Teresa Reviews Gumnaam (1965)

Teresa Reviews Gumnaam (1965), the Bollywood musical version of And Then There Were None, and found the clash of British and Indian cultural traditions perplexing.

Source: Amazon Prime

(c)2023 by Teresa Peschel

Fidelity to text: 1 murder weapon

The isolated mansion on a deserted island with bunch of strangers who start dying remains. Everything else is different.

Quality of film: The standard group of icons but shade the bottom half and not the top half

It depends on how you feel about Bollywood productions. Their conventions are very different from Western cinema.

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.

Ten Little Indians (1939), later retitled And Then There Were None, was Christie’s seminal novel. At 100 million copies sold, it’s the bestselling mystery in the world, and one of the biggest selling novels, period. It inspired countless imitations, starting with her stage play in 1943. You’ve seen it on stage (the ending’s quite different from the novel), you’ve seen multiple filmed versions, you’ve seen films loosely based on the premise including slasher flicks like Friday the 13th, and you’ve read countless novels that use the same idea.

I guarantee you’ve never seen it performed like this.

The plot is amazingly simple: A pack of strangers are gathered in an isolated location and an unknown assassin picks them off one by one. As the story progresses, you learn that the strangers all earned their fate.

Now, consider India, a literate, cultured, wildly diverse country that’s been strongly influenced by the British since the 1700s. Agatha’s novels are wildly popular there, in English and in translation. India also has a long history of filmmaking, frequently involving plenty of singing and dancing.

What could be more natural than Indian cinema making an Agatha Christie film and adding musical numbers? Which brings us to Gumnaam, which translates as Unknown or Anonymous, and a very loose remake of And Then There Were None.

None is no one’s idea of a cozy, charming mystery. For one, everyone dies horribly because they deserved it. Even the stage play, softened considerably so the novel’s two worst characters turn into our heroes, doesn’t stint on the slashing and hacking and drowning and poisoning. It’s harder to imagine any of the characters bursting into song, although it was done in 1945 version by Mischa Auer, the 1965 version by Fabian, and the 1974 version by Charles Aznavour. Each played the first victim, who sang their song and died from cyanide-laced cocktails shortly thereafter.

Nobody danced. Certainly no one sang and danced in a huge Busby Berkeley-style spectacular with an ornate stage, statues with flashing, laser-beam eyes, and hundreds of gyrating, costumed backup dancers and singers. They didn’t dance in happening nightclubs, backed by a combined orchestra / rock ’n’ roll band, nor did they dance on the beach. They didn’t sing and dance romantically in the rain. The castaways were too busy getting killed, or waiting to be killed.

But this is a Bollywood production, so you’ll get all of that singing and dancing and more! It’s performed by a star-studded cast who were the toast of Bollywood in 1965 and decades afterwards, although they’re relatively unknown outside of India.

As you can imagine, I’m still not sure what I watched. I spent much of the film with my mouth hanging open. The only Bollywood films I’ve seen have been bits glimpsed on a TV in an Indian restaurant. I was completely unprepared for the experience.

The film opens with murky action shots that depict some kind of murderous conspiracy out of the Godfather. It was hard to tell, which was truth in advertising of what was to come. I’m still not sure we saw the entire film as released in 1965 in Mumbai. Some of the scene shifts were so choppy it felt like a reel was missing. Much of the film was so badly lit, the actors emoted in the dark, and it was difficult to see what they were doing. The subtitles were … adequate. I got a sense of what was going on, but I am positive I missed the nuances that would have led to a greater understanding of the film and the humor that must have left audiences rolling in the aisles across India.

Still, what remained was surprisingly funny. Yes, the most nihilistic novel Agatha ever wrote, has scenes played for laughs.

The opening demonstrates how far away you are from the novel. After the murky conspiracy, we move to a very happening nightclub where everyone is wearing a black domino: the audience, the staff, the dance band, the lead singer, the lead dancer in fringed gold lamé, her crew of backup dancers in pink fringe, and the army of boy dancers. The performers are strutting their stuff as if it’s the last dance in the world. It’s high-energy and a mix of Indian music and ’50s rock ’n’ roll. Guitars, drums, horns, and sitars. Pay close attention because you’ll never see any of those people again.

The performance over, the nightclub MC announces that a select group of seven people have won a fabulous two-week vacation at a luxury resort. They fly off, accompanied by an air steward. The plane develops engine trouble, makes a forced landing in a pasture, the passengers and the steward exit with some luggage and the plane flies off, abandoning them.

After traipsing through the jungle, listening to a mysterious singer (the same lyrics heard during the opening credits and you’ll hear them a lot), they find a palace. It’s a decrepit ruin on the outside and opulent and perfect on the inside. God knows where the generator providing the electricity is hiding; maybe in the catacombs,. set in what looks like the statue garden of a convent.

Inside, they encounter a sheet-draped body on the dining room table. As our eight castaways watch, it slowly rises to its feet as if pulled up by wires. The sheet slips away and reveals India’s biggest comedian, Mehmood. Like Deadpool, he aware he’s being watched and not just by a crazed slasher who wants to murder the guests. Think of the other versions of None you’ve seen and replace the butler with Jerry Lewis or Jim Carrey. He’s wildly out of place, almost in another movie, but it’s Bollywood, so just go with it.

The castaways get to know each other but they’re never directly accused of their crimes. They never confess to each other or to the audience. Not until a very truncated ending do you learn that there’s no psychotic judge wanting to punish murderers who got away with it. No, it turns into a gangster revenge flick in the last fifteen minutes! The man behind the curtain (who faked his death and got the doctor to cover it up) was angry because he’d been cheated in a smuggling deal and sent to prison.

The ending made no sense at all. Asha, our heroine, is completely innocent in every possible way. Her only crime consists of being a murdered crime boss’s niece. The air steward, her love interest, turns out to be a policeman in disguise, on the track of our villain. There was no reason ever given to explain why our villain went to all this trouble to remove five irritants and a niece, plus the butler and his sister. Yes, in the last five minutes, it’s revealed the butler has a sister in red who’s been following everyone around and singing the same song endlessly. Why? Don’t know.

But that’s Bollywood, I guess. Gumnaam must have made much more sense in Hindi. It’s wildly different from the other versions of None. It stands alone, sufficient unto itself, and that’s why I gave it the rating I did. You, dear reader, can either accept it on its own terms or dance away as fast as you can.