Guru Dutt remembered on birth anniversary - Page 2

C. I. D.

(1956, Hindi, 146m)
Directed by Raj Khosla
Produced by Guru Dutt for Guru Dutt Films Pvt. Ltd.; Screenplay and dialogues: Inder Raj Anand; Music: O. P. Nayyar; Lyrics: Majrooh Sultanpuri; Dances: Zohra Sehgal; Cinematography: V. K. Murthy; Playback Singers: Mohammad Rafi, Geeta Dutt, Shamshad Begum, and Asha Bhosle.
Starring Dev Anand (Shekhar), Shakila (Rekha), Johnny Walker (Master), K.N. Singh (commissioner), Kumkum, and introducing Waheeda Rehman.(Kamini)

(Notes by Corey Creekmur, Institute for Cinema and Culture, University of Iowa)

The Bombay crime thriller C.I.D. (or Criminal Investigation Department, a term used by most of the world's police forces established under colonial rule), though directed by the talented Raj Khosla, was produced by Guru Dutt for his own company, and signals his influence throughout. In many ways the film resembles his own debut as a director, BAAZI ("The Gamble," 1951), an underworld tale that also starred Dev Anand, one of the era's most popular male stars and Bombay's equivalent to contemporary tough guys like France's Jean Gabin or Hollywood's Humphrey Bogart. C.I.D. also provides the Hindi film debut of the stunning Waheeda Rehman, soon one of Bombay cinema's biggest stars, and Guru Dutt's leading lady in his masterpieces PYAASA ("Thirst," 1957) and KAAGAZ KE PHOOL ("Paper Flowers," 1959). Guru Dutt's influence is also evident via comic actor Johnny Walker, a staple of the director's troupe, and through the brilliant cinematography of V. K. Murthy, the essential craftsman of Guru Dutt's gloomy world view (here in their fifth collaboration) whose work should be ranked with Hollywood's John Alton or Mexico's Gabriel Figueroa among cinema's greatest black-and-white cameramen.

C.I.D. was the third film produced by Guru Dutt Films (following AAR PAAR ["Heads or Tails," 1954] and MR. AND MRS. 55 [1955]), and the first major assignment for Guru Dutt's assistant Raj Khosla, whose success with this film would launch a long career. (When C.I.D. proved a hit, Guru Dutt presented Khosla with a Dodge convertible.) In style and theme, however, C.I.D. invokes the work of Navketan, the film production company established in 1949 by Dev Anand and his older brother Chetan. (In 1953 the younger brother Vijay Anand would join the team and eventually direct some of the company's finest films, usually starring his brother Dev.) Navketan had produced BAAZI (reuniting Guru Dutt and Dev Anand, who had begun their careers at Pune's legendary Prabhat Studio), and specialized in thrillers featuring proletarian heroes, such as TAXI DRIVER (1954) and KALA PANI ("Black Water," 1958). Naveketan was consciously translating the influential work of the radical Indian Peoples' Theatre Association (IPTA) into a mass form, and C.I.D.'s screenplay by Inder Raj Anand, also closely associated with the Bombay wing of the IPTA, extends this populist influence on the post-Independence Hindi crime film. (C.I.D.'s "real" villain is not, therefore, the working-class thug it presents unambiguously as a murderer, but the rich and powerful figure who can hire such a character while appearing to keep his own hands clean.)

Like many Navketan productions from the same period, C.I.D. argues for the existence of the unexplored category of popular Hindi "film noir": Bombay filmmakers, it appears, were making films contemporaneously with Hollywood that exhibit many of the thematic concerns and perhaps more of the stylistic devices that French critics would identify through the evocative term noir beginning in the 1950s. In the now substantial body of criticism on the topic, critics have commonly identified European precursors to American film noir – the latter often the product of European immigrant talent – but Asian examples have only been tagged with the label of "neo-noir" along with the more recent U.S. examples indebted to the earlier models. But C.I.D., among other Hindi films, suggests a simultaneous production of what critics now call "historical noir" to identify the original body of work that suggested a common perspective and stylistic practice in post-WWII cinema, even though its own producers had no clear label for what they were then creating. Film noir has always, then, been a retrospective and retroactive category, but so far popular Hindi films from the 1940s and 1950s haven't been collected under the noir net. Films like C.I.D. suggest that a significant component of film noir's international appeal and reach has therefore been overlooked. (The category of neo-noir, which has been more commonly applied to international examples ranging from the films of Hollywood's Quentin Tarantino to Hong Kong's John Woo or Japan's Takashi Miike, might be a useful category through which to explore recent Bombay gangster films like SATYA and COMPANY, or a psychological thriller like ROAD, films which more readily acknowledge their global affiliations and influences.)

The plot of C.I.D. is (unlike the most celebrated American film noir) fairly straightforward: a mysterious series of phone calls authorizes the intimidation and murder of Shrivastav, a crusading newspaper editor who is about to expose a corrupt public figure. His murder is witnessed by Master (Johnny Walker), a petty thief in the wrong place at the wrong time who is suspected of the crime until Inspector Shekhar (Dev Anand) takes over the case and begins his investigation. Shekhar, summoned by Shrivastav, had almost caught the fleeing murderer by commandeering a young woman's car before she tossed the keys out of the window during a storm. Despite this setback, Shrivastav's killer is soon caught and identified by a nervous Master, but Shekhar is warned to stop any further investigation by a mysterious woman (Waheeda Rehman) who has summoned him to her home. After waking up in his boss' home, Shekhar discovers that the petulant young woman whose car he shared is Rekha (Shakila), his superior's daughter. At Rekha's birthday party he again meets the mysterious young woman, now identified as Rekha's longtime friend Kamini, who apparently drugged him after their meeting. Now even more determined to identify the power behind the actual killer, Shekhar continues his search and is cleverly framed for killing his suspect in jail. After a trial finds him guilty, Shekhar runs from the law as well as the criminals until he cracks the case with the unexpected help of Kamini. A final scheme to catch the real villain in the wounded Kamini's hospital room almost goes awry, but the film concludes with tarnished reputations and budding romances restored.

C.I.D. implicitly announces its cosmopolitanism through its emphatic modernity: set in a thoroughly up-to-date Bombay, the film barely hints at the elements of traditional Indian culture that commonly interact with modern life in most Indian films: only the film's first song sequence takes its characters out of the city and offers glimpses of innocent village life. (While the women in the film, unlike the men, appear in more conventional Indian clothing, they are otherwise modern, city girls who drive cars and wield guns.) In its narrative the film relies upon many of the elements of the traditional detective story: an unambiguous hero whose honor will be tested and reclaimed; a melodramatic villain whose house hides secret panels and rooms; a good girl and femme fatale whose charms both vie for the hero's attention; and a cowardly, comic sidekick whose minor crimes are easy to dismiss when his honorable actions and basic goodness reveal themselves. But the film also twists these conventions somewhat toward the more morally ambivalent world of film noir: by clarifying the identity of its villains early on, the film does not function as a conventional "whodunit", but locates its suspense elsewhere: the film suggests that the problem to be solved is less a mystery than a social circuit of corruption that moves down through different classes of society (the film's emphasis on class rather than caste seems to be another of its IPTA-influenced elements). The true villain of C.I.D. is in fact a deviant version of the kind of new Indian citizen who was more often celebrated in films of the progressive, Nehruvian era: a successful capitalist who generously supports social causes and charities. In arranging the murder of a crusading newspaper editor – whose Congress party affiliations are signaled by his clothing – the fat cat, whose influence extends to police officials, will be revealed as a potential cancer in independent India's body politic that must be cut out. (The film also hints at the villain's sexual deviance when we learn that Kamini was taken from an orphanage by him: whether she has been raised as a daughter or kept as a mistress, she has clearly been corrupted by the older man.)

If C.I.D.'s story incorporates some of the differences between traditional detective stories and the hard-boiled variations that inspired film noir, in its visual style the film's affiliation with Hollywood noir is even more evident. Much of the film takes place at night and in deep shadows, and a consistent pattern of framing encloses "trapped" characters within windows and behind bars. A graphic match between the captured murderer being put behind bars and Shekhar's caged parrot acknowledges the film's awareness of such visual metaphors. (In a later scene Kamini also employs the parrot for equally playful verbal metaphors, wordplay our hero is a bit slow to pick up on.)

Once Shekhar has been "framed" for the murder of his prisoner and (like a Hitchcock hero) is on the run from cops and criminals, Murthy's camera relentlessly confines Dev Anand in frames within frames, a motif commonly celebrated in discussions of the visual style of Hollywood film noir. One of the film's most effective sequences precedes the credits: beginning with an extreme close-up of a telephone – a "common" object in Hollywood films by the 1950s, but still a prop evoking the West and modernity for India – this miracle of modern communication is being misused to harm rather than help the recently connected nation: a series of shots of mysterious figures traces a circuit of cross-class corruption that will lead to murder and the obfuscation of the truth. This opening resembles the famous sequence that starts Fritz Lang's 1953 film noir THE BIG HEAT, which has been described by Colin McArthur (in his 1992 BFI monograph on the film) as "a masterly condensation of film narrative" that relies upon the "linking motif" of the "generic technology" of the telephone to connect the film's main characters across space and social levels. The sequence in C.I.D. functions in exactly the same way, but does not appear to be an imitation of or homage to Lang's film. (It's hard to imagine that Lang's film was seen by the people responsible for C.I.D., since Lang's violent film was released in Great Britain with an X certificate – the most restricted category – in 1953. In any case, the film's status as a "classic" only came later.) Is it time to acknowledge a "masterly condensation of film narrative" in a Bombay film from the 1950s produced three years after Lang's celebrated masterpiece?

Yet while taking on some of the trappings of American film noir (and components of the Hitchcock-type thriller), C.I.D. remains a commercial Hindi film: it can't quite allow its femme fatale to be really bad, and redeems her in the end; it mixes genres more freely than most Hollywood films, happily including a scene where Johnny Walker's hat rises off his head when he spies a pretty girl, or shifting to a chase through a Gothic house towards its hospital-drama conclusion. Those unfamiliar with popular Hindi cinema will wonder, however, if a movie featuring six song sequences wouldn't more accurately be called a musical (a genre category that seems redundant or misleading for India's song-suffused popular cinemas). It's easy to forget that even the toughest American film noir often features at least one song, usually performed in a night club, sometimes by a popular singer in a cameo role, and films like GUYS AND DOLLS, WEST SIDE STORY, and CHICAGO all attest to a regular fusing of crime stories and the musical. C.I.D. especially suggests Guru Dutt's hand in its song sequences, since his creativity in this area – which can easily become formulaic – remains one of his singular contributions to Hindi cinema. What at first glance can appear to be fairly irrelevant insertions into the narrative are in fact a carefully arranged sequence which grounds the film in a meaningful pattern of circles, many of which challenge the circle of crime depicted in the opening sequence. The first song, "Booj mera kya naam re …," performed outdoors by a village girl is, again, the film's only glimpse of traditional India. As a playful song about a woman who asks a man to guess her name, the song contrasts with the film's final song, performed indoors by the film's mysterious city girl, who sings in order to distract the villain and communicate to the hero. (A close-up of Waheeda Rehman's face when she drops and then restores her smiling faade demonstrates her subtle acting skills at this early stage in her career.) Another circular pattern is built up across the three song sequences that develop Shekhar and Rekha as a couple: "Leke pehla pehla pyar …" ("With my first love…") is sung by a male and female street performer whom Shekhar pays to "eve-tease" Rekha. The female singer literally encircles Rekha three times, and is filmed repeatedly in a series of circular panning shots as she whirls around her prey. Rekha does not yet recognize that, like the murderer, she too has been caught by Shekhar's relentless pursuit. When the couple alone perform "Ankhon hi Ankhon me …" ("In just an exchange of glances …") they circle one another willingly and exchange positions as they song's lyrics play with images of "secret" lovers who "steal" one another's hearts: by this point in the film, love and police work follow similar paths of progressive encircling until someone gets caught.

Most creatively of all, the once flirtatious love song "Leke pehla pehla pyar…" is reprised as a tormenting number that moves in and out of Rekha's fevered mind: she's now encircled, not by annoying outsiders, but by her own conflicted emotions as the song literally moves in and out of her body. (This reprisal anticipates, for instance, the later contrasts between the "happy" and "sad" versions of "Yeh dosti hum nahin…" from SHOLAY , or the "female" and "male" renditions of "Choli ke Peeche" in KHAL NAYAK.) The song, we might say, circles back and reverses its mood and purpose. The four songs that intensify Rekha's and Shehkar's romance narrow from a half-dozen to four to two and finally a single divided participant; yet like the overall narrative which itself comes full circle, returning Shekhar to his official position and honor, the film's love story and careful sequence of songs challenge the crime story's negative circuit of corruption by offering a series of positive and more seductive loops.

Eventually, however, although filmed along Bombay's sunny oceanfront drives, it's Johnny Walker's famously ironic "Aye dil hai mushkil jeena yahan…" ("Dear heart, it's difficult to live out here …") with its refrain "yeh hai Bombay meri jaan" ("This is Bombay, my dear…") that seems most evocative of a noir sensibility insofar as it is an affectionate but ambivalent tribute to the dirty, dangerous city in which slitting people's throats is called "business" (the lyric supplies the unsavory English word). Like a notable strain of American film noir, the sequence balances its stylization with a documentary impulse when we are shown shots of Bombay landmarks while a movie comedian cavorts through actual city streets. The children who follow him (and the camera) along Bombay's Marine Drive also blur the line between this film's status as a fantasy set in India in 1956, and as a document recording Indian modernity in that same year.

Ah! death, did one say? Well, they say, he who remembers death, remembers God; but what of the man who longs for death? Guru Dutt was one such man, mysterious, enigmatic... Nasreen Munni Kabir has just walked down the anonymity lane.

GURU DUTT: The Man who could not digest FAILURE


"He couldn't digest failure," says close friend and one-time confidant, Dev Anand.

"He was engulfed by depression because he always felt he wasn't able to give enough to his relationships and to his films," says Nadira, once his neighbour and friend.

An air of loss and mystery continues to shroud the talented but troubled Guru Dutt's premature death in 1964 --- he was 39 when he died. A keen look at the director's classics shows a recurring appearance of a death wish.

Even if one were to desist from reading too deeply between the frames, one conclusion leaps to the eye. Dutt's films are a testimonial to the popular belief: great art comes from great suffering.

Famous songs picturised on Guru Dutt
Song Film Singer
Sun sun sun
sun zalima Aar Paar Mohammed
Rafi
Udhar tum
haseen ho Mr And Mrs 55 Mohammed Rafi
Jaane woh kaise
log the Pyaasa Hemant Kumar
Dekhi zamane
ki yari Kagaz Ke Phool Mohammed Rafi
Chaudhvi ka
chaand ho Chaudhvi Ka Chaand Mohammed Rafi

Guru Dutta Padukone's childhood would have confounded Freud --- there were no signs of a tortured soul. Born on July 9, 1925, near Banglore, to erudite, middle-class parents, Guru Dutt was enamoured by dancing. After a stint at Uday Shankar's Dance Academy in Almora, Guru Dutt wired home to say he had got the job of a telephone operator in Kolkata. But he disengaged himself from the job soon and bagged his first film assignment as choreographer, in Lakhrani (1945).

The second half of the Forties were a period of struggle. Dutt played a small role in Prabhat's Hum Ek Hain (1946) which brought him in close contact with fellow newcomer Dev Anand. Dev and Guru Dutt double dated, swapped shirts, and also shared a pact: if Dev ever produced a film, Guru Dutt would direct it. If Guru Dutt ever made a film, Dev would star in it. Dev made it first and gave Guru Dutt the promised break as director with Navketan's Baazi (1951).

Baazi [Dev Anand, Kalpana Karthik and Geeta Bali] had shades of the Film Noir movement of Forties' Hollywood --- the morally ambiguous hero, the transgressing siren, shadowy lighting. Baazi created a major buzz and Dutt followed it with a more noirish thriller Jaal (with Geeta Bali trying hard to resist bad boy Dev's illicit charms).

The director graduated to hero opposite Geeta Bali in Baaz (1953), an eminently forgettable fare. On a brighter note, he married singer Geeta Roy in the same year. Geeta sang some unforgettable songs in his films for years to come.

Guru Dutt's breakthrough as actor-producer-director came with Aar Paar (1954). This entertaining crime thriller was a gutsy venture with a music director (O P Nayaar) who had yet to give a hit film and two heroines who were hardly major stars (Shyama and Shakila).

Interestingly, one running theme in most of his films was the other woman. In Baazi, Kalpana was the conventional heroine and Geeta Bali the moll in love with Dev. In Aar Paar, Shyama was the one he loves while Shakila was the second lead. Shakila was promoted to heroine in C I D while newcomer Waheeda played the vamp. Pyaasa starred both Mala Sinha and Waheeda Rehman.

By a strange coincidence, Waheeda and more profound concerns entered Dutt's films with Pyaasa (1957). This sombre, nihilistic film was a marked departure from Dutt's light-hearted romantic entertainer Mr And Mrs 55 (1955). Pyaasa (which Dutt had originally planned with the heart-stopping combination of Dilip Kumar-Nargis-Madhubala) was about a poet betrayed by his lover, disowned by his brother and short-changed by his publisher. In the finale, the poet forsakes all of them and fame, seeking solace in the arms of a social outcaste, the streetwalker Gulab (Waheeda Rehman).

Replete with symbols, Pyaasa lamented the inability of a prosecuting world to understand the purity of a genuine soul. In the Sahir Ludhianvi gem, Yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaye to kya hai, Dutt posed as though at a crucifixion. Those who missed Dutt's obvious allusions to the Son of God were still enraptured by Dutt's engrossing storytelling, his flair for song picturisations and his inherent ability to extract the best from four talented actors --- Waheeda Rehman, Mala Sinha, Rehman and Dutt himself.

After its success, Guru Dutt braved one more film on the transient nature of stardom and fame, Kagaz Ke Phool. With V K Murthy's still-admired cinematography, Dutt created some unforgettable visuals in the film: the image of filmstar Waheeda running after her mentor Dutt only to be held back by autograph hunters still finds an echo in films like Hum.

Kagaz Ke Phool won raves for Dutt but set him back by Rs 17 lakh --- a huge sum those days. Dutt produced a Muslim social Chaudhvi Ka Chaand (1960) with an eye on the box office. The title song became a rage and the film filled Dutt's coffers.

Devastated and disillusioned by Kagaz Ke Phool's failure, Dutt never signed a film with his name again. His next was the wonderfully atmospheric Sahib Biwi Aur Ghulam (1962). To date, the controversy rages on: did Guru Dutt ghost direct the film or did Abrar Alvi, whose name appears as director in the credits, really call the shots?

Set in a crumbling 19th century haveli, symbolic of the slow decay of feudalism, the film told the tale of the lovely yet unloved chhoti bahu (Meena Kumari). Spurned by her husband yet desperately in love with him, she seeks support from her ghulam, Bhootnath (Guru Dutt), and increasingly from alcohol.

Sahib Biwi Aur Ghulam couldn't stop Dutt's life from falling apart: his parting with Waheeda when she sought to establish her own identity outside his films hurt Dutt. A last ditch effort to reunite with estranged wife Geeta also failed.

Dutt was addicted to paan (he had an ornate spitoon at his Peddar Road house in Mumbai), also began drowning his woes in alcohol. A few days before he died on October 10, 1964, Dutt met Dev, expressing a desire to cast him in his next film. Dev agreed, and asked to hear the script. Dutt, now a pale shadow of himself, didn't return, succumbing instead to an overdose of sleeping pills.

Picnic with upcoming star Sadhana remained incomplete. As did K Asif's Love And God costarring Nimmi (Sanjeev Kumar replaced Dutt and it was released two decades later). Brother Atma Ram completed Dutt's own venture Baharein Phir Bhi Aayengi (with Mala Sinha and Tanuja), after reshooting Dutt's portions with Dharmendra.

If only Dutt had heeded the life-affirming title song from Baharein Phir Bhi Aaayegi: Badal jaaye agar mali, chaman hota nahi khali [Even if the gardener changes, the garden will not stop sprouting flowers].

Guru Dutt's Landmark Films
Year Film Cast
1951 Baazi (Director) Dev Anand, Kalpana Karthik,
Geeta Bali
1954 Aar Paar (Actor, Director, Producer) Guru Dutt, Shyama
1955 Mr And Mrs 55 (Actor, Director, Producer) Guru Dutt, Madhubala
1957 Pyaasa (Actor, Director, Producer) Guru Dutt, Mala Sinha,
Waheeda Rehman
1959 Kagaz Ke Phool (Actor, Director, Producer) Guru Dutt, Waheeda Rehman
1960 Chaudhvi Ka Chaand (Actor, Producer) Guru Dutt, Waheeda Rehman
1962 Sahib Biwi Aur Ghulam (Actor, Producer) Meena Kumari, Rehman,
Waheeda Rehman,
Guru Dutt