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Three cheers for the thrills of ‘Teesri Manzil ‘! – ‘Matinee with me’

Jul 4 2008 | Views 514 | Comments (16)

Three cheers for the thrills of ‘Teesri Manzil ‘ !– ‘Matinee with m... Expand

Three cheers for the thrills of ‘Teesri Manzil ‘ !– ‘Matinee with me’

I had just stepped out of S.I.E.S school and entered the S.I.E.S college as a First year Science student. I was pleasantly surprised at the new-found basic freedom of being a college student,– which included the freedom of ‘cutting classes’ (something unthinkable at school) whenever one just don’t feel like attending the lectures---or whenever there is some ‘unavoidable circumstance’--- --- such as having to attend the matinee show at the near-by theatre! Rupam at Sion Circle (now a Multiplex Cine-something) was strategically located near S.I.E.S . Though it was just a stone’s throw away from the college, the students preferred to throw themselves at the theatre!

Now please don’t get my credentials wrong! I was not the irresponsible undisciplined rowdy type of teen-ager that you would imagine! I was a shy, sincere, spectacled student serious about my studies. Bunking classes for a matinee show was not in my nature. But tell me, when friends tempt you so much to join them, what can you do? First I say ‘No—No!’. They rationalize with me – ‘Let us see, What lectures have we today?—a boring lecture on Botany, then one on Zoology—Don’t worry, you can draw an amoeba in any shape you want and still get marks—next what, English and Hindi—Come on now, It’s a disgrace to attend language lectures in science stream! Forget it, yaar!’. I see their point and concede. OK, what about tickets? No problem, one of the fellows has already been dispatched to stand in the Q!

So at 11.15, we are inside the AC comfort of Rupam. There is chaos all around. It appears as if the entire college is inside the auditorium! Noisy banter, loud laughter, whistling etc. The commercials are on. Nobody is paying a damn heed to the ads. I think, why can’t these guys maintain some discipline and sit down quietly. Soon a documentary by Film Divisions on Rural Development starts. One student gets impatient and shouts towards the man at the projector -‘ Arre! Main Picture chalu karo re!’. Another gentleman from the matured uncles’minority in the audience sounds an admonishing ‘Shhh!’ to the errant student, but poor uncle is instantly greeted back with hoots and ridicule. As Rural Development makes its painful way towards the conclusion, the catcalls grow louder. At last Film Divisions prove their point that villages in India indeed have developed satisfactorily!

Suddenly there is a hush as the Censors’ certificate of the main film is displayed. Somebody reads aloud the number of reels for the benefit of the myopics among us!

Then the real show starts with a bang - a big banner of NH (Nasir Hussain) films and a thundering Urdu couplet. The audience screams for no apparent reason. I wonder, what is there to scream about an Urdu couplet that they don’t understand!

As the banner fades out, ‘Teesri Manzil’ explodes on the face! Right from the first frame, this guy called Rahul Dev Burman who seemed to be hiding behind the screen for the attack, suddenly unleashes his instruments on you! On the screen, a car is chasing another along the hill-ways on a rainy night. Two short violin pieces play continuously in quick succession exactly simulating the pace and tension of the situation. The credits roll on. The lady driving the first car gets down and runs towards a building. You can see from the glass pane outside, her silhouette rushing up the stairs followed by another shadow of a man close on heels. 1^st floor, 2^nd floor and further up—and then she desperately knocks at a door, ‘Rocky, Darwaza kholo!, Rocky, Darwaza kholo!’, as the shadow of the man is fast closing in on her. The back-ground music turns ominous and suddenly stops for a second--- as the shrieking woman is bodily lifted and thrown by her predator from the ‘Teesri Manzil’! RDB announces the bloody event with a loud trumpet, pauses a bit, then crashes his cymbals and goes at his drums with a beat that is sort of a cross between ‘Pink Panther’ theme and the 007 title track, but with lots of more punch. The camera swirls around the shocked faces including Shammi Kapoor’s, collected around the gravitated lady’s corpse. RDB’s beats raise the tempo culminating with the last credit-slide –‘Directed by Vijay Anand’. By now the audience is univocally vociferous giving out, not those hoots reserved for ‘Films Division’, but shrill shrieks of excitement and anticipation of more thrills!

‘Teesri Manzil’ was all thrills, not just because it was a murder mystery, but also because it was a musical wonder. Apparently unlike me, most of the audience were seeing the film for umpteenth time, as they knew exactly when to scream at RDB’s notes! I think, RDB would have jumped like a hungry tiger at the offer made by Nasir Hussain, who also knew his music ‘funda’s alright, right from the time of ‘Tumsa nahin dekha’(OPN) and ‘Jab pyar kisise hota hai’(S-J) days! So for the cynics like me who had always wanted Shankar-Jaikishen for a Shammi Kappor movie (that included Shammi Kapoor himself), RDB silenced ‘sab-ki bolti’ with the opening orchestral blast!

It was not that ‘TM’ was an out-and-out RDB show. Apart from music, it had great style! Vijay Anand’s narration of a crime caper was slick and imaginative with loads of thrills and fun too! After the credits, you find Shammi Kapoor on the top berth of a compartment with Asha Parekh sitting below and one pot-bellied man (Ram Avtar?) sitting opposite to her. Shammi makes monkey-faces at the fatso and forces him to break into uncontrollable peals of laughter which invites Asha Parkh’s wrath and she starts bashing the poor ‘mota’!

Asha is on the track of one ‘Rocky’, a band-player to avenge the death of her sister. She traces him to the hotel where Rocky plays his band daily. Shammi Kapoor (Rocky) who is also trying to get to the bottom of ‘Third Floor Throw-out’ puzzle hood-winks Asha about his real identity. He says he is substituting on the drums for ‘Rocky’ who is on leave. Asha pouts contemptuously that she had come to hear Rocky’s drums and she had to listen to this non-entity. Shammi takes on the challenge. So does RDB--- and throws at you ‘O haseena zulfonwali—‘!

Now the shrieking session has revived! Shammi thrashes the drums , Helen swoops down the curved stairs and the collegians cry hoarse almost deafening the voices of Rafi and Asha Bhosle! Then Shammi and Helen sizzle on the floor to Majrooh Sultanpuri’s rapid repartee:

‘Garm hai, tez hai, yeh nigaahen meri

Kaam aa jaayengi sard aahen meri!

Hey, Tum kisi raah-mein phir miloge kahin,

Arre, Ishq hoon, Main kahin teherta hi nahin!

Main bhi hoon galiyon-ki parchhai, Kabhi yahan Kabhi wahaan-------‘

Then RDB’s violins take you to high pitch and tug at you three times before dropping!

The steps and movements are wild, yet so gracefully executed---a far cry from some of today’s crude ‘item numbers’! Shammi tinkers with a glass and then blows a saxophone. Guitars and violins pump adrenalin into the auditorium. Now I am beginning to enjoy all this ‘shor’ around me! I don’t know what one calls it –Rock, Pop or Jazz, but ‘jo bhi hai khuda-ki kasam lajawaab hai’! I find myself rocking involuntarily on my seat to the RDB beats. Then I tell myself ‘Sit straight properly—like you used to sit at school-bench!’!

(Incidentally, the song won RDB the whole-hearted approval of Shammi Kapoor who seemed to have had S-J on mind for the film. Also when the film was released, a sporting Jaikishen rang up RDB and heartily congratulated him for the mind-blowing music!)

As the song ends, I compose myself and sit straight. But there is no respite. The second song starts soon. For prelude, RDB plays a crazy guitar piece that does somersaults repeatedly three or four times and hands over the mike to Rafi and Asha Bhosle. This time it is Shammi wooing Asha Parekh with ‘Aa jaa aa jaa, main hoon pyar tera—‘ feverishly shaking his head and repeating ‘Ah-ha aa jaa’ eight times for emphasis! Parekh in pink swirls around Shammi giving him the slip and ‘pehnao’-ing him the ‘topi’. Shammi dances with ruffled hair and goes berserk gesticulating in eight different ways for each ‘aa jaa’ while Asha swings fluttering her eyelashes. All that frenetic head-shaking and hip-swinging on screen with trumpets blowing and drums beating, drive the public to delirious frenzy. I suppress my own urge to scream. Aakhir discipline bhi koi cheez hoti hai!

(Strange coincidence! As I type this, there is a program on NDTV ‘Pancham Unmixed’ which shows Shammi crooning ‘Ahha aa jaa’ clutching his hair in the masti of the rythm!)

Agatha Christie’s whodunits could grip you, but you don’t read the same novel repeatedly. Alfred Hitchcock was a master of suspense who packed in some of the most bizarre situations in his script, some of them exciting and funny at the same time (Remember ‘North by North-West’ in which Cary Grant is left alone to drive on a treacherous hilly road after being forced to gulp a full bottle of Bourbon by a bunch of goons!). Nobody can beat Hitchcock when it comes to an intriguing plot, but Hitchcock Saab-ke filmon-mein aisa music kahan hota hai ( if you don’t count in ‘Que Sera Sera’ for ‘The man who knew too much’)? Here our own Vijay Anand mixes all the ingredients like suspense, music, romance and comedy in the right proportions like an expert ‘bhel-puri-wala’ from Juhu and gives on the platter ekdum ‘paisa-wasool’ entertainment, worth every penny of your ‘hard-begged’ (from Daddy!) pocket-money!

The first-half is fun and romance giving RDB the avenue to come up with another two very pleasant numbers, ‘Diwana mujhsa nahin—‘ – a Rafi solo and ‘O mere sona-re sona-re’, a Rafi-Asha duet in which Asha Parekh concedes to Shammi Kapoor’s ‘patao’-ing! Before you know, it is already ‘Interval’. Now there is commotion at the Samosa stall outside! No Sir, I don’t join the mad scramble for a few samosas! I told you already that I was not the irresponsible undisciplined rowdy type of teen-ager that you would imagine! I was a shy, sincere, spectacled student!

I try to take my mind off from the missed samosas and focus on the second half. The plot thickens now—like the thick tomato ketchup that goes so well with samosas! Now a whole lot of suspicious characters are hovering around the screen like Prem Chopra who points a rifle to shoot a distant bird, Iftekhar who leaves a misty cigarette smoke from wherever he spies on other suspects, Premnath urf Rai Bahadur Singh who lives lavishly in a Dak Banglow, K.N.Singh , Rai Saab’s a drunken house-keeper etc. The needle of suspicion keeps swinging. Who killed the lady? Well, that can wait. Meanwhile let’s have more of RDB. So we have a delightfully crazy ‘Dekhiye Sahibon’ in which Asha lets loose the ‘public’ on Shammi who clings to a ‘Merry-go- Round’ to avoid getting bashed up! The song is good fun with great camerawork matching the mood of the music. I think, the same situation was used differently by Tahir Hussain (NH’s cousin?) in ‘Anamika’ for a song –‘Logon na maro ise—‘ with Sanjeev Kumar and Jaya Bhaduri.

It is time to get a bit serious. Helen has a ‘raaz’ tucked up in her sleeve-less. So she gets shot the same way as the ‘broads get the bullets’ in James Hadley Chase novels, before she could divulge the ‘secret’ to Shammi Kapoor. Shammi himself gets exposed as the real ‘Rocky’ making him eligible for titles like’Jhoothe’,’Makhhar’,‘Dhokebaaz’ etc. from Asha Parekh, but not before delivering a superb last song, a solo by Rafi, my most favourite in the film - ‘Tumne mujhe dekha hokar mehrban---Rukh gayi yeh zameen, tham gayaa aasmaan, Jaane man, Jaane Jaan---!‘ – What a song!
'Lekar yeh haseen jalwe, Tum bhi na kahan pahunche!
Aakhir to mere dil tak kadmon-ke nishaan pahunche!'
- One can as well sing these lines to the fantastic trio of Majrooh-RDB-Rafi for such an exquisite composition!

The stock of songs are sadly over, but RDB still has a fantastic piece in store, when Shammi discovers the identity of the murderer by his host’s coat in which one diamond stud is conspicuously missing . The missing button had been tightly clutched in the fist of the dead woman. Terrific closeup-s of a sweaty shocked Shammi’s face when he realizes the truth, are accentuated with a more terrific back-ground score by RDB! Finally after a scuffle, the killer himself drops himself to death from an altitude equivalent to that from which he had thrown the lady in the title-scene. The police arrive dutifully after all action is over! The film ends with a funny note with Shammi and Asha again in a train compartment, this time on honey-moon, encountering the same pot-bellied man who tries to escape from them to avoid trouble!

Vijay Anand’s creative direction makes the film a gripping entertainer and places it a cut above the rest of typical crime thrillers. But ‘Teesri Manzil’ is more remembered as a musical classic that changed the trend of Hindi film music irreversibly! The film was released way back in 1966. But Rahul Dev Burman was a maverick clearly much ahead of his time. He broke all the rules and raised the tempo of Hindi film music to a feverish pitch several ‘manzil’s higher!. Western music never sounded more jazzy and classy in any other Indian film, before or after ‘TM’!. So it is no wonder that after four decades ‘Teesri Manzil’ still rocks at matinees!

Well, to cut the long story short, we were back in college corridor next day and discussing the ‘TM’ experience. This guy who had stood in Q the day before at Rupam comes and starts, ‘Listen , Today is Thursday’. ‘So?’. ‘So---er—today is the last day matinee show of ‘Teesri Manzil’ at Rupam!’ So why not we---‘. I nod my head vehemently, ‘No—No—er—Ok, Why not? OK,Yes’! ‘Let’s see what have we today? Oh! Physics Lab? The same silly experiment of moving the convex lens to and fro till you remove parallax! Journal? Fikr not, we can copy from that front-benchwala Bakul Mehta’.

So we are back again at Rupam, throwing all shame to the rains outside! There is chaos all around inside. FD documentary is on. One voice shouts ‘Arre! Main Picture chalu karo re!’. I turn towards the voice and am shocked to find that the shouter is none other than Bakul Mehta,the front-benchwala of college! I mutter to my friend ‘Just look at him! What’s he doing here? How irresponsible! Now how we will finish our journals?’! Anyway worry of

journals later, ‘Teesri Manzil’ now! The show starts with a bang - a big banner of NH (Nasir Hussain) films and a thundering Urdu couplet. People shriek cheeringly. And to my horror, I find myself whistling and screaming hoarse along with them for no apparent reason!

Now please don’t get my credentials wrong! I was not the irresponsible undisciplined student --------, well, may be till I saw 'Teesri Manzil'?!

Musically yours,

S.V.Nathan.

P.S: Visit the following song-dance sequences and get crazy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwN9Mgq0aSc – ‘O hasina zulfonwali--’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSYQd2Q1N7I – ‘Aa jaa aa jaa---‘

Coming shortly on this matinee show!