Haré Rama Haré Krishna

Evergreen Actor Dev Anand has acted a lots of movies.But Hare Rama Hare Krishna is one of the best of Dev Anand.Zeenat Aman also doing her excellent performance as a Nepali Girl.It was one of the biggest hits of all time.Evergreen Anand's direction is quite faulty(like in most of his directorial ventures).I never understood the purpose of the film apart from its innovative theme.Anand's willingness to break new ground.Specially i like the O Re Ghungroo Ka Bole Sung By Voice Of Asia Lata Mangeskar For Mumtaz & Dev Anand in Hare Rama Hare Krishna.This super hit movie was released in 1971 and the highest grosser of the year.It was starring Kishore Sahu,Achla Sachdev,Mumtaz,Dev Anand,Zeenat Aman,Prem Chopra and Rajendranath and all were doing their best.

Dev Anand (or Prashant) and Zeenat Aman ( Jasbir/Janice) are siblings brought up in single parent families. Jasbir (the sister) grows up in an affluent environment but this is not enough to lead her to reject her life and ultimately join a hippie movement that eventually leads her to drugs. Prashant (the brother) on the other hand grows up in a less affluent environment but grows up to be a matured gentleman. The story marks Prashant making efforts to save his little sister (who is perpetually in a trance) from a hostile hippie environment. This movie stands the test of time, commenting that cults and hippie groups are a place for those who give up on their lives when they should instead stand up and be counted in the face of adversity. Great music compositions in this movie that mean different things in different situations and to different people, and the director brings forth an eerie feeling to it.

Prashant and Jasbir are siblings. They were separated at childhood when their parents decided to part ways. Prashant remains with his mother and Jasbir -- with her father and his new wife. Years later, Prashant is in search of his sister. To his complete shock he finds out that she is located in Nepal and is a part of a group of young hippies, which includes unemployed drug addicts who spend most of their time at parties. She calls herself Janice and everything she does is in order to forget her past. Hare Rama Hare Krishna is one of the most famous films of Dev Anand, and its popularity comes mainly because of its rather racy presentation of the hippie movement and the modern culture in general. But the film as a film does not really work that much. The concept is very interesting but the script is quite poor and very often it turns into a big melodramatic mess. Anand's direction is quite faulty (well, like in most of his directorial ventures). I never understood the purpose of the film apart from its innovative theme and Anand's willingness to break new ground.

Where acting goes, the movie belongs to Zeenat Aman. With this film, Aman introduced a new heroine to Hindi cinema, characterised by her westernised nature and modern persona. This image was only consolidated by her proceeding films. This role is as bold as the film itself or even more, and Aman does full justice to it. She looks really beautiful and even within the rather messy proceedings manages to create a conflicted and troubled young lady who you end up feeling for. This is a very good debut and sadly she never managed to get many great chances in her career. Dev Anand is terribly miscast as he looks too old for his part. His Prashant is supposed to be 24-25 years old, but Anand himself is at his late forties, which is a total joke. Mumtaz is there to look pretty, and she definitely does. The music is excellent - well, after all it's by master R.D Burman. Asha Bhosle's fantastic rendition of "Dumm Maaro Dumm" is obviously the most memorable. Clearly, an interesting concept, "Dumm Maaro Dumm" and the presence of Zeenat Aman pretty much sum up Hare Rama Hare Krishna.

We do not come across movies on brother-sister relationship in Indian cinema, or any other language or medium. This relationship has several aspects which have not been exploited in movies or novels. Typically, a sister is depicted as a pile-on who can be used for ransom in the climax. This movie treats the subject in an entirely different light.

It is inspired by George Eliot's novel "The Mill on the Floss". The brother is very prosaic, all-good, the blue-eyed boy who is a conventionally good son and a favorite with his mother. The sister is romantic, wild and defiant of the unwritten rules of the society. In spite of this, the love of the brother-sister is the winner.

This movie is about the love of the two siblings who are separated in childhood and revival of the same feeling when they meet years later. It is also the quest of the subdued brother to reunite with his sister who has chosen to be wild to defy the world.

Although the movie and the novel are set about 3 centuries apart in two distant countries, yet the sentiments are the same and still hold true.

This one grew on me. I love the R.D. Burman music and in spite of the cruder elements of the story I found much to be moved by as I kept re-watching the movie. The brother-sister plot line is powerful, I thought; there's also more probably obligatory stuff, like bar fights, a loony crime story, etc. that are just distracting. (Though not unfunny from a certain point of view.) Also the English translation is definitely by someone for whom it was a bit of a stretch, and as loony as it is I am grateful to him for doing it.

Like many of the Bollywood movies I've seen, this one is melodramatic and opera-like, including here notably a song sung first by a little boy to cheer up his abused and unhappy sister, and then the same song sung 12 or so years later by the man who has travelled to Kathmandu seeking to re-connect with this girl, grown up and troubled (she had been told her brother and mother were dead), numbing her pain with drugs.

A super thing about this 1971 movie is that it is about the hippie movement, which brought hordes of seekers to India, from an Indian point of view, that sees them as people driven to India by a spiritual hunger aroused by the failings of their own societies, but nonetheless, in India, living only for the pleasures of the moment. The hippie singing-dancing-drugging scenes are truly wonderful, and accurate in their tone (I'm old enough to remember), and I feel pretty sure that the masses of young white zoned-out kids are actual hippie extras, as I remember hearing about kids on the caravan to the East getting this kind of work in Bollywood.

(It is not about the actual Hare Krishna movement, though the movie hippies sing a Krishna/Rama chant, as do a group of actual Indian devotees, unrelated to the hippies, in the opening scene of the movie.)

~Virginia