The Notebook Primer introduces vital figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.
Baazi (Guru Dutt, 1951).
Cigarettes, card games, taxi rides, nightclubs, jail cells. No matter the setting of a film noir, certain things remain constant. In Hindi crime films of the 1950s, Bombay—the most populous and densest city in India—came to stand in for New York. Both cities attain a certain romance when it rains. In both, taxis honk incessantly while the downtrodden brush shoulders with the rich and glamorous. Guru Dutt’s Baazi (The Gamble, 1951), the first film in what would be an illustrious career, introduced Indian audiences to a new kind of genre filmmaking, unsubtly inspired by the conventions of 1940s Hollywood noir. The box-office success of the film, the second highest grossing of 1951 behind Raj Kapoor’s iconic Awaara, proved to financiers that films about antiheroes and criminals could have mass popular appeal. Although its popularity waned within a decade, Bombay Noir had an indelible impact on the Bollywood industry, where its fingerprints continue to be found well into the 21st century.
Baazi begins with Madan (Dev Anand), a young gambler and drifter with a near-permanent wistful look on his face, throwing dice and winning a handsome sum of money in an underground betting parlor. The distinct silhouettes, tracking shots, and stark lighting, using shadows as impressionistic elements in the frame, are all direct quotations from the West. Dutt often frames his characters through taxi windshields and blocks their movements around the architecture of beams, bookshelves, and staircases, creating a distinct visual template that defined the genre, and one that he would continue to use in his films outside the noir genre, like Pyaasa (Thirsty, 1957) and Kaagaz Ke Phool (Paper flowers, 1959). The taxi in particular becomes a prominent player in Bombay Noir, a venue for revealing secrets, creating conspiracies, brooding over life-changing decisions, and professing love.
Anand, meekly holding a cigarette right at the edge of his lips, became the prototype for the Bombay Noir protagonist, unique within the generally prudish Indian cinema for their many vices: smoking, drinking, gambling, womanizing. In his next film, Jaal (The Net, 1952), Dutt cast Anand as an anti-hero drug smuggler who coldly and calculatingly takes advantage of a young woman, upending the expectations of the Bollywood leading man. In Baazi, Madan is the kind of loner who has been on his feet, wandering, scraping, all his life and for whom romance doesn’t come easily. He knows the stakes of the world he inhabits, riddled with gamblers and thieves.
Top: Aar Paar (Guru Dutt, 1955). Bottom: C.I.D. (Raj Khosla, 1956).
Bombay Noir is distinctly Indian, interweaving music, religion, and political history. The Bollywood staple of the “item number”—a musical vehicle for an actress who does not actually feature in the plot— was easily adapted to the nightclubs and dance halls of the film noir. Some of the most iconic Bollywood tunes originate in these films: “Aaiye Meherbaan,” from Shakti Samanta’s Howrah Bridge (1958); “Babuji Dheere Chalna,” from Dutt’s Aar Paar (This or that, 1955); “Bombay Meri Jaan” and “Aankhon Hi Aankhon Mein,” from Raj Khosla’s C.I.D. (1956).
Aar Paar, featuring Dutt himself in the lead role—one of two he played in major noir films, the other being in Pramod Chakravorty’s 12 O’Clock (1958)—repeats many of the tropes of Baazi, like the shadowy boss figure and the centralization of the taxi as the location of many of the film’s main plot points, but this time, it also features a heist, drugs, and several shootout scenes. It was uncommon, even shocking, for Indian films to feature brash acts of violence at the time, and their inclusion was one of the signature ways in which Bombay Noir brought the influence of Hollywood into Indian cinema. But even within Bombay Noir, violence and sexuality was toned down to levels even more restrained than what Hollywood dealt in under the Hays Code. The genre’s narratives also resisted the pessimistic and cynical nature of much foreign noir cinema. Bombay Noir adopted Hollywood’s aesthetics and portrayals of vice, but kept the Bollywood cinema’s romantic optimism.
C.I.D., produced by Dutt and directed by Khosla, one of his mentees, is perhaps the most fully realized of the Bombay Noir films, beginning with an absolutely stunning sequence of phone calls between anonymous parties hinting at a conspiracy to kill a newspaper editor. All the figures lay in silhouette or are filmed as disjointed limbs. The film starts off in near silence, with the faint ticking of clocks in the background, but suddenly the score crescendos and the opening credits roll. Khosla’s stylistic devices build atop the influences of Hollywood noir to create his own visual language. Centered on Anand’s detective , Khosla’s film brings with it the rainy, dark, and smoky aura of dread.
It was also the award-winning debut of a young Waheeda Rehman, who would go on to appear in another beloved noir of the time, Chakravorty’s 12 O’Clock, in which she starred opposite Dutt as a woman charged with murdering her sister. Several actresses also made major marks in Bombay Noir, including Nargis, who had two stunning turns—one in a dual-role as twin sisters in K. A. Abbas’s noir paranoia thriller Anhonee (The untoward, 1952) and another as the abused niece of an alcoholic uncle in M. L. Anand’s noir romance Bewafa (Disloyal, 1952). The roles of women in the genre tended to push against the boundaries of Hindi cinema’s traditional romantic narratives. While women were still predominantly treated as the love interests of male protagonists, they assumed an autonomy separate from their counterparts; their intentions and motives were often unknown, adding to the suspense. This deception is sometimes accomplished through double-roles: in Anhonee, neither the viewer nor the protagonist knows which character Nargis plays at any given time.
Top: Anhonee (K. A. Abbas, 1952). Bottom: Howrah Bridge (Shakti Samanta, 1958).
Samanta’s Howrah Bridge is perhaps the most peculiar film of the genre, and not only because it’s the only one that takes place in Calcutta instead of Bombay. Samanta was a master of compiling his influences, even if he lacked technical and artistic chops of his own. In the case of Howrah Bridge, we see a copy of the tunnel sequence from Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), several closed-door meetings from The Maltese Falcon (1941) with the central object replaced with a jeweled dragon mask, and the ending chase from Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948).
In the film, a detective named Prem Kumar (Ashok Kumar), based in Rangoon, Burma, travels to Calcutta and runs into Edna (Madhubala), a traveling nightclub performer who has just returned from Shanghai. The film is rife with racist caricatures of its Burmese and Chinese characters, most notably John Chang who is played by Madan Puri in yellowface. In its most romantic sequence, a riverboat ride, Samanta establishes the historical and economic importance of Howrah Bridge. Edna explains the way the bridge has become a symbol of industry in West Bengal, serving millions of workers and connecting the cities of Howrah and Calcutta. Not one for subtlety, Samanta dissolves the bridge into an image of Kumar and Madhubala staring lovingly into each other’s eyes, manifesting connective infrastructure as a symbol of love.
Top: Kala Bazar (Vijay Anand, 1960). Bottom: Woh Kaun Thi? (Raj Khosla, 1964).
By 1960, Guru Dutt had given up directing, though he continued acting and producing until his untimely death in 1964. Samanta’s China Town (1962) and Vijay Anand’s Kala Bazar (Black market, 1960), Teesri Manzil (The third floor, 1966) and Jewel Thief (1967) maintained an aspect of noir, though they became more interested in the traditional romantic dramas then enjoying resurgent popularity. Kala Bazar was one of the last true Bombay Noir films, once again featuring Dev Anand as a poor criminal drifter. This time, he becomes a movie-ticket scalper, which meets with the disapproval of his idealistic love interest, and their dysfunctional romance must navigate the immorality of the black market. It was only Raj Khosla, the genre’s greatest devotee, who continued to hold the noir flag unabashedly with the brilliant mystery thriller Woh Kaun Thi? (Who was she?, 1964) and the murder mystery Mera Saaya (My shadow, 1966), though even he began to mix his patented dark, moody atmospheres with more upbeat, daylit romantic sequences and comedic hijinks in what would become known as the “masala” hybrid genre tradition.
Bombay Noir could scarcely be found on Indian cinema marquees by the 1970s, and it wasn’t until the turn of the century that its characteristic lighting of silhouettes, gloomy rain, and criminal debauchery began to find purchase with a new generation of filmmakers. With the release of Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya (Truth, 1998) and Kaun? (Who is it?, 1999), and Anurag Kashyap’s Last Train to Mahakali (1999), Bollywood once again became home to grittier and darker themes, a striking departure from the syrupy escapist romantic musicals of the 1990s. While these were still strictly crime dramas with only peripheral elements of noir, a slew of pulpy neo-noir films soon appeared. Sriram Raghavan’s Ek Haseena Thi (There was a beautiful woman, 2004), underappreciated upon its release, was later hailed as a flagship of the neo-noir genre in India. While it maintained the moody atmospherics of classic noirs with heavy shadows framed by doorways, stairwells, and alleyways, it subverted the romantic reformation plot by involving both parties in the central crime, not just the man. Soon after, Raghavan’s follow-up, Johnny Gaddaar, and Kashyap’s No Smoking (both 2007) were released, sparking a resurgence of interest in noirs.
Top: Andhadhun (Sriram Raghavan, 2018). Bottom: Merry Christmas (Sriram Raghavan, 2024).
As the century progressed and India’s political situation swung rightward with the election of Narendra Modi, the Indian Censor Board became increasingly conservative, mandating on-screen warning labels in any scene that features smoking or drinking, which has hampered the further development of the genre. Much like the neo-noir pulp films of Hollywood, including Basic Instinct (1992) and L.A. Confidential (1997), current noir-influenced films in India exist, in the words of Lalitha Gopalan, as “strains dispersed across a range of genres but recognizable in lighting and archetypes.” Sriram Raghavan’s Andhadhun (Blind tune, 2018) billed as a “crime thriller,” features elaborately composed sequences. In one scene, the main character, who is blind, walks into his love interest’s apartment while she’s covering up a murder she committed. The sequence plays with the same sort of urgent but systematic camerawork and dialogue of the murder clean-up in Pulp Fiction (1994). Outside of Hindi films, movies in Tamil, like Thiagarajan Kumararaja’s Aaranya Kaandam (Anima and Persona, 2010), and in Kannada, like Pawan Kumar’s U Turn (2016), have clear influences rooted in Bombay Noir—particularly in their use of night and rain.
Raghavan remains the only neo-noir director in Bollywood. His movies feature energetic jazz scores that replace the slower and more soulful jazz of the traditional noirs. Dutch angles and overhead shots create a sense of disassembly and paranoia. Fifty years later, the interiors of cars remain safe havens for investigators and criminals alike to discuss matters of grave importance. Raghavan’s influences stem from Khosla and Samanta to Alfred Hitchcock and Jean-Pierre Melville. His latest film, Merry Christmas (2024), based on Frédéric Dard’s novel Bird in a Cage, concerns two forlorn individuals, Maria and Albert, who come upon the body of Maria’s husband with a gun in his hand. The ripe setup here, similar to Andhadhun, continues Raghavan’s exciting play with the history of Bombay noir. As in Baazi, we see protagonists down on their luck, gambling their lives to make something, anything, out of scraps.