As F1: The Movie rocks the box office, I am reminded of a film from over 50 years ago: Bollywood’s first movie to feature professional car-racing, the ritzy 1972 release Apradh.
A full-throttle flashback: Poonam Saxena on India’s early F1 film, Apradh
Feroz Khan’s directorial debut, it featured the flamboyant star in the role of a race-car driver. The opening credits consisted of four-and-a-half minutes of real racing footage from Nurburgring, Germany. (Khan is said to have bought the footage from a local TV channel.)
I remember thinking it slightly curious that Khan would choose professional car-racing as the backdrop of his first movie, at a time when there was hardly any public awareness of the sport in India. But then this was an actor known for his cool Western style. He had a personal fondness for leather boots and cowboy hats. The heroines in his films wore miniskirts and short shorts.
In Apradh, when the hero, Ram, first meets the heroine, Meena (Mumtaz), she is wearing a gold jacket, knee-high boots and tiny shorts (which were called hot pants back in the day). Later on, she wears a black string bikini, then considered a very daring move. Some heroines did wear swimsuits in films; Nalini Jaywant, in fact, wore one as far back as the 1950 film Sangram. But these were usually demure one-piece affairs, sometimes extending into rather long shorts. Skimpy bikinis were a rarity. In a recent TV interview, Mumtaz said she was hesitant to wear the bikini at first. Khan convinced her to give it a shot. “He promised me he would cut the scene if I disapproved of it… when I saw the scene I thought I was looking very nice,” she said.
The first half of Apradh is set in Europe and follows the racer Ram as he helps Meena escape the clutches of a vicious gang of diamond-smugglers. In the second half, the racing car is forgotten and the action shifts to India. Ram and Meena marry and he finds a job as a factory foreman. But their troubles are far from over.
He must now fight another gang of criminals, this one led by his brother Harnam (Prem Chopra). The two parts seem almost like two different films, though both contain early signs of Khan’s penchant for over-the-top villains. The baddies in the first half include a dazed hoodlum in sunglasses and brightly coloured clothes, and a sadistic and scantily clad moll. Back in India, Harnam’s nightclub is eye-popping: it has a revolving bar surrounded by small circular pools in which bikini-clad women frolic. There is also a stuffed leopard on a wall, several fountains, and a man in a sombrero playing a guitar.
It always seemed to me that Khan struggled to marry his keen Western sensibilities with the conventions of commercial Hindi cinema. Sometimes the marriage was successful, as in the box-office hit Qurbani (1980; about two men in love with the same woman, and a villain determined to use this against them). With its star cast of Khan, Vinod Khanna, Zeenat Aman, Amjad Khan and Amrish Puri, it had flourishes typical of the director. Early on, for instance, Khan smashes the villain’s Mercedes to prove a point (at a time when most Indians wouldn’t even have recognised the logo.)
Apradh contains many elements that would become hallmarks of Khan’s filmmaking style: dashing heroes, leading ladies full of oomph, fast cars, kinetic action, eye-catching costumes, great songs and, occasionally, an exotic “foreign” connection (his 1975 film Dharmatma, a desi take on The Godfather (1972), was the first Hindi film to be shot in Afghanistan).
He was sometimes called the “Clint Eastwood of Hindi cinema”, probably because of the boots and hat. But he was one of a kind. Khan, who died aged 69, in 2009, has long been acknowledged as one of the most, if not the most, stylish actor-directors in Bollywood.
No wonder he chose Formula racing as the backdrop of his first film.
