Revision as of 22:36, 18 March 2014

Sholay (1975)

After three hours of mesmerised, and tense, involvement in the film the audience suddenly realises what the Thakur’s game plan is. They see the metal spikes on the soles of the Thakur’s shoes and, for the first time after relentless tension, they relax. They know that good will finally prevail over evil. The entire theatre breaks into an excited cheer, people leaning forward in their seats, as in a tense sporting match where ‘our’ team, after taking a lot of beating, is finally posed to an exciting, entertaining victory.

The Thakur leaps in the air. (Sholay (1975): Scene deleted by the censors in 1975.)

The Thakur does what the entire audience—nay, almost all filmgoers across India wanted him to do. He crushes Gabbar’s forearm to avenge the loss of his own arms.

The Thakur kicks Gabbar into the cauldron behind him.

The Thakur crushes Gabbar’s hand in a prolonged scene.

But, as Thakur discovers, it is not the spiked shoes that kill Gabbar. Thakur's assault on Gabbar's chest had made him fall on a sharp iron spike embedded in the pillar behind him. (Till the 1980s or '90s the good guys were not alllowed to kill even murderous screen villains, on the ground that death sentences were something best left to the judiciary. Therefore, during the fight sequence in the climax the haresd villain, whom the audience wanted dead,would stumble off a cliff, get bitten by a snake or die of his own bullet, so that the hero could not be accused of taking the law into his own hands.) (Sholay (1975): Scene deleted by the censors in 1975.)

The dying Gabbar falls down. (Sholay (1975): Scene deleted by the censors in 1975.)

Veeru (centre) brings the shawl that the armless Thakur (left) generally uses to conceal his armlessness. Gabbar lies dead on the right. (Sholay (1975): Scene deleted by the censors in 1975.)

Crew

Director: Ramesh Sippy

Writers: Salim-Javed (Salim Khan, Javed Akhtar)

Produced by G.P. Sippy

Director of photography: Dwarka Divecha ...

Sound re-recording: Mangesh Desai ...

Film Editor: M.S. Shinde

Production Company: United Producers, Sippy Films

Cast

Dharmendra: Veeru

Sanjeev Kumar: Thakur Baldev Singh

Hema Malini : Basanti

Amitabh Bachchan : Jai

Jaya Bhaduri: Radha

Amjad Khan : Gabbar Singh

A.K. Hangal : Imam Saheb

Satyen Kappu : Ramlal

Iftekhar : Narmala ji (Radha's father)

Leela Mishra : Mausi

Vikas Anand: Jailor

Mac Mohan: Saamba

Keshto Mukherjee: Hariram

SachinV Ahmed

Master Alankar Joshi: Deepak

Viju Khote: Kaalia

Major Anand and Bihari: The two dacoits whom Gabbar kills because they were funks (jo dar gaya)

Asrani: The 'British-era Jailor'

Gita Siddharth: Deepak's mother

Helen: ‘Mehbooba,’ the gypsy dancer

P. Jairaj: Police chief

Jagdeep: Soorma Bhopali

Jalal Agha: The one who sings ‘Mahbooba’

Om Shivpuri: Inspector Saheb

Sharad Kumar: Ninni

Technical Specifications

Runtime: 188 min/3:08 hrs (version released in 1975); 204 minutes/ 3:24 hours (3D version released in 2014).

Sound Mix: 6-Track stereophonic (on 70 mm prints)| Mono (on 35 mm prints)|

Color: EastmanColor

Aspect Ratio: 1.37 : 1 (original negative) / 2.20 : 1 (70 mm prints)

Country: India

Language: Hindi

Release Date: 15 August 1975 (India)

Outdoor shooting at: ‘Sippyvaram’/ Ramnagram village on the Mysore-Bangalore highway, Karnataka, India

Songs

All lyrics by Anand Bakshi

All music credited to Rahul Dev Burman, including a song not composed by him.

Holi Ke Din Sung byKishore Kumar & Lata Mangeshkar

Jab Tak Hain Jaan Sung byLata Mangeshkar

Koi Haseena Sung byKishore Kumar

Mehbooba O Mehbooba Sung byRahul Dev Burman (based on Demis Roussos’ Say you love me)

Sholay Title Theme

Yeh Dosti (happy version) sung by Kishore Kumar & Manna Dey

Yeh Dosti (Sad Version) Sung by Kishore Kumar

"Chaand Sa Koi Chehra": the song not used in Sholay

In addition, a qawwali, "Chaand Sa Koi Chehra," had been recorded for the film (and sung by Kishore Kumar, Manna Dey, Bhupendra Singh and, above all, lyricist Anand Bakshi) but never used. In the film it was supposed to be sung by Jai, Veeru and fellow inmates during their stint in jail. The song was never shot because it would have added to the already considerable length of the film, director Ramesh Sippy told an online channel. G9 Premiers, on which you can hear roughly 40 seconds, from 2.00 to 2.40. You can hear 5:49 minutes (i.e. almost the entire song) juxtaposed quite cleverly on a 'fake' video [1]. The lip--synching is nowhere near perfect, but still quite good. The 'fake' video is a qawwali filmed on Dharmendra and Amitabh Bachchan in the 1977 film Charandas.

Censored sequences

Sholay was released just six or seven weeks 'a state of emergency' was declared on India. This included, for the first and last time in the history of independent India, press censorship. A squeaky clean family film like Sholay ought to have had nothing to worry about from the pre-June 1975 film censors of India.

However, the Emergency censors decided that even violence of the kind normal in Disney cowboy films was too much for India's gentle audiences. No film could have more than six minutes of violence and no 'violent' sequence could last more than a minute. Fisticuffs had, in the early 1970s,been the mainstay of India's commercial films, in Hindi-Urdu as well as Tamil and Telugu. Because of the Emergency, most commercial filmmakers opted for scripts that had a quota of six one-minute sequences per film-more was out of question because of the censors, and less was not acceptable to mass audiences. Some films (e.g. Khoon Pasina) want to show more action than that. So,they awarded themselves additional action scenes in which the two antagonists (normally the hero and the villain) chased each other, lunged towards each other, wielded lathis (long batons) but did not actually touch each other in sequences that exceeded the six-minute quota.

By the time Sholay was released the six-minute quota had not been imposed. But the censors deleted three sequences, the last of which was critical to the story. In it the Thakur, whose arms had been chopped off by Gabbar, the villain, decides to kill Gabbar with his feet--with little metal spikes studded on the soles of his shoes.The spiked-shoe climax, 7.11 minutes The censors got this sequence replaced by one in which the police arrives in the proverbial 'nick of time' and takes Gabbar into custody.

Because this sequence was deleted, a shorter sequence in which a village cobbler studs the Thakur's shoes with metal spikes, became meaningless. The film's makers deleted it on their own.

A third sequence that shows how Gabbar kills young Ahmed (Sachin), too, was chopped off by the censors.Ahmed’s murder: 2.48 minutes

Since the early years of the 2st century, unauthorised DVDs crafted by Indians living in the West have been available in which the sixteen deleted minutes have been added where Salim-Javed and Ramesh Sippy had intended them to be. Most of those 16 minutes are also available on YouTube.

In 2014, a 3D version of Sholay was released with the previously deleted 16 minutes. Sholay 3D (2014)

See also

70mm films in India/ South Asia which, inter alia, pictorially demonstrates how the film was blown up from 35mm to 70mm.