(Note: my comments are comments from an Indian Movie education in progress)
Foreigners with an idea of what you might find in Bollywood movies -- this one is your dream come true if it's the dream of color color color, great music, amazing clothes, and delight upon delight. This one for your collection.
My own experience of hunting down a list of the best 50 movies of India, for a start, has been to learn of their infinite variety as well as some of the conventions many of them follow. But this one is close to my original dream of what I would find: the "Jewel Thief" plot line allows us to revel in massive displays of jewelry from the great jewelry culture of the world; the plot also takes Dev Anand, as the apparent identical twin of a hunted jewel thief, into a variety of over-the-top luxe settings, some "Indian" looking (palaces), some done up in spectacular 1960s Mary Quant era British-influenced go-go/kicky style.
The plot also take Dev Anand into relationships with a large number of beautiful and beautifully-dressed women, including the incomparable Helen whose night-club dance in a costume with jewel-dripping tights and a rooster tail should not be missed by a single pleasure-loving soul.
The artistic and plot climax is a gigantic dance in a palace in Sikkim (or Srinigar, I am not sure) with women in some kind of traditional costume, drummers in Tibetan Buddhist (again, I think) masks. There's a great still photo of this in the Film Comment Bollywood issue, I think May 2002.
English translation apparently provided by same person who did Hare Rama Hare Krishna, not hard to get used to and on balance I am just grateful it exists, though wish for song lyric translations.
Foreigners with an idea of what you might find in Bollywood movies -- this one is your dream come true if it's the dream of color color color, great music, amazing clothes, and delight upon delight. This one for your collection.
My own experience of hunting down a list of the best 50 movies of India, for a start, has been to learn of their infinite variety as well as some of the conventions many of them follow. But this one is close to my original dream of what I would find: the "Jewel Thief" plot line allows us to revel in massive displays of jewelry from the great jewelry culture of the world; the plot also takes Dev Anand, as the apparent identical twin of a hunted jewel thief, into a variety of over-the-top luxe settings, some "Indian" looking (palaces), some done up in spectacular 1960s Mary Quant era British-influenced go-go/kicky style.
The plot also take Dev Anand into relationships with a large number of beautiful and beautifully-dressed women, including the incomparable Helen whose night-club dance in a costume with jewel-dripping tights and a rooster tail should not be missed by a single pleasure-loving soul.
The artistic and plot climax is a gigantic dance in a palace in Sikkim (or Srinigar, I am not sure) with women in some kind of traditional costume, drummers in Tibetan Buddhist (again, I think) masks. There's a great still photo of this in the Film Comment Bollywood issue, I think May 2002.
English translation apparently provided by same person who did Hare Rama Hare Krishna, not hard to get used to and on balance I am just grateful it exists, though wish for song lyric translations.