that it was one of Luca Guadagnini’s favourites that year.

Tellingly, I am still thinking in very positive terms about Trap many days later. This was interesting, because with films that have a kinetic, emotional effect on you while you’re watching them – but which are also sketchy in matters of logic or character behaviour – you tend to feel sheepish when thinking about them later in the cold light of day; you dwell more on the implausibilities/plot holes. But that wasn’t the case here – Trap actually grew in stature for me, and I revisited a couple of the more affecting moments, such as a scene where Lady Raven asks her audience to think of someone they need to forgive, and to put their phone lights on if they have “released” them. This leads to a lovely hushed moment where hundreds of lights in the darkened hall go on, while Cooper (who is being a fond dad, saying “Wow” at the right moments to please his little girl, but is obviously also preoccupied) looks around at the transformed setting. Followed by another good, gentle song, “Release”.

(Incidentally, this scene - the visuals, the music, the use of lights in a dim setting - reminded me of the lovely moment in De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise where Jessica Harper sings “Old Souls” in her resonant voice.)

P.S. even Shyamalan’s cameo was bearable this time, not annoying like it sometimes has been in the past.

(Related post: about Shyamalan's Split)