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In Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Anil Kapoor looked dapper, no doubt, but the Mumbai sequence is pathetic, an insult to this major metropolis. Apart for a couple of authentic shots (one of Bori Bunder), the scenes could have been shot anywhere. At best, it is only lip sympathy to India as a developing film market. In my college days, I remember seeing Harry Black and the Tiger (1958) about a hunting expedition, which had Stewart Granger in the lead role. Then, after his compelling performance in King Solomon’s Mines, he was really big. It is a love story with Barbara Rush playing the female lead but it was Indian actor I. S. Johar, who had a cameo and did it rather well. Later, in my journalistic days, I made it a point to interview Johar, then an established star, and he surely provided me with excellent copy.
In 1975, I was fortunate
enough to cover the shooting of a three-minute sequence at Hal village
(near Khopoli on the Bombay-Pine road) for Steven Spielberg’s Close
Encounters of the Third Kind. It was invoking a UFO (unidentified
flying object) sequence and French New Wave director Francois Truffaut,
Bob Balabam and Lance Henriksen, lesser-known Hollywood names, were
the actors. It was an impressive shot done very professionally. Baba
Sheikh, who handled the shoot, collected some beggars and dressed them
up as sadhus and none could tell the difference.
There was a clause in the contract of the eight American companies that required them to keep certain funds in India and that money (Rs 25 lakh) was used for shooting in India. Spielberg was then a raw 26-year-old but had earned the nickname of "wunderkind." In 1983, the James Bond film Octopussy was also shot in India and Kabir Bedi was given a bit role but it was even smaller than Anil Kapoor’s and, at best, he looked like a darban and rightly ridiculed for his efforts. But then, that’s the way they distribute goodies to Third World countries.
Google has pictures of
the turbaned Selar Shaik Sabu often mistakenly called Sabu Dastagir.
Looking somewhat like Nobel Prize winner Sir C.V. Raman, then became a
legendary name. Remember elders talking of Sabu the elephant boy in
the 1940s. That he should be forgotten is indeed sad. He is surely the
most famous Indian to have appeared in Hollywood movies.
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Amrish Puri also made
his international debut in one of Spielberg’s Indiana Jones
stories but strangely he does not figure in Halliwell’s Film &
Video Guide. The one Indian that nearly got away is a rare jewel named
Sabu, the Elephant Boy, a diminutive Indian who played the lead the
1937 film Elephant Boy. It was made by British documentary
filmmaker Robert Flaherty and Zoltan Korda and won the Best Director
Oscar on their debut. Flaherty earlier shot Nanouk of the North
after spending months in the polar region.