BackBad losers
Not too many people have it in them to sportingly accept that they are second best or fit to come in only last
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The art of losing gracefully is exactly that. Not too many people have it in them to sportingly accept that they are second best or fit to come in only last. Do they swallow their pride, acknowledge their flaws, cede the contest to the other side, and retire to the pavilion with erect and intact spine? Not always, as is proved by our potted collection of blinkered politicians, egotistic fathers, spiteful spouses and evil hoodlums.
Secret Honor
The late and lamented American auteur Robert Altman based this 1984 production on a play by Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone. The movie is set in one room, stars one actor, and is essentially a rambling rant delivered over 90 minutes. Philip Baker Hall superbly plays Richard M. Nixon, the disgraced former American president who, over the course of dictating a series of memos to an unseen assistant, raves, curses his opponents, with some choice epithets for rival John F. Kennedy, justifies his actions, and exonerates himself of all wrongdoing. Secret Honor is a fascinating portrait of a politician who simply fails to see that he has been done in by his acts of omission. The movie is specific to Nixon and American politics, but it’s also universal (hint, hint) in its indictment of all politicians everywhere who can’t swallow the fact that they have been licked.
The War Of the Roses
Danny DeVito’s brilliant black comedy, starring top-of-the-form Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner as a couple that wants to tear each other apart, is a lesson in divorce proceedings and battlefield manoeuvres. Turner’s Barbara Rose demands a divorce from Douglas’ preening and patronizing Oliver Rose. She waives alimony but has one condition—she wants to keep the mansion that she has decorated, one Staffordshire object at a time. He refuses. Cue one of the most vicious, and hilarious, spousal battles ever seen, whose casualties include shattered crockery, a gutted sports car, a dead cat, and a strategically located chandelier.
Mughal-E-Azam
K. Asif made only two films in his life. One of them is enough to retire on. Mughal-E-Azam, one of the grandest historicals in Indian cinema, is, at heart, a minutely observed domestic drama between an obdurate father and his equally stubborn son. The father happens to be the Mughal emperor Akbar (Prithviraj Kapoor), who will not accept that his beloved son Salim (Dilip Kumar) has lost his heart to the courtesan Anarkali (Madhubala). Akbar’s refusal to abide by his son’s choice, his son’s hardening of stance, the repeated punishments meted out to the noble Anarkali, the verbal and military battles between father and son, and the splendid but ultimately stifling sets, make this a battle of wills of epic proportions.
Katha Don Ganpatraoanchi
Arun Khopkar’s adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s The Tale Of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled With Ivan Nikiforovich is set in a picturesque village by the sea in Maharashtra and concerns the souring of the great friendship between Ganpatrao Ture-Patil (Dilip Prabhavalkar) and Ganpatrao More-Patil (Mohan Agashe). Ture-Patil, a dandy who sees himself as made for greater things, falls out with the rustic More-Patil over an ancestral sword. A series of often hilarious stand-offs follow as neither man is willing to blink first, withdraw hurt or even stoop to conquer. The superb performances, Shanta Gokhale’s screenplay, and Satish Alekar’s biting dialogue offset the languid pace.
Cape Fear
Not the lurid, nasty, morally ambiguous and redundant Martin Scorsese remake, in which Robert De Niro’s vengeful convict tracks down the lawyer who nailed him. The original, made in 1962 by J. Lee Thompson, retains its ability to shock and awe. Robert Mitchum, who had played another Devil’s own in The Night of the Hunter in 1955, is Max Cady, a sexual deviant who steps out of prison with but one thought in his malevolent head—to make the lawyer whose testimony was responsible for nailing him suffer. Cady doesn’t for a minute believe that he has one wrong bone in him, and the screenplay doesn’t grant him any concession either. As he goes about stalking Gregory Peck’s upright citizen, harasses his wife, and threatens to rape their daughter, there is no doubt whatsoever that Cady fully deserves to be somewhere at the top of the Worst Losers of All Time list.
This fortnightly column tries to make sense of news, one movie at a time.
Also Read | Nandini’s previous Lounge columns
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