They don’t make ‘em like Pran anymore

There’s a scene in Guddi (1971) when a film-crazy Jaya Bhaduri is clearly rattled seeing Pran during a shooting. You could not blame her; the entire nation was terrified of Hindi cinema’s most famous onscreen villain!

Yet, as Guddi goes on to show, Pran was an absolute gentleman in real life. The fact that he managed to transform into Mr Hyde when the cameras began whirring is testimony to his genius as a performer. It is this versatility that allowed him to move out of this dark space of villainy into stronger character roles in the 1970s.

One of my favourite Pran films is

Naya Zamana where he is, well, not exactly a paragon of virtue but not all that bad either. As the rich businessman who ends up pinching another man’s idea for a book as his own, Pran was brilliant in combining arrogance and vulnerability.

A year earlier (1970) had seen him making the onscreen transition from the bad-to-good guy in

Johnny Mera Naam , one of the finest crime flicks after Teesri Manzil and Jewel Thief . And even while the villainy honours went to Premnath, Pran’s role was pivotal in this Vijay Anand masterpiece.

He reverted to being the bad guy in Roop Tera Mastana two years later, but 1972 still saw him at his comical best in Victoria No. 203 (with Ashok Kumar) and the role of the no-nonsense patriarch in Parichay . Both were fabulous performances but it was Zanjeer in 1973 and the role of Sher Khan that catapulted Pran to a new space. Some of his memorable roles thereafter include Majboor, Don and Karz where he was up against top box-office heroes like Amitabh Bachchan and Rishi Kapoor but still managed to hold his own comfortably.

Was Pran, Hindi cinema’s best villain? Obviously, there will be a whole lot of opinions on this subject but he stands alone when it comes to sheer durability. You just have to see him in Madhumati made in the late 1950s or Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai and fast forward to Karz in the 1980s to get an idea of Pran’s genius in readapting himself to changing times.

I am not too sure if other screen villains like Prem Chopra, Ranjeet or Premnath had this kind of a staggering bandwidth. It is only the Big B who, like Pran, can take credit for astonishing staying power when most of his contemporaries have literally vanished from the scene.

For someone who has been in Hindi cinema for over six decades, it is a crying shame that the Dadasaheb Phalke recognition should come so late to Pran. He is 93 today and there was no reason why he should not have bestowed the honour in the 1980s. But then age always seems to be the criterion for such weighty awards. What a tragic irony for a country where two-thirds of its population is under 35!