Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Seven days of 70s Bollywood: Rani Aur Jaani

[This post is part of a week long blog-a-thon, masterminded by Beth of Beth Loves Bollywood, paying tribute to the films of 1970s Bollywood. Be sure to check out the other participating blogs for more about the best decade ever in the history of Indian film-making!]

Rani Aur Jaani (1973)
Directed by K.S.R. Doss
Written by K.S.R. Doss, Prem Kapoor
Starring: Aruna Irani, Jyothi Laxmi, Anil Dhawan Narendra Nath, Jagdeep
Music by Satyam


Rani Aur Jaani sees Tollywood director K.S.R. Doss bringing his distinctive brand of trashy, female-centric action cinema to Bollywood -- and with it comes his muse apparent, the fugalicious and disturbingly habit forming Jyothi Laxmi. Taking the oft told filmi tale of siblings separated at birth who grow up on opposite sides of the law and giving it an estrogen-injected spin, Rani Aur Jaani comes across like Deewar as directed by the Hindi version of John Waters. Add to that Peter the sharp-shooting wonder dog, a rare and very enjoyable leading turn by the under-appreciated Aruna Irani, and one of the best rear-projection enabled motorcycle chases in film history, and you have the makings of a classic. Currently only available on VCD, this is at the top of my wish list for a subtitled DVD release.

Read my review of Rani Aur Jaani on 4DK

3 comments:

bollywooddeewana said...

I love Aruna too, i wonder why she never made it as a major heroine but still she made good use of what was given to her, now i hope moserbaer will release this on a dvd with subs i really can't do the whole vcd thing no matter how much i like the leads

Amrita said...

I JUST saw the poster of this movie alongside one for a movie called Mounto and was thinking that i should watch. Good to know my poster sense is sensible.

Unknown said...

You had me scrambling over to Google images to check that poster out. Nice indeed! Mounto?