Deewaar

A film set in Bombay. The father is a union leader. During a strike he is forced to come to terms with the employer and the workers take him for a traitor; he leaves the town. After that the crowd tattoos a sentence onto his son's arm. The boy carries that writing for the rest of his life. The mother comes to the city with her two sons. She works on a building site, the elder son Vijay carries loads at the docks, and the younger, Ravi, goes to school. Years pass. Vijay moves into smuggling at the port and rises quickly; Ravi becomes a policeman. From there the film is about two brothers coming face to face. The same mother, the same house, and two separate sides. The mother stays with Ravi. What the narrative is interested in is not crime but being right: Vijay defends what he does and his defence is strong; the film does not draw him as a villain and gives his brother no easy answer. The scene where the two talk under a bridge is at the centre. Vijay counts everything he has and Ravi answers in one line; that line became one of the most repeated in Indian cinema. Vijay's quarrel with God is inside the narrative too; he will not enter the temple and his mother remembers it every day. The screenplay is by the pair Salim and Javed and is counted among the texts that established the angry young man of the period. Amitabh Bachchan became the face of that type with this part. Amitabh Bachchan, Shashi Kapoor, Nirupa Roy, Parveen Babi and Neetu Singh are in the cast. Yash Chopra directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes Indian cinema of the 1970s and strong screenplays. Who it is not for: anyone looking for realism; the narrative uses the melodrama template all the way.