Talent

by Gautam Chintamani

The arrival of an actor on a set is often accompanied by whispers, hushed enough not to raise the alarm but loud enough to let everyone know that ‘talent’ has arrived. Everything before this moment is but preparation—hammering out the perfect dialogues, designing and redesigning elaborate sets, intricate camera movements perfected to the last detail, background artists, sometimes in thousands, dressed to the nines and choreographed—all for the actor to deliver a line or a look. Everything fades into the background, and everyone else becomes secondary. Unlike most humans—and other creatures I suppose—cats don’t like to play second fiddle, and that is perhaps the reason why furry felines aren’t the first thing to pop into one’s head, when one thinks of animals in cinema. Although there have been many iconic cats in movies worldwide, Bollywood, the world’s biggest film industry, invariably relegates cats to a secondary spot, a few notches lower in the pecking order.

It’s not as though filmmakers don’t like cats, but this apparent lack of fondness possibly results from certain technical factors. For starters, cats are, well… famously moody, and when it comes to cinema, the ‘M’ word is dreaded like the plague. Why? The inability to get into action mode on cue is a factor that can make or break careers, and cats, to put it mildly, are not known for their ability to compromise on the matter of mood.

Unlike dogs, who have saved the day in many films such as Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (1994) or avenged their mistresses and masters in Noorie (1979) and Teri Meherbaniyan (1985), or horses that get you out of a sticky situation, say a la Dhanno in Sholay (1975), or become an inseparable part of your identity such as Raju-the-horse in Azaad (1978), who was immortalised by the R.D. Burman-Anand Bakshi song ‘Raju, chal Raju, apni masti mein tu... '’ cats, more often than not, are embellishments. Glorified props that are needed to convey something about the character, without doing any heavy lifting of their own. It is assumed that cats aren’t team players, and therefore it would be impossible for a screenwriter to come up with a cat version of, say, the scene in Manmohan Desai’s Mard (1985), where Raju Mard Tangewala’s sweet Labrador, Moti, and trusted stead, Badal, team up to save him from drowning to his death in quicksand.

Then there is the question of framing—a cat and a character can share the frame in limited ways. Nearly most cat appearances in mainstream Hindi films, or for that matter Hollywood too, can be traced back to the super-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld, James Bond’s nemesis, who was frequently portrayed stroking a white Persian. First seen in From Russia With Love (1963), the Blofeld character singlehandedly crafted the onscreen image of the cat that pretty much remained unchanged for decades. The image was further cemented in what is considered the greatest cat-appearance in cinema, The Godfather (1972), where screen-legend, Marlon Brando, found a stray cat on the shooting floor and included it in the scene, to give himself something to do. Interestingly enough, the cat purred enough to ensure that director Francis Ford Coppola did not edit it out. By the mid-1970s, this particular image of the cat in a villain’s hands had become a regular motif in popular Hindi films, as seen in Rafoo Chakkar (1975), Jay Vejay (1977), Paapi (1977) and Maha Badmaash (1977), where the mysterious villain was called ‘Mogambo’.

The onset of the 1980s, a decade often unjustly derided as the worst for Hindi films, saw the filmy billi share the screen with one of the greatest screen villains, Amjad Khan. For Khan, having enjoyed the high of Sholay’s Gabbar Singh, nearly everything else that followed ran the risk of falling short, especially when playing the baddie. While he had well-etched characters in Inkaar (1977) and Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (1978), there was little that he could explore as a villain, at least, on the face it. In Bombay 405 Miles (1980), Amjad Khan fiddled around with Baoding or Chinese mediation balls as a prop and took it a notch up to play the classic cat-stroking villain in Katilon Ke Kaatil (1981). Khan played the ‘Black Cobra’ and could be seen talking to ‘Ginny Darling’, a black Turkish van. The 1980s were a significant period for animals in Hindi cinema, with Ballu, the Eagle, playing Allah Rakha opposite Amitabh Bachchan in Coolie (1984), Tarzan and Ruby having a ball in Adventures of Tarzan (1985), Moti, the dog, being a good boy in Teri Meherbaniyan, snakes ruling the box office along with Sridevi in Nagina (1986), and Handsome, the pigeon, saving the lovers in Maine Pyar Kiya (1989). But it was essentially the same old tale for cats. With a bit of horror interlude in Ramsay Brothers’ Veerana (1988), they continued to be props for the villain. Although cat-stock rose a bit, with them being the super-pack for criminal kingpin Roshi Mahanta in Khal Nayak (1993), and even doing a bit of the dirty work for Gulshan Grover’s Billa in Gambler (1995), the 1990s, too, were no different for cats. Just to provide some context, this was an era where some creatures, such as a snake, even got to play the hero Jackie Shroff’s brother in Doodh Ka Karz (1990)!

Today though, the cat is no longer an afterthought or a villain prop in Hollywood, something more than apparent from the space given to the tabby both on the poster and in the narrative in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis. How long then before Hindi films re-imagine the cat? For an industry where most writers proudly wear the cat-parent badge on social media profiles, it’s strange that no one’s really come up with a great role for a cat. They might not have spent as much time in front of the camera, but one thing’s for sure, cats are the only other bunch that deserve the moniker ‘talent’ on a film set.