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anitavazirani
Reviews
Saudagar (1973)
The plot in brief
The plot in brief: A village in southern India. Amitabh is in the business of selling gud, a kind of sugar product distilled from the sap of date palms (sometimes called jaggery in English). Amitabh extracts the sap from the trees and gives it to Nutan, a village widow, who boils it down for him. He sells the gud she makes and gives her a portion of the take. They are an extremely successful pair; he is very industrious and she is very skilled.
On an excursion to a nearby village, Amitabh is smitten with a young girl, Padma Khanna, and wants to marry her. But the price her father wants (as money to set aside as insurance in case of divorce) is too steep for him - Rs. 500. So Amitabh hits upon the idea of marrying Nutan - so he can work her harder without giving her half his profits - saving up the Rs. 500, and then tossing her aside for the Padma Khanna.
I won't say much about what happens next unless someone wants me to (I can put it in a spoiler tag). I think any fan of classic films and of Amitabh should see this movie - it's very unusual and very excellent.
Amitabh's character just engages in one reprehensible act after another. I spent much of the film with my mouth hanging open, thinking, "he's not really going to do that to her, is he?" He was so young, and so not yet a superstar - his performance is grounded, real, and unfettered by the requirements of the persona he developed later in life. It's hard to imagine him playing a character like this during the peak of his stardom - he's a dashing hero for sure, and all the village girls swoon over him, but he is a terrible selfish person who makes a series of just awful choices.
Nutan I had never seen before - and now I want to see more. She is very beautiful, in a sad-eyed kind of way that I found so appealing. Here she is supposed to be the over-the-hill widow who is no match for the voluptuous young village girl played by Padma Khanna, but actually her mature, solemn beauty is much more attractive than Padma's vanity and curves. Her performance, too, is excellent; her role requires the most range, as she has moments of hard resolution, joyful domestic bliss, and explosive rage, and she achieves all of it. (I also learned, via Bollywood501, that Nutan is Tanuja's sister - hence Kajol's aunt. I love Tanuja; Nutan is very different from Tanuja's soft, round cuteness.) Padma Khanna is the weak link, not much of a performance, but little is required of her beyond flouncing, preening, and pouting. I'm not sure who she is; she seems to have been in plenty of movies in the 1970s but not many I had heard of, for what that's worth. I am also interested by how dark she is, for the movies - it made her very believable as a seductive village nymphlet.
Here are a few more screenies: Amitabh in a loincloth - check out the legs! Some clever cinematography in some of the songs: Padma Khanna's introduction highlights her voluptuous sex appeal by showing her trying to catch droplets of sap on her tongue; it's very suggestive, almost pornographic, at least to my dirty mind: Nutan is simply lovely - in one song, she wears a palm frond in her hair, which is very pretty, but from some angles it makes her resemble the Statue of Liberty: I'd love to hear from anyone who's seen this, especially to discuss the fairly ambiguous ending, that allows the viewer to speculate on the ultimate fate of the characters and on the price of Amitabh's redemption (or indeed upon whether he is redeemed at all).