Sholay Review

Sippy took two borrowed frames, the Leone western and the village that hires outcasts to defend itself, and built something neither original could have been in India. The ravines of Ramanagara stand in for the frontier, Dwarka Divecha shoots them in a widescreen format almost unheard of for a Hindi production, and the score alternates between menace and a jeep song that outlived the film itself. What makes it endure is Amjad Khan. Gabbar Singh is not a brute, he is a performer who enjoys an audience, and the writing by Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar gives him a rhythm of taunts and pauses that Indian audiences can still recite line for line.

Dharmendra and Amitabh Bachchan split the hero into a talker and a silence, and Bachchan's restraint is the reason the ending lands as hard as it does. At three and a half hours it sprawls, the comic subplots stall the middle, and the censored ending remains a real loss. None of that matters much. This is the standard every Indian action film has been measured against since.