china town 1962

Shammi Kapoor has always been a favourite of mine. I can't claim to be a fan, but I did admire him. This week I started a small Shammi Kapoor fiesta to celebrate his early movies and the surprising acclaim he achieved through them. I'm doing this in no particular order and so I start with China Town. 

One of the reasons I love this movie is because it's set in the Calcutta of the 60s. It was a much prettier city back then- cleaner, richer and more mysterious. The club setting of the mafia gang-like organisation fit right in with those times. The mobster hats were especially cool.

The story starts in a club in China Town where Suzie (Helen) sings china town, dressed in a neatly cut kimono, to happily nodding rich people and dances prettily with a feathered fan. The club owner Wong (Madan Puri) watches and then goes to a couple of his men and asks them where Mike is. Mike (Shammi Kapoor) is lying in a tub completely indifferent to the time, because 'Mike doesn't move for time, time moves for Mike!' Wong persuades him to get ready and leave to meet their smuggling associates at the Kidderpore docks. Suzie comes into his room and says that everyone praised her dancing a lot- Mike sneers and says that they only praise her because she entertains them.
"Mike," says Suzie, hurt. "You're always rude to me. You keep breaking my heart."
Mike looks knowingly at her. "Maybe. But I mend it too." Then he does his trademark Mike-gesture, which is something like a short dismissive wave with a "Pchh". (I think this gesture's been grossly overdone in the movie, though it does give you an understanding of exactly how mean Mike is). 

Mike leaves for the meeting, exchanges goods with some Chinese people in the dark shipyard, then as he climbs back into his car.........Police!

Mike makes a run for it and we are treated to a short car chase through empty city streets at night before- kaboom!- an accident renders Mike unconscious. The police take him into custody.
And then........we shift to Darjeeling!

Here, Shekhar (Shammi again) sings bar bar dekho in a restaurant, smiling and teasing Rita (Shakeela), while she alternately fumes and smiles at him. (I think he looks absolutely adorable with that pencil mustache of his!)

Shekhar wants to marry Rita but her father, Rai Bahadur Digambarprasad Rai (S.N. Bannerjee), keeps threatening to shoot him every time he tries to approach him for her hand in marriage. He doesn't want his daughter to marry a gawayya (a singer) and so decides to leave Darjeeling and go back home to Calcutta, where a businessman, Chowdury, is waiting to marry Rita.

And so we all come to Calcutta. Shekhar follows Rita and her father to the city and manages to climb into Rita's room through the balcony, but gets caught while escaping. Infuriated, Rai takes him to the police. There they meet Police Inspector Gupta (Kanu Roy) who sees Shekhar and is astonished to find Mike's look-alike in him. He takes Shekhar to his office and tells him that if he agrees he can have a good job with the police, and that might persuade Rai to let him marry Rita.

Essentially, this part of the movie is very much like Don- but then the idea has been used before this movie and maybe a hundred times afterwards. Shekhar is taken to the cell where Mike is and shocked to find a man who looks like himself locked up there.
Mike, in the mean while, is refusing to cooperate with the police and turn informant. He is tortured and enticed, but he refuses to betray his gang (I liked him for this, despite his maniacal laughter). So Shekhar studies Mike and reels of the china town club, and then Gupta releases the news to the press that Mike has decided to reveal all to the police.


Meanwhile, Shekhar's mother (Jeevan Kala) comes to visit him from Darjeeling and becomes anxious when Shekhar tells her about Mike. She confesses that a long time ago (the requisite twenty years!) his father used to play the violin in china town and that smugglers used to use him (unbeknownst to the man) and his violin to smuggle opium (we were not told how this happened exactly- i guess that an explanation of the process would have stumped their creativity). Then one day, the father found out and went to the police. Wong and his henchman came to their house to look for him, but only found his wife and twin sons. They took one of the young boys (Shankar) with them and told the mother that she would better send her husband to them or she would never see the boy again. 

The husband apparently gets killed at some point, but the main thing is......have you guessed it?....Shankar is Mike! Woohoo!

The mother, Shanti, pleads Shekhar that she be allowed to see Mike. So, Gupta lets her into Mike's cell, where Mike thinks that she is another trick the police were trying to play on him. He turns feral and shouts at her to go away. This apparently convinces her that he's  "mera beta, Shankar!"


Now, Wong reads the papers and sends his men to kill Mike, who's known to be in a hospital. Just as they are about to knife Shekhar (in his Mike guise) he turns kung-fu champion and unarms both men. He then angrily explains that he'd only said he was turning informant so that Wong sends them and he can escape with them. The men are bemused but quite relieved to find an easy route to escape by (with the secret help of the police).

Shekhar does a good Mike impersonation and even though he can't remember much of who is who and what is where, he gets away by being abrasive and sneering a lot. (He does the mean-boy really good). Helen is pretty young here and her part as the sweet, adoring Suzie is touching. 

Shekhar spies out a copy of the list of agents- gets caught- and frames the man who caught him by knocking him out and putting the list in his jacket before Wong and his men arrive.

Wong is relieved to have the police spy caught and let's Skekhar take care of him. But Ching Lee (Shetty in a really neat get up) doesn't trust him and begins to keep a closer eye on him.

Finally, one day when Shekhar and another guy were supposed to smuggle some diamonds in the heels of their shoes, Ching Lee notices that Shekhar's feet are larger than what Mik'es used to be (Lee runs a shoe shop, so he knows his shoe sizes). He confronts Shekhar and they get into a fight. 

Shekhar wins the fight and either knocks the guy out or kills him (i can't be sure and they didn't dwell on it). Instead, Suzie comes down the stairs with a revolver in her hand. Shekhar explains that though he isn't Mike, he is his brother and that if he can get these people caught, Mike can have a reduced sentence in jail. Suzie weakens when he reminds her that he never took advantage of her while pretending to be Mike. But before Suzie can decide to help him, Wong and his minions enter and take Shekhar prisoner.


Now in prison, Mike's health worsens and the doctor tells Gupta he has to be shifted to a hospital. So Gupta sends this highly dangerous and wanted criminal off in an ambulance at night with one driver and one guard, while Mike lies unguarded in the back. It rains hard that night, the ambulance gets in an accident and Mike conveniently slips out of the back (literally slips- the lock's were very flimsy in the ambulances in those days) at the impact and both the police men are also thrown out of the van. Mike revives when he feels the rain on his face and then runs blindly into a car.


In the car is Rita. Now Rita knows about Shekhar's new job and wrongly assumes that the staggering man on her bonnet is him. She takes him home and tries to treat his wounds while hiding him from her father. He keeps eyeing her calculatingly and calls her "Ree-ta!", but of course that doesn't tip her off. She calls Gupta and tells him angrily that Shekhar was hurt and he will no longer work for the police.


Gupta and his men make their way to her house, while Mike tricks her into driving her to china town. There, he hands an outraged Rita to Wong and goes to the dungeon to meet the impostor who pretended to be Mike while he was gone.


He unchains Shekhar and beats him up, while Shekhar declares piously that he could never raise a hand on his own brother. Finally, just as Mike is about to finish him off with a heavy water container (hee-hee), Suzie stops him and says that all Shekhar claimed was true because Wong told her about them kidnapping Mike when he was a boy.

Apparently the existence of such a horribly deprived childhood- that he had no memory of- was enough to change Mike completely and he went from declaring that "Mike IS china town! And he will kill all of china town's enemies!" to "I will avenge my murdered father on china town!" in a blink. 

Do you notice how Helen is transparent against the staircase in the above pic? I love look-alike movies of the 60s!
Mike promises to rescue Rita and help Shekhar escape, and then tells Suzie to go call the police. He does his Pchh! thing and Suzie looks sad and defeated. He apparently notices this for the first time, because he stops her and promises to not treat her like trash if he comes out of this alive. Suzie is happy.

There is a tunnel chase scene! For whatever reason, Wong's Boss (the secret head of the gang no one knows and the police are dying to find out about) thinks Rita should be brought to him through the secret tunnel and the brothers give (silent but sloshing) chase.

Wong is knocked out by Mike and then he and Shekhar enter the Boss's den. Boss stands behind a screen (alone, with no body guard in sight- how convenient) and tells Mike to put the girl on the gurney against a wall. He does, and Shekhar slips under it. Then the wall opens and pulls the gurney in. Mike, probably feeling helpless, throws a chair at the nice, mysterious screen.

The Bass!

Wham!

Revealed!

In the following confusing, Mike gets shot and Boss runs away with Rita because "you know too much!" (I'm sorry but I couldn't figure out who this guy was). Mike tells Shekhar to go after Rita and that he'll send the police after them when they arrive.

There's a car chase. I love car chases!

Isn't he awesome? He looked really cool on that bike!

Can someone tell me what the purpose of taking the girl was was? She was more a liability than a hostage- Shekhar wouldn't be chasing him so hard if not for her, and wouldn't it have been easier just to kill her?- so what did Boss intend to do with her once he got away? I wonder what this fascination with an unwilling girl wriggling in your arm is all about. Oh. Right. Got it.

There's this really neat chase scene through the docks, where you can see Shammi (or someone) running along the riverside to keep pace with the Boss's steamer-boat. I loved it because this kinda scene usually ends up on an empty stretch by the side of a highway (but then that's Bomaby). It's fitting that a Calcutta fight scene should happen against the backdrop of the Howrah bridge.

Now, wasn't that lovely? Oh, to finish punching the bad guy while standing precariously on a buoy!

In the end, Mike\Shankar gets the ridiculously reduced sentence of only three years and asks Suzie to wait for him (which we all know she will). 

The bichhra hua family is finally reunited and everyone goes home happy. 

Like all movies that really entertain there was a lot you had to suspend your disbelief for, but who cares? Good guys won! Bad guys died! One good-looking bad guy turned good and got a reduced jail sentence! Yay!

So, if you haven't watched it and don't have the patience to download it, you can catch it here - it's hosted legally by rajshri.com at you tube.