"unmitigated trash": an opinion piece on 1970s films from Filmfare September 1–15 1978

I can count on one hand the number of points that I agree with in this piece by Tony Mirchandani entitled "The 70s—Cheap Stunts, Loud Music, Stale Stars"—and one of those is that villains often wear "silver, blonde, or even purple wigs." Some of the observations just don't hold up under the privilege of hindsight; for example, we would probably all agree that Amitabh Bachchan has had plenty of staying power, even if we haven't always applauded his deployment of it. Mirchandani's claim that films and audiences are wildly unpredictable is an interesting contrast to what I feel I hear critics of Bollywood (by which I mean people who don't like it or dismiss it, not the film critics) say in despair of "mass entertainers" today.

This piece appeared in the same issue of Filmfare in which I found the article on Vinod Khanna quitting the industry and the kerfuffle over the casting of Kranti (see them here). I have to applaud Filmfare for running a piece with such a crabby humorless lacking in imagination and capacity for joy divergent attitude towards contemporary popular cinema.

The first image shows the whole page; click on the second two to get images big enough to read.