11 Years Before Sholay When Sambha Danced For Thakur
A decade before Sholay happened and changed the fortunes of many actors who starred in it, there was Joy Mukherjee and Saira Banu’s Aao Pyar Karen (1965) which starred Mac Mohan and Sanjeev Kumar as friends and supporting characters to the lead. By the time Sholay happened, Mac Mohan and Sanjeev Kumar had taken completely different routes, and post-Sholay the former had found himself famously reduced to “Poore Pachaas Hazaar”.
It is interesting to think how cult movies build and destroy actors. Sholay, whose main heroes must be its writers Salim Khan and Javed Akthar, perhaps by the sheer aura of its dialogue and characters did more harm than good to actors like Asrani and Mac Mohan burdening their careers with the fame of Jailor and Sambha. Though movie buffs would know that Asrani has had wonderful roles in some Hrishikesh Mukherjee movies to boast of, there are only petty villainous roles in Mac’s kitty — in most of which he was called Mac, because it mattered so less.
Film writer Jai Arjun Singh in an interesting blog post looks at Mac Mohan’s career vis-a-vis those Sholay lines where he brings up Satyajit Ray’s short story “Patol Babu Film Star” and the Mac tribute in Zoya Akthar’s meta film Luck By Chance.
In this song “Yeh Jhuki Jhuki Nigahein” from Aao Pyaar Karen we see a completely different Mac — lithe and graceful as he strips and dances to Mohammad Rafi’s voice — accompanied by Joy Mukherjee. To provide some context to the song, we must know that Sanjeev Kumar, Joy Mukherjee, Mac Mohan and Manavendranath (as this blog post says) are friends who hatch a plan to convince a moneylender for Kumar’s benefit. So Mac is stripping and dancing here for the the moneylender (in white kurta-pajama).
Debojit Dutta is a co-founder and editor at AntiSerious. Some suspect he secretly writes fiction, evidence suggests he is fictitious.