Movie Review | Sholay (Sippy, 1975)
This is absolutely worth seeing in its new restoration, especially if you can catch it on the big screen. Third is a movie of big wiiiiiiidesceen images that uses the width and size of its frame for visual impact. It’s full of two-fisted closeups. Of zooms with the impact of violence, to match the blood and sweat and dust onscreen. Of pans that curve and give the proceedings a relentless sense of kineticism especially in the breakneck first half.
This is also worth seeing on the big screen if you’ve grown up with the movie, or you’re seeing it with an audience who has no doubt grown up with the movie, because it absolutely benefits from the reactions of the crowd. It’s a movie of big stars and big emotions and big laughs and big music and big action and big heroics, and the experience of seeing it in Roy Thomson Hall with an entire audience that was regularly bursting into applause and cheering and reciting lines from the movie can’t be beaten. I joined in on the hooting and hollering, and absolutely lost it during the Hitler moustache jail warden scenes.
And out of the stars, the biggest reactions might have been to Amjad Khan as the villain Gabbar Singh, a figure of pure joyous cruelty, during whose scenes the movie goes unnervingly quiet. When he massacres Thakur’s family, the freeze frames puncture the normal rhythms, and we hear little but the creaking swing, which R.D. Burman’s iconic score begins to echo. When he taunts his lackeys with the threat of Russian Roulette, the music drops out, he starts laughing, and like an echo his lackeys start laughing, and the movie cuts like a visual echo, and the person behind you recites the lines so you get another echo. This restoration includes the original ending that the censors insisted on changing, so if you ever found the arrival of the cop at the end a little abrupt, now you can have the climax pay off the way it was intended. The whole audience cheered, I joined in too.
