Bandie seems to have been the last in a trio of bilingual films that, starting with Amanush (1975), were meant to promote Uttam Kumar as a Hindi film hero. Compared to Amanush or to Anand Ashram (1977), it’s a much more earnest attempt to transplant a Bengali star into the narrative and stylistic world of massy mid-‘70s Bollywood. What results is a messy, meandering film—but it’s certainly an interesting failure. Bandie was produced by F. C. Mehra for Eagle Films and directed by Alo Sircar from a screenplay by Sircar, Jainendra Jain, and Ashok Ghosal.
After stealing some mortgage money back from the local seth (Manek Dutt), Bhola (Uttam Kumar) is forced to flee his village to the neighboring kingdom of Bharatpur. He awakes from a refreshing nap on a hillside to find himself politely but very insistently apprehended—not by the policemen the seth had set on his tail, but by Bharatpur’s senpati Raghuveer (Iftekhar). Raja Brajbhan Singh (Satyendra Kappu) having recently expired, Raghuveer and the kingdom’s diwan (Madan Puri) are keeping the home fires burning until such time as they can relocate the missing yuvraaj Uday Singh. Their working theory is that Uday has been kidnapped or perhaps outright murdered by Brajbhan’s scummy brother Vikram (Utpal Dutt) or Vikram’s scummier son Kanchan (Amjad Khan—they wear matching ruffle-fronted shirts). Given that his most urgent priority is locking Vikram and Co. out of political power, and that Uday is portrayed in flashbacks by Uttam Kumar, Raghuveer is eager to exploit Bhola’s potential as an impersonator. Bhola is assured that he’ll remain the reluctant charge of bodyguard Chandravadan (Tarun Ghosh) for only as long as it takes to dig up the real Uday—surely sometime before Uday’s planned wedding to raajkumari Radha of Rampur (Sulakshana Pandit). Chandravadan or no Chandravadan, Bhola manages to heist himself out of the palace. He then voluntarily returns after stumbling across a cabin in the surrounding jungle. Bhola decides he can afford to stay in Bharatpur and cooperate with Raghuveer’s plans while investigating the cabin and its apparent connection with the long-ago murder of his mother (Indrani Mukherjee).
The above paragraph offers an intentionally conservative accounting of the named characters whom an aspiring Bandie viewer is obligated to track. Besides the half a dozen or so who are major players in the prologue only to retire before the primary action, there’s also Sujan Singh, king of Rampur (Amar Nath); Brajbhan Singh’s second wife, the chhoti raani (Nandita Thakur); Vikram’s current spymistress/henchguy matched set, Bimla and Anand (Bindu and Amrish Puri); his previous spymistress and henchguy, Sundari and Zalim Singh (Padma Khanna and a guy I don’t recognize); and Radha’s lovely, portentously named lady’s maid Krishna (Prema Narayan)—each of whom has something of moment to do. It’s not even a particularly long film! The print I saw weighed in at under two and a half hours, of which no niggardly portion is reserved for comedy business, decorative dishoomery, and other plot-ancillary endeavors. At least in some regards, this narrative maximalism must surely be a deliberate choice. Certainly much of the film progresses with a curious sense of double vision, perhaps meant to complement the brace of Uttam Kumars behind held captive by different factions in Bharatpur. Besides the fateful cabin, there is a pair of fateful temples. Twice Bhola arrives at the cabin so soon after the last occupant departed that he finds a candle wick still smoking. His mother’s murderer drops two significant objects and is identifiable by two distinctive scars. Kanchan entrusts Amrish with two different assassinations, which unfold during two different songs. Radha escapes via horseback from two unwanted engagements! Unfortunately, this muchness permits the story to unfold only in spastic, wandering steps. While something is never not happening, particularly after interval, many of the developments feel pointless. With characters so readily offed and plots so easily foiled, I started to have sunk-cost-fallacy-type feelings about them.
Poor Uttam Kumar is saddled with some regrettable comedic episodes that suit him very poorly in the early parts of the film. I found him rather more interesting in the role of Uday rather than as Bhola; even though the former gets much less screentime, he has to sell a pretty difficult personal arc. With the paths of its main characters so meandering, there is often more enjoyment to be found among the smaller players. Utpal Dutt, Bindu, and Amrish Puri all turn in interesting performances as antagonists. Bindu’s character of Bimla had, to my surprise, the most engaging story out of any of them. With a suppressed but not inactive conscience, she is able to keep a close psychological bead on her employer Vikram, obviously aware that her life depends from moment to moment on the good temper of an inherently ill-tempered man. Although mostly in it for the money, she still fosters some genuine friendship for him—as well as affections for other parties, for whose sake she tries to push her honeypot gig as far as she possibly can before cutting and running. The melodrama also sits more comfortably on Bindu than most of the other actors involved; she isn’t embarrassed to be broad. Although the performance is perhaps less successful, I also enjoyed Sulakshana as Radha. We learn early on that her father raised her to value her own moral sense and independence. When he or others, pressured by political embarrassments, demand her cooperation in various machinations, she does not hesitate to assail that hypocrisy. Certainly her arc ends on a delightful little button.
I had really only known Shyamal Mitra from his scores for Amanush and Anand Ashram, each of which I like. It was therefore a disappointment to find the songs of Bandie so sadly mid, although there are at least a few that are interestingly realized. In this film replete with assassination plots, I did not think it too spoilerish to mention above that there are two songs that have attempted murders in them. In “Honth Bhale Inkar Kare,” Anand nearly has the misfortune to accidentally whack Helen mid-qawwali! (Don’t worry; she escapes unscathed to dance another day.) Under contemplation, it seems obvious that some ambitious filmi assassin ought to use the visual confusion of a Holi song as cover for a hit, but “Range Na Mann Rang Mein Agar” is the only example I can recall having ever seen. There are also a couple of picturizations that play interestingly with the conventions of “heard” and “unheard” songs. Bhola, frustrated with having to remain in disguise as Uday, presses Radha to think of things from an average person’s perspective for once. While she imagines an ordinary life (and an ordinary romance) for herself in “Jise Yaar Ka Sachha Pyar Mile,” time is also passing back in the real world; she comes back out of the song to discover that Bhola is gone and her room is again unlocked. One of the film’s several time jumps actually occurs midway through a song. In “Dil Usse Dungi,” Vikram is nodding off in his chair while Bimla dances for Uday’s benefit down the hall. Starting with the second antara, what we hear and see is one of Vikram’s dreamt memories of Sundari—and the film continues in that earlier timeline for several minutes after the song has concluded. We finally jump back to the “present” when Bimla tucks a blanket over the fitfully napping modern Vikram. Need I point out that, besides offering an inventive transition between timelines, this system also permits two item numbers for the price of one? Unlike Vikram, we viewers can have our Bindu and our Padma Khanna, too.
I would be interested to know the full story behind the making and reception of this film, about which I have been able to uncover minimal information. Amanush and Anand Ashram had both been made in parallel Hindi and Bengali versions, the latter movie flopping badly. One would naturally assume that filming the same story twice would create additional expenses in terms of manhours, if nothing else. Every secondary source that I can find describes Bandi as straight-up a Hindi film. In the course of looking up the songs on YouTube, however, I stumbled across Bengali versions of some of them and was ultimately able to dig up a variant of the full film with a Bengali censor’s ticket. (Look for the title “বন্দি.”) Based on my inexpert examination—keeping in mind that I know literally not a word of Bengali—I think that version is “parallel” rather than being a dub. At any rate, if it is, it’s an awfully good dub, and while certain other aspects of Bandie are interesting, pleasant, or passable, I wouldn’t term any of them “awfully good.” In short, it seems as though there were three of these parallel Bengali–Hindi projects in a row—not two as generally reported.
If these films represented some kind of concentrated make-Uttam-a-Hindi-hero cottage industry, it was leeching talent by the time Bandie came along. As in Amanush and Anand Ashram, Utpal Dutt still appears in the main negative role, but rather than Sharmila Tagore as the heroine, Bandie had to settle for Sulakshana at a time when she was still transitioning from playback singer to actress. Shakti Samanta had directed and produced both of the earlier parallel Hindi–Bengali projects. Bandie was instead produced by F. C. Mehra (a very familiar figure to fans of ‘70s Bolly) and has as its director some fellow named Alo Sircar, whose only previous credit was Chhoti Si Mulaqat—the Agni Pariksha adaptation that had been Uttam Kumar’s first catastrophic attempt to break into the Hindi industry all the way back in 1967. Most influentially of all, though, the credits of Bandie invoke only the faithful “Eagle Films Story Department.”1 Amanush, by contrast, had been adapted from a Shaktipada Rajguru novel, while the story of Anand Ashram is credited to veteran Bengali screenwriter Shailajananda Mukhopadhyay. It is story and screenplay more than anything else that give Bandie a different flavor than the earlier Hindi–Bengali parallel projects. Whether the switch away from literary models and to the Eagle Films writers’ room was an intentional choice or one necessitated by the failure of Anand Ashram, it makes Bandie feel far more thoroughly a creature of the Bombay industry.
1 A digression: anyone who, like me, spent their childhood hiding inside of nineteenth-century novels will recognize the basic shape of Anthony Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda in this plot setup. Saradindu Bandyopadhyay wrote an unauthorized adaptation of the novel called Jhinder Bandi, which had been made into an Uttam Kumar film in 1961. To go by the plot summaries provided by Sharmi, Madhu, and Beth, it seems as though Jhinder Bandi and Bandie share one major reorientation of the Zenda model while differing on most other points. Without getting the opportunity to watch Jhinder Bandi, it’s presently unclear to me what relationship Bandie might have had either to that film or to Bandyopadhyay’s novel, if any.