May 18, 1998

With six films due for release this year, and many more in the pipeline, the ageing star has more than a hit at stake.

By Madhu Jain

Amitabh Bachchan has been threatening to ride into the golden sunset for some years now. But he's decided to play god a little while longer and not let that sun go down on him in tinsel town: six of his films will be out this year, and as many are in the pipeline. For the ageing "angry young man", 1998 is going to be a turning point, a make-or-break year. "If these films fail, I will have to hang up my boots and pack my bags," he says with a shrug. "Then I will sit here and run the office." The Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Limited (ABCL), he admits, is in the red: "We are all broke, threadbare."

Yet, nobody dare write off the 55-year-old Bachchan. Not yet. An icon with his talent can resurrect himself, like melted ice cream shoved back into the freezer. But the film industry is watching. Closely. One failure -- his last film, the Rs 15 crore Mrityudaata was an unmitigated disaster -- can be written off as an accident, or just a bad film. A second flop would have the industry asking, "Has Bachchan lost it?"

The man who could do no wrong for almost two decades finds he is at a bewildering crossroads in his life. Both on-and off-screen.

One road leads to the vintage Bachchan, superhero of the '70s. And leading him down this back-to-the-future path is K.C. Bokadia whose Lal Badshah, in which Bachchan plays a neighbourhood Robin Hood with a Bihari accent, would have Laloo Prasad Yadav do a double-take: if anything, Bachchan is a perfect mimic. Says Bokadia, the man who put him back on the pedestal after the fallow period of Ganga Jamuna Saraswati and Jadugar: "This is a pure commercial film. No reverse gears, no experiments. This is pure vegetarian Bachchan -- I have nichoroed (squeezed out) the Bachchan of the '70s." Down this road, Bachchan does those hip-thrusting, swivelling dance numbers with Manisha Koirala and the long-legged Shilpa Shetty.

The other road takes him to the new edition Bachchan, the one who actually acts his age. In Major Saab, an ABCL production directed by Tinnu Anand, he is wise and grey and married to, as Bachchan himself puts it, an "equally grey Nafisa Ali". Says Anand: "Major Saab could not have been played by anyone else. It has an angry man, but he is playing his age."

Yet another role has him playing both father and son, so he gets to eat his cake and have it too. In Padmalaya Films Production's Suryavansh, a remake of a Telugu film, Bachchan has a double role, as he does in Veeru Devgan's Hindustan Ki Kasam and several other films on the floor.

Down another path, he has hitched himself on to the successful David Dhawan-Govinda bandwagon. Bade Miyan Chote Miyan, a Bollywood take-off on the Comedy of Errors, with both stars playing double roles, is vibrantly funny, and in the old Manmohan Desai mould which asks you to leave your logic outside the cinema hall. No longer the lone star in a vast sky, Bachchan now has to share screen space with younger, saleable stars like Ajay Devgan, Sunny Deol and even generation next like Arshad Warsi. Obviously, Bachchan is taking no chances: he's trying out all the options simultaneously. He could so easily have turned his back on all this and begun the vertiginous but ultimately wise descent into character roles. Or gone the Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson way. Maybe even in the wake of Dilip Kumar.

Bachchan at the moment is an actor desperately in search of a genre. Indian movies fall into two categories, according to director Shyam Benegal: the action movie and the young love stories. "There are no other tried and tested formulas," says Benegal, "Bachchan has to find a new genre for himself, but the market here has not shown any proof of this being possible."

It's not as if the actor is living in a fool's paradise. "If you are a failure, you are a failure," he says in that tautological, almost deadpan, manner of his, "and of course I am one ... If your last film is a success, there are smiles on the faces of people, if not, there aren't."

Nor does he think that he can still run around trees and play a college-going lad: "There is no attempt at all to defy age or to do things that are deliberately stupid. No actor would want to do that, and least of all I."

But in an era dominated and dictated by youth and music, he still has to shake those hips: in Lal Badshah he swivels them with as much abandon as Manisha Koirala does hers. Though, as Bachchan points out, all that thrusting is justified because it's happening in Koirala's imagination: "She is chasing me. I am not chasing either of the young heroines in the film."

And in Bade Miyan, he has to keep up with the gyrations of the unstoppable Govinda. And it's hard work, as he says: "Well, there's a lot of rehearsals, a huge number of retakes and a lot of embarrassment." No wonder, it's a slimmer and sprightly Bachchan who goes from studio to studio in that old faithful beige van of his.

But should grandpas like him be horsing around with women half their age? Bachchan may be less of an angry man on screen today, but the anger is still smouldering, beneath the stoic surface. "The concept of an actor is hopefully bereft of his personal attachments. So what if I am married? So what if I have a kid? Or that I am a loner or unmarried? This is one profession where such so-called encumbrances are not in consideration when you look at the career graph of an actor. One can take healthy criticism, but one can't say that you are a grandfather so you should be sitting at home. That simile is incorrect." The "rocking chair" will have to wait until the box office and his producers give the thumbs-down sign.

And so the on-screen lover and fighter will carry on. Meanwhile, back in real life, Bachchan has put on his boxing gloves. ABCL is under siege: the company is said to owe about Rs 17 crore to Doordarshan (DD), a fair amount to NDTV, and some of its cheques to other companies have bounced. Bachchan says that he is challenging the amount demanded by dd. It's operation rescue. And friends of the Bachchans say that for the past six months brother Ajitabh -- the one with a head for business -- has been back in the picture. He has always been on the ABCL board but was apparently not involved in its day-to-day management. "The two brothers have come together again, their relationship had taken different turns over the years," says a family friend.

At ABCL, it's operation restructure: the number of employees has shrunk from 120 to 30 and most of its offices have shut down, explains Bachchan. The "so-called professionals" took them for a ride, but now ABCL's core group is back at the helm. And bailing them out is the Sahara India Group. Though Bachchan insists that it is not pouring in money and newspaper reports about Sahara giving Rs 150 crore is incorrect. "They are helping us with creative management," says Bachchan, "We have an emotional relationship with Sahara because of my friendship with Mr Subrata Roy."

ABCL is down, but is not yet a terminal case: "It is still in the ICU, with all the life-support systems. But I assure you the patient is still alive." Bachchan's off-screen mission for the next couple of years is to get the patient back on its feet. He's now making the Mirinda Lemon advertisements for Pepsi and taking on other assignments to make up for ABCL's losses.

Bachchan's charisma may have dimmed a bit because new kids on the block like Shah Rukh Khan have moved in with glowing halos. "There's been a generational shift," says director Mahesh Bhatt. "The audience's gone teeny-bopper, and anger no longer sells. Irreverence does." But Bachchan still walks as tall in Bollywood: nobody can question his acting, only his taste in roles. For many, he is still the larger-than-life money-spinner. Says Bokadia, almost reverently: "Amitabh Bachchan is Ram and I am his Hanuman."

There is even a buzz about his new releases because Bachchan and Shah Rukh are, according to Trade Guide Editor Tarun Adarsh, the only two stars who can assure a good opening. "One can't write off Bachchan, he has survived so many disasters," adds Adarsh.

Yet, it may not be so easy this time, according to Komal Nahata of Film Information: "His career is at stake. Though I must add that people have liked the promos of Major Saab, and those who have seen Lal Badshah's trials like his Bhojpuri accent."

The resurrection of Amitabh Bachchan may yet be round the corner. But he has to beware: there's another tempting road leading off that crossroads: Sunset Boulevard.

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