Khoon Khoon (1973)

Khoon Khoon is a 1973 Bollywood action film directed by Mohammed Hussain. The film stars Mahendra Sandhu, Danny Denzongpa, and Rekha.With a driving funk theme and blood-dripping title graphic, Khoon Khoon‘s opening credits clearly announce that the film’s director, Bollywood B movie maestro Mohammed Hussain, has changed with the times, moving on from the gee-whiz swashbuckling thrills of sixties efforts like Faulad, Aaya Toofan and Shikari to lurid subject matter much more in tune with the tenor of the seventies’ less restrained Indian cinema. What’s still intact, however, is Hussain’s tendency to hew very closely to Hollywood models in the crafting of his films. This is the man, after all, who helmed one of Bollywood’s earliest adaptations of Superman, and who based his successful Dara Singh vehicle, the aforementioned Aaya Toofan, on Nathan Juran’s “Harryhausen” pastiche, Jack the Giant Killer.

In the case of Khoon Khoon, Hussain’s model is Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, a film that had been a major hit in the U.S. just a couple of years earlier, and which had provided a career-defining role for Clint Eastwood in the process. While he certainly takes his liberties, Hussain here sticks close enough to the original that I was able to easily follow the story without English subtitles. All of the major set pieces are recreated, often with pains taken to duplicate certain shots. As a result, the film – while being a scrappy little entertainer in its own right – is especially fascinating for how it melds the lean economy and uncompromising grittiness of its inspiration with the more colorful and excessive conventions of 1970s Bollywood. And I have to say that, for the most part, it does a pretty good job, though the end product doesn’t carry nearly the same weight as Siegel’s film.Seeing release in 1973, Khoon Khoon was made during a time when Amitabh Bachchan was still yet to popularize the image of the angry young antihero in Indian cinema, and, as a result, Indian movie audiences may not have been considered ready for a protagonist of such deep moral ambiguity as Eastwood’s Harry Callahan. It is perhaps for this reason that Khoon Khoon makes its biggest departure from its source, casting its version of Harry (played by Mahinder Sandhu) as a typical Bollywood policeman hero of the day: an upright and honorable caretaker of the public will who enjoys both the respect of his peers and the support of his superiors, and who comes home each night to a loving family comprised of his beautiful wife (a very young Rekha) and doting parents. As a result, Khoon Khoon strips away almost all of Dirty Harry’s elements of character study, reducing the story to its police procedural bones, and instead gives the narrative flesh by way of the usual musical numbers, candy colored art direction, and episodes of comic relief provided by Jagdeep in the role of Harry’s partner.

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