Sridevi, Anil Kapoor, Jackie Shroff, Madhuri Dixit, Sonam, Anu Aggarwal, Zeba...
The Exciting '80s
Ten years more to go to the next century,. Any way you look at it, film folk will look back at the 80s as a particularly significant decade. New talents have emerged in every field and teh Goliaths have crashed. Huge successes and thundering flops came side by side.
All that is usual. What is unusual is the huge traffic of ins and outs, the high frequency of ups and downs as also the interflow between teh 35mm and 51cm medium. Quick rises and fails were as interesting as the step by step decline and strengthening of careers.
The decade of Sholay is over but the five-year-old-film is still running at the Minerva, Bombay. All efforts to surpass its success have so far proved futile. The Manoj Kumar starrer, Dus Numbri, and the Amitabh starrers, Amar Akbar Anthony (dir: Manmohan Desai), Muqaddar ka Sikandar (dir: Prakash Mehra), Don and others have been big hits in the intervening years, but their success stands dwarfed in comparison to Sholay. Likewise, Amitabh continues to tower above the other actors who can only hope to fight for the number two position. Still, Dharmendra, Manoj Kumar, Jeetendra, Rajesh Khanna, Rishi Kapoor, Shashi Kapoor, Sanjeev Kumar, Shatrughan Sinha and that new boy, Mithun Chakraborty, are all much-in-demand stars. Vinod Khanna, Randhir Kapoor are there but not quite. Dev Anand and Feroz Khan are confined to their own productions. Hema Malini, Zeenat Aman, Raakhee, Rekha, Reena Roy, Poonam Dhillon, Moushmumi Chatterjee, Tina Munim and Shabana Azmi are the top actresses. There's this promising girl, Smita Patil, who has just broken her self-imposed restriction to art films. That Southern girl, Jaya Prada, got away playing a dumb girl in Sargam, a big hit, but they say her diction is bad and she has very few takers in Bombay. There are rumours of Dimple Kapadia staging a comeback - the industry knows they are empty threats of a dissatisfied wife. Parveen Babi, they say, has gone nuts.
Amjad Khan as a villain, and Laxmikant-Pyarelal as music directors are a permanent feature in most big budget projects. Prem Chorpa is very much around and Amrish Puri is on the rise. There are great expectations from the new villain of Shaan, Kulbhushan Kharbanda. Kalyanji-Anandji and R.D.Burman are the other top music directors, followed by Bappi Lahiri and Rajesh Roshan.
The top makers now are Raj Kapoor, Ramesh Sippy, Vijay Anand, Manoj Kumar, Feroz Khan, Nasir Hussain, B.R.Chopra, Yash Chopra, Ramanand Sagar. Manmohan Desai, Prakash Mehra. People are waiting to see if they will make a film that surpasses the success of Sholay. The other ambitious makers are Raj N. Sippy, Rahul Rawail, Subash Ghai and Ramesh Behl but people are laying their bets on Kamal Amrohi's Razia Sultan and H.S.Rawail's Deedar-e-Yaar. Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Gulzar, Basu Chatterji, Shyam Benegal have their own following but people don't expect blockbusters from them....
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