C.I.D. Raju (India, 1971)

C.I.D. Raju confounded my efforts to understand it without subtitles by featuring a male cast that was, to a man, made up of dark haired men with mustaches, heavily painted eyebrows and powdered faces. Their characters would have been no less indistinguishable to me had they been played by members of the Blue Man Group. C.I.D. Raju also confounded my efforts to understand it without subtitles by being as crazy as a bonobo in heat.

If the above description does not already scream “Telugu film” to you, let me also say that C.I.D. Raju raises high expectations by having been made in the same year as the sublime James Bond 777 and by sharing some of that film’s key talent both behind and in front of the camera. Chief among these is director K.S.R. Doss, whose unique aesthetic would be obvious even without his prominent billing in the credits:

Holding this film up to James Bond 777 may seem unfair, but the truth is that it acquits itself quite well, if to a large extent by means of compensation. It does not, for instance, have a trio of dog assassins (though there is a hero German Shepherd named Sabu) or dueling Jyothi Laxmis, but in place of those things it gives us more than we might expect. Here Doss has taken the secret agent trappings of JB777 and combined them with those of an “old dark house” thriller along with the mad science of an old Universal horror picture. Yes, there are monsters.

Our story begins with the escape from prison of one of the aforementioned mustached and powdered gentlemen, who, it turns out, is one of the bad mustached and powdered gentlemen, as opposed to the many also mustached and powdered gentlemen who make up the city’s easily baffled police force. This crumb bum wastes no time in reuniting with his old gang, who, despite the film’s contemporary urban milieu, all dress in cowboy outfits—probably because this is a K.S.R. Doss film. It soon follows that the hoods kidnap a scientist, Dr. Ramesh, whom they torture into revealing the secret of his newly developed paralyzing serum. They then set to kidnapping a series of pretty college girls whom they drag back to their underground lair for purposes unknown to me. It is at this point that the baffled C.I.D. calls in Agent Raju, who comes wheeling onto the scene on his motorcycle to the accompaniment of peppy surf guitar.

Of all the kabuki-esque mustache farmers on display in C.I.D. Raju, you’d think that one would be the ubiquitous Superstar Krishna, who was apparently exercising his omnipresence elsewhere at the time. Instead, Agent Raju is played by a younger, though no less dolled up, actor whose name I am unsure of. This is of little matter, though, because, not long after he is introduced, Raju disappears from the film for the better part of an hour, leaving his sidekick to take on most of the heavy lifting. Also on hand to pick up the slack is 4DK favorite Vijaya Lalitha playing Lita, who is, I believe, the daughter of the local magistrate. Many attempts on Lita’s life are made by the gang, all of which allow the scrappy Lalitha to demonstrate her fondness for flying scissor holds.

Oh, and don’t think you’re going to get out of this movie without seeing an item number from Jyothi Laxmi.

Which brings us to C.I.D. Raju’s supernatural content. As all of the above described action takes place, we learn that the cowboy gang’s lair, while equipped with all the standard sliding doors and hidden chambers, is also infested with spooks, chief among them a fanged brute with Reggie Watts hair and one bulging eye. There is also a scene in which one of the gang confronts one of the girl captives, who reveals herself to be a witch with long, Wolverine-like talons (a side effect, perhaps, of Dr. Ramesh's serum?). Each of these sequences is followed by that old haunted house movie chestnut in which the only person to see the monster is later embarrassed when he/she brings a posse of disbelievers back to the spot of the sighting, only to find that the monster has moved on. Wah-wahhhh.

The film’s spookiness peaks when Lita—after being, by all appearances, successfully killed by the gang--returns as a vengeful ghost. This leads to a sequence in which a squadron of police officers watch in astonishment from an adjoining rooftop as Lita, singing a mournful tune, repeatedly explodes into a cloud of white phosphorous before reappearing. It is a truly dreamlike moment, one that speaks well of Doss’s skills as a filmmaker and visual stylist. It is also commendably free of panty shots.

It also speaks well of Doss’s skills as a filmmaker that C.I.D. Raju is a very entertaining film, even when watched by someone who has no idea at all what is supposed to be going on it it. Those scant moments in which there is no chase, fistfight, hip swiveling item girl, or monster reliably contain some quirk of fashion or mid-century interior design that is equally compelling. Notable among these visual bonbons are the gang’s chain smoking, plaid skirt wearing gunmoll and the odd, ceramic baby statue that adorns the Magistrate’s coffee table. This is not to mention the grating comic relief turn by Raja Babu, whose every bit of shrill physical business is accompanied by weird sci-fi sound effects, because, well, we are never to mention that, ever.

C.I.D. Raju ends, as is traditional, with an all-hands-on-deck dust-up involving every member of the cast that is filled with kung fu and gun violence. As much as you might decry its predictability, I think that, were the cast to instead join hands and sing us out to “Kumbaya”, we would find ourselves left with a profound emptiness. Such meatheaded spectacle is exactly what K.S.R. Doss was brought into this world to provide. In return, we can offer him only a drunken mind and a complete annihilation of disbelief.

Revolver Rani (India, 1971)

Only the most enfeebled among you will be surprised to learn that contemporary relevance has nothing to do with why I choose to review a film on 4DK. Nonetheless, it is always interesting when some far flung obscurity that I’ve set my sights on turns out to have some. In the case of the 1971 Telegu actioner Revolver Rani, that relevance comes from the fact that current Bollywood “it” girl Kangana Ranaut has chosen to star in a satirical remake of it as her follow up to this year's widely praised Queen.

Those who are familiar with Telegu action films of Revolver Rani’s particular bent -- we’ll call them “vengeful cowgirl” movies -- know that they are ripe for satire. Yet satire, at its best, needs a target that is earnest in intent, and Revolver Rani leaves a lot of doubt as to just how seriously it takes itself. For instance, there is its title sequence, a riot of proto-South Park cut out animation that sees a rapidly spinning Vijaya Lalitha picking off baddies like tin ducks in a carnival shooting range. It’s funny, but also captures perfectly the feel of these movies: antic, breathlessly hyperbolic, and more than a little spastic.

And speaking of Vijaya Lalitha, a warning: those of you who, like me, come to Revolver Rani hoping to see a showcase for that diminutive South Indian dynamo might at first feel like they’ve been the victim of a bait and switch. This is due to the unwritten rule (I’m assuming it’s unwritten, though perhaps it was inscribed on a banner above the studio gates) that Superstar Krishna and his hair had to appear in every Telegu film made. Krishna, I’m happy to say, only dominates the first half hour of Revolver Rani and then, I’m even happier to say, is killed -- though, unfortunately, along with his dog, Peter, who showed a lot of promise as an anipal. This all occurs in the course of Krishna defending his sister, Lalitha’s Rani, from a rape attempt by the band of trigger happy grotesques he has fallen in with. Afterward, Rani -- thanks to Vijaya Lalitha’s unique features and command thereof -- adopts the look of a rabid Keane painting and swears her blood revenge, at which point Revolver Rani becomes the kind of movie we like.

These hoodlums against whom Rani is now pitted, I want to point out, are led by a sharply dressed Mr. Big named Vikram, who suffers from a heart condition that causes him to erupt into violent coughing fits whenever he gets too worked up. As a signature disability for a villain to have, this falls somewhere below a hook hand or eye patch in terms of desirability, as it simply leaves the audience anticipating him conveniently dropping dead during a pivotal moment in the narrative (I’ll never tell).

Adding a nice Magnificent Seven aspect to the typical “ride, rumble, shoot, then dance frenetically” structure of these films, Lalitha’s Rani decides that, to combat the gang, she must first form one of her own, and so rides off in search of suitable candidates. This she does to the accompaniment of the theme tune that music director Satyam has conjured up for her, which consists of basso male voices chanting the English word “vengeance” over a Morricone-esque backing. (By the way, Rani and her crew stay true to their rough riding cowpoke ways despite this film being set in the present day; there are cars and everything.) Rani first recruits a towering strongman for her cause, and then a carnival knife thrower. The vetting process basically involves Rani seeing the amount of grace with which they accept her beating the shit out of them. There’s a street boxer who doesn’t make the cut, but his high strung manager ends up tagging along for comic relief purposes. I think this is same actor to whom I referred in my review of James Bond 777 as “Tollywood’s answer to Jagdeep”.

While there are many familiar faces both in front of and behind the camera in Revolver Rani (many of whom I sadly can’t put names to) one of them is definitely not director KSR Doss, the man behind so many of the Telegu films I’ve covered. Instead a character by the name of KVS Kutumba Rao is in the director’s chair, which affords me the opportunity to momentarily break from my Doss fixation and get some sense of which of the vengeful cowgirl movies’ quirks were specific to the genre, perhaps based on audience expectations, and were not a symptom of one director’s particular madness – to establish a base line for 1970s Telegu action cinema, so to speak.

And the fact is there is little to distinguish Revolver Rani from one of Doss’ films in terms of pacing (frantic) or violence (also frantic -- and cartoonish), though the camera work does not quite approach Doss’ level of insane restlessness. There are also not quite so many of the upskirt shots that Doss was so fond of, though the one that I caught is pretty in your face. And by that I mean right up in there.

Vijaya Lalitha executed a flying scissor hold on my heart from the time I first saw her, in 1972’s Kaun Saccha Kaun Jhoota, back in 2009, and there is nothing in Revolver Rani that could chill my affections. Here the actress again exhibits that same peculiar combination of flitting, bird like movements and bug eyed intensity that, paired with the unrestrained mania of her fighting style – whether with whip, karate, or freestyle wrestling – makes her a signal figure in world action cinema. The only loss here is that we get to see little of Lalitha’s equally frenetic dancing, beyond a scene where she executes the old “infiltrate the villain’s hideout by posing as a nautch girl” gambit. The item girl duties are instead taken over admirably by the actress (Kavitha, perhaps?) who portrays Krishna’s nautch girl girlfriend, Lilly.

And then, of course, because no Telegu movie would be the same without her, Jyothi Laxmi shows up at the last minute for a number in which she demonstrates that sexy dancing and making really ugly faces are not mutually exclusive.

Once gathered, Rani and her gang go about the business of picking off Vikram’s rapey minions one by one while interfering with their various criminal enterprises (a diamond robbery in one case, sex trafficking in another). They then ship each minion’s corpse to their boss in a crate, complete with a nasty note. And, in case you were wondering, Rani does refer to herself as “Revolver Rani”. This activity attracts the attention of both Vikram and the Police Commissioner, who does nothing but listen to the latest tale of Rani’s exploits before staring dreamily off into the middle distance and repeating her name. All comes to a head in a showdown at Vikram’s lair that climaxes with Vijaya Lalitha wrestling a lion. And, yes, that is pretty fucking awesome.

Had I known those five years ago when I watched Kaun Saccha Kaun Jhoota that there would turn out to be many, many movies like it, all of them starring Vijaya Lalitha and/or Jyothi Laxmi, I would have thought my life had become some kind of strange and wonderful dream. And still today, a film like Revolver Rani sends me into an intoxicating reverie, a world very much like that film’s credit sequence, where a pixie-ish firebrand with Sailor Moon eyes spins like a dervish while sending greasily pompadoured, mustached men flying toward every point on the horizon, guns blazing and limbs a blur. True, the inclusion of two musclebound male sidekicks takes the action spotlight off of Vijaya Lalitha a little bit, but the fact that she fights alongside them as an equal (though they rescue her on occasion, she in turn rescues them) makes me respect her even more, and Telegu cinema as a whole for walking the walk.

Now the question: Will I see the remake? The trailer for the film, predictably, shows us a Rani who’s much more dependent upon hardware and fire power than Lalitha’s version. Tell me that Kangana Ranaut wrestles a lion and we might be able to do business.

4DK on Masala Zindabad

A while back I had a chat with Amrita and Beth of Masala Zindabad about the female-driven Telegu language action films of director K.S.R. Doss. The resulting podcast has just been posted and can, for a limited time, be streamed for free from the Masala Zindabad site. Check it out, won't you?

Rani is her name

I originally meant to write up Rani Mera Naam for 4DK. But, as I wrote, my love for Telegu action director K.S.R. Doss, scrappy star Vijaya Lalitha, and crazy Indian female vigilante movies from the 1970s overflowed the boundaries of what a simple blog post could contain. Clearly, I realized, this movie deserved nothing less than the full-fledged Teleport City treatment. Check out my review, just posted over at TC.

James Bond 777 (India, 1971)

Given my extremely limited exposure to the Telegu language cinema of the 1970s, the fact that I could pick out three familiar faces among James Bond 777's cast makes the film, for me at least, something of an all-star affair. Of course, given the abysmal condition of the copy that I watched, picking out the actors was a task similar to trying to identify animal shapes in cloud formations. Still, when the Tollywood galaxy of stars plays host to such distinctive celestial bodies as these, its hard to be mistaken. Ladies and gentlemen, our stars:

Tollywood superstar Krishna, who also starred in the previously reviewed Kaun Saccha Kaun Jhoota, as secret agent James Bond 777, aka Kishore. (Apparently, in this instance, "James Bond" is just a job title, rather than someone's actual name.)

Vijaya Lalitha, who also starred in Kaun Saccha Kaun Jhoota, again fighting alongside Krishna, this time in the role of Sopa, the two-fisted female counterpart to agent 777.


Jyothi Laxmi, the star of the previously reviewed Pistolwali, playing a dual role as both femme fatale Jamilla and her less evil duplicate, a stroke of casting genius that allows her to have a catfight with herself during the film's rousing finale.

Oh, and also: at the helm, director K.S.R. Doss, the man behind Pistolwali, as well as a bunch of other female-centric Telegu action films, including the awesome sounding Rani Mera Naam.

As you can clearly see, Krishna's pompadour is as majestically towering as ever in James Bond 777, but there is another man on the scene whose 'do is every bit as formidable. That man is the evil mastermind known by his underlings as "Boss". Needless to say, the presence of two hairstyles of such equally monolithic proportions necessitates a battle to the death. In this Kishore is aided both by his righteousness and the able assistance of lady cop Sopa, as well as a comic relief sidekick who seems for all intents and purposes to be Tollywood's answer to Jagdeep. For his part, the Boss has at his disposal a small army of robotic goons in referee shirts and Panama hats, as well as a couple of female lieutenants ready and willing to do his dirty work. The first of these lieutenants is the aforementioned Jamilla, who operates from a secret lair hidden beneath a "Beauty Paralour". The other is Cindy, who seems to spend an awful lot of her time berating her minions, calling them "bloody fools" and whatnot.

The Boss also commands a trio of the most friendly-looking attack dogs in cinema history. The onus for portraying these beasts' menace falls entirely upon the film's human actors, who must react to their adorableness with expressions of abject terror.

James Bond 777 offered pretty much everything that I'm now learning to expect from these old Tollywood actioners: weird hair, crotch-grinding dance numbers filmed from uncomfortably intimate angles, and lots of crazy fights. It also managed to squeeze the familiar tropes of the James Bond series into the more comfortable Tollywood format of the family revenge film. In classic fashion, a prologue shows young Kishore's parents being murdered before his eyes by the movie's main villain, an injury that drives him to become the super secret agent of the film's title. Similarly, Sopa's father is also murdered by the heavy, which proves to be her motivation for joining Kishore in his fight. Of course, true to spy movie conventions, the villains also have some kind of grand diabolical scheme that the heroes are trying to prevent, but the film's lack of English subs prevents me from telling you what it is. I do know that it in part involved having the dogs rob a bank, though.

The movie -- as if you needed to be told -- is a glaringly low-budget affair, and in trying to cover up for its shortcomings employs a device that struck me as being very similar to the one used in the equally cash-strapped Mithun Chrakraborty-fronted James Bond knock-off, Gunmaster G-9, which was made several years later. In that film, whenever something took place on screen that was perhaps less spectacular than what the filmmakers had envisioned in their heads, the soundtrack blared with the character's theme tune, accompanied by an enthusiastic off-screen voice shouting "Gunmaster! G-9!" -- as if you could simply be hectored into getting excited over a pathetically underwhelming miniature effect or the sight of Mithun stepping out of a VW van while wiping sandwich crumbs off his lips. Similarly, James Bond 777 kicks in with a rousing theme tune and a female voice excitedly cooing "James Bond, triple seven!" whenever we're forced to confront, say, a motorcycle chase that's composed of lots of embarrassingly obvious rear projection.

Not that James Bond 777 doesn't provide its fair share of legitimate thrills, mind you. I was especially impressed by a pole fight sequence involving Vijaya Lalitha that looked like it was taken straight out of an old Shaw Brothers movie. I'd read that Hong Kong martial arts films were particularly popular in southern India during this period, and here is the visual proof.

I know that this is a broken record lament of mine, but I don't care. Will somebody please, please, pleeeease release James Bond 777 on an English subtitled DVD -- preferably one that, if at all possible, doesn't look like its mastering process involved using the surviving negative to snare bottom-dwellers from the bed of a stagnant lake? The fact that I enjoyed it despite all of the impediments that an angry god threw in my way indicates that, were said impediments removed, I would be moved to spout solid blocks of gold-tinged hyperbole from my mouth like some kind of xtacy-fueled verbal Pez dispenser. Want! Want! Want!

Um, was that clear enough for y'all?

Hyderabad calling XLU. Pompadour containment
breach imminent. Do you read me?