Chupke Chupke

Sulekha admires the intelligence of her brother-in-law Raghavendra and keeps telling her husband so. Her husband Parimal is a professor of botany and has had enough of the praise. He makes a plan: he will enter Raghavendra's house as a driver and fool him. His wife joins the game, his friend Sukumar comes in under another identity, and the lies pile up into something nobody can get out of. Hrishikesh Mukherjee's film draws on Upendranath Ganguly's Chhadmabeshi and its 1971 Bengali adaptation. The narrative contains no fighting, no violence and no melodrama; it is built entirely on wordplay and mistaken identity. Gulzar wrote the screenplay. Dharmendra plays Parimal, Sharmila Tagore plays Sulekha, and Amitabh Bachchan plays Sukumar. The film opened on 11 April 1975 and counts as a classic of Indian comedy. Who it's for: Viewers who like classic Indian comedy, disguise narratives, and 1970s Bollywood. Who it's not for: The humour depends entirely on dialogue and language, and some is lost in subtitles. The pace is also slow by present-day measure.