The Beatles (The White Album): All Thirty Tracks Ranked And Revisited

30- Wild Honey Pie

Even by the Beatles' exceedingly high standards, there had to be a lower end of the spectrum to begin with. Jaunty, a bit whimsical and somewhat pointless, this brief interlude from McCartney sounds like a practice run for the vintage pop froth of the similarly named Honey Pie.

29- Good Night

This closer to the epic album is a simple lullaby written by Lennon and sung, with a 1950s style swoon, by Starr and it is pretty much that. However, given their indisputable brilliance in pop, it sounds quite sweet and blissfully reassuring, just like a lullaby should.

28- Mother Nature's Son

While aurally as sugary and invigorating as anything by McCartney, Mother Nature's Son is something that he had not only done before but also what he would do later. It will still sound ethereal and vivid, especially as dawn breaks and your senses are still blissfully sleepy. 

27- The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill

With typically smarmy wit, Lennon turns a lyric for a children's song into a scathing parody. The nutty words were penned back in Rishikesh and lampooned a certain American who was reportedly boasting of his exploits as a game-hunter. Everyone can be heard singing along joyously, including Yoko Ono.

26- Piggies 

Long before Pink Floyd thought up of an entire album devoted to Orwell's Animal Farm, Harrison gave the upper-crust piggies of English society a good whacking in this baroque ballad that disguises sneering disgust slyly with a shimmering veneer of childish banality. It is both Machiavellian and melodious.

25- Why Don't We Do It In The Road?

This was McCartney at his cheekiest. Reportedly inspired by the ludicrous sight of monkeys copulating in the hills of India, this doo-wop howler has him roaring the titular lyric again and again with an almost infectious verve that could have worked even better for a longer, sleazier cut.

24- Don't Pass Me By

The second song sung by Starr has a wonderfully upbeat rhythm and makes for some fun-filled, head-nodding listening during a lazy picnic. The self-referential lyric is clever as well and you do end up wishing that he had written a few more songs in his run.

23- Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da

Don't write off this bouncy ska song just because it is considered as one of their lows. Instead, marvel at how Lennon's jaunty piano intro kicks off one of the most charming and cheerful moments in the album. McCartney might have fussed over it but it is still pure musical bliss.

22- Sexy Sadie 

Conversely, it is McCartney's tinkling piano that begins, unforgettably, one of Lennon's most acidic compositions, a barbed attack at the alleged misdemeanours of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in which he is turned from spiritual guru to a sleazy trash queen. Typically, this Beatle hides none of his scandalised anger. 

21- Martha My Dear

Trust McCartney to turn something mundane, like a song to croon to his sheepdog, into something sweet and irresistibly bubbly. Martha My Dear is all over the place melodically but the boyish Macca sings with such delicious relish that you can imagine Martha nuzzling lovably by his side in the end.

20- Glass Onion

Everyone agrees that the Beatles were really trying to say something. Except Lennon, who decided to shut up the experts and textperts with this rocker laden with obscure clues and hints but revealing nothing. Listen to it again though and you might be tempted to spot many glimmering layers of subtext.

19- Honey Pie

The best McCartney vintage pop ditty evokes vividly the domestic austerity of scratchy tunes playing from gramophones in suburban houses in the 1940s. It is a song that you would love to twist and sway to and the lines hint devilishly at the romance between bold America and nostalgic England itself.

18- I'm So Tired

When we first hear Lennon, he does sound tired and troubled too. Written when he was miles away from Yoko Ono in India, the languid atmosphere of this late-night ballad of solitude turns pensive and desperate as he screams his own frustrations to breaking point in unison to Harrison's guitar.

17- I Will

The simplicity of this ballad, shorn of satire and snark, is so effective that it will remind you of the days when the Beatles were writing those teenybopper chartbusters. At the same time, McCartney's deft guitar-work and Starr's gentle bongo drumming make it old-school material made with modern skills.

16- Birthday

The crazed, adrenaline-pumping fervour of Birthday proves, above everything else, the Beatles were still awesome at rocking and rolling really hard. Lennon and McCartney share vocals and trade thrilling guitar riffs and Starr pummels those drums to set the stage for a real birthday party. It is throwaway but very thrilling.

15- Back In The USSR

Referencing Chuck Berry with cocky, unabashed chutzpah, McCartney delivers one of his smoothest and sweeping cuts, propelled with his new-found talents at both electric solos and quick-witted lyric. The song debunks all those myths about Soviet Russia being a dull place. It is the perfect opener to the album. 

14- Cry Baby Cry

Lennon is compellingly unsparing as ever, even if Cry Baby Cry sounds like a famous nursery rhyme lyric played out as baroque pop. The subtly sharp words, whispered maliciously, sneer at childhood neglect and George Martin's  harmonium adds to the elegiac, satirical essence. The more often you listen, the more it haunts. 

13- Yer Blues

One of the three essential rock songs of this album, Yer Blues is tongue-in-cheek, tersely written and thrilling all at the same time. A zesty spoof of British blues, this Lennon number features him yelling and screaming in despair while Harrison's and his guitars spit out solos that make you shiver. 

12- Julia 

Armed with nothing else than an acoustic guitar and a poetic plucking technique, Lennon pens out his most impassioned love-letter to the eponymous enigmatic woman; it is both his mother who died early and Yoko Ono. He sings his heart and speaks his mind, painting a sublime portrait of dazzling feminine beauty.

11- Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey

Yes, that is how funky it actually is. On repeated listenings, one cannot help but be addicted to its deliciously berserk spirit, with all the four rattling and tooting with their instruments. It is also cheerful and celebratory as Lennon eggs everybody to share his heady thrill of falling in love. 

10- Rocky Raccoon

This country number from McCartney (of all people) becomes truly sensational with the individual pieces chipped in from others. Martin's honky-tonk piano tinkles with juicy relish and Lennon plays the harmonica for one last glorious time. And Macca himself jams along with zest. This is the most underrated song on the LP.

9- Revolution 9

Infamously maligned for being incoherent, this epic mishmash of unearthly noises, random mutterings, explosions, hollering crowds and Geoff Emerick saying Number 9 again and again, is actually the greatest slice of avant-garde music of the 1960s. It has a twisted, disjointed rhythm and as a portrait of chaos, it unnerves like nothing else.

8- Savoy Truffle

Once again, to brilliantly satirical effect, the Beatles turned a mere joke into a rambunctious barnstormer crammed with reckless invention and energy. This time, it was Harrison sniggering at his friend Eric Clapton's sweet tooth for exotic sweets. But others dig it for new meanings, including casual sex itself. As sumptuous as those chocolates.

7- Revolution 1

Granted, the faster, breakneck cut of Revolution is undeniably more urgent and commanding but the bluesy flourishes and the shoo-be-do-wop of the slower take is a snazzier, spikier piece of music. The famous inclusion of the count me out/in ambiguity makes Lennon's message more resonant and everyone sounds very enthusiastic.

6- Blackbird 

Talking of political resonance, McCartney's Blackbird is that one single moment in the album that vindicates their prescient awareness of the overwhelming reality of the era. It is a stirring and stunning message composed with affection and it is intended for a victimised, marginalised culture that needed much-needed hope in those tumultuous days.

5- Long, Long, Long

By this time, Harrison had evolved into not just a virtuoso songwriter but also a musician with a clear-minded grasp of his material and abilities. With a haunting Indian melody woven out of his acoustic chords, Long, Long, Long is a strange and sublime ballad, penned in exhausted, almost wistful affection for God. 

4- Dear Prudence

In India, Donovan taught Lennon a thoughtful finger-plucking method; the latter uses it along with his cool, calming voice and able support from others to craft a lush watercolour portrait of sun-kissed idyll that refuses to age even today. Dear Prudence is Lennon at his most upbeat. The pastoral flavour is reinvigorating and it also paves the way ahead for the transcendent beauty of his evergreen songs of peace and love that would dazzle everyone.

3- Helter Skelter

What is this bizarre, bawdy and beautiful hard rocker all about, really? Is it about kids having a wild party at a playground or is it something seedier, seamier altogether? You don't really care because McCartney's sexy, screaming voice, his barking guitar, Harrison's sleazy slide fretboard, Lennon's jagged six-string bass and Starr's blistered drumming fingers create musical mayhem that refuses to be tamed by convention. It is impossible to find a more outrageous Beatles song elsewhere.

2- While My Guitar Gently Weeps

Harrison himself was gently weeping at how the band was breaking up in the space of the recording studio. This heartrending rock song ,that oozes with almost orgasmic pain, is his angry voice of protest, disguised a heartbreak song to break all hearts.While My Guitar Gently Weeps brings together all the three guitarists and Eric Clapton to open those raw wounds and let the music wail. It is a song that cuts deep and leaves you bleeding.

1- Happiness Is A Warm Gun

What happens when you throw in a heady serving of simmering sexual desire laced with urgent psychotropic cravings and a smattering of the most deliciously abstract writing? Lennon blended them all together, built a three-act miniature rock epic and everybody was seduced. Like A Day In The Life, Happiness Is A Warm Gun straddles and struts across the disparate worlds of erotica, kitchen sink satire and psychedelic blues all in the space of less than 3 minutes. If that is not extraordinary, what else is?

50 Years Of The Beatles (The White Album): A Fabulous Canvas Of Musical Revolution

In his book Beatles Vs Stones, author and columnist John McMillian called Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (another seminal musical masterpiece that turned 50 last year) as the 'soundtrack to the remarkable summer of 1967'. Unlike that year, when love and peace were the mantras being chanted by millions of impassioned fanatics and free love-mongers in the West in the haze of bliss and psychedelia, 1968 was not a year that deserved a celebration, let alone a lovely soundtrack. This was the epoch of dissent, disillusionment and the gradual dissolution of all hope. 

The Vietnam War had entered its most dispiriting and desperate chapter, Robert Kennedy was assassinated because of his idealistic liberal stance and  the Manson family was just a year away from their most notorious exploits that would leave a nation shocked and stunned to silence. Things might not have been so grim across the Atlantic, except that a foursome of incredibly charming Liverpudlians, who were already crowned as arguably the greatest musical sensation of the decade, were about to break up and the writing was on the wall, on the blank white cover of their latest epic album. 

Can The Beatles, also known more popularly as The White Album, be called as the soundtrack to the tumultuous days of 1968? Indeed, it would be right to call it that, no matter what its detractors at the time said about the songs being apolitical and irrelevant. In fact, as it turns out on revisiting the album on every occasion, there are more political parables to be found in The White Album than in any other Beatles album in the past, both pointed in their fury and punchy in their satirical barbs. And it can be agreed unanimously that the album's varied styles, its eclectic and almost avant-garde flavour, is what captures the predicament and despair of the year and crystallises it as a chronicle of a troubled time. If Sgt. Pepper was the sound of the Summer Of Love, The White Album was the noise of the Winter Of Discontent.

Before I go deeper into that, let's hit closer to home and consider what this magnificent album represented for the band itself. 

If the year 1968 witnessed the dissolution of the euphoria of hope and happiness that had flooded the world in 1967, it also signalled a possible end to the road that had been tread by the Beatles till now; it was high time since each one of them considered the inevitability of them going on their own individual paths rather than continuing as an indivisible band for more years. It is important to understand that by the latter half of the 1960s, the Beatles had changed in ways more than one. Not only had they traded their harried and hurried routine of live performances from city to city for the relative comfort of the recording rooms in Abbey Road, which also allowed their truly incredible songwriting talents to flourish in unprecedented ways; they had also changed individually, from Liverpudlian musicians coming up the hard way to make it big in England and the rest of the world to musical revolutionaries who now sought new grounds for pushing musical boundaries on their own. 

It could not have happened while they had remained as tightly knit a band as ever; and in any case, they were confronted with many life-altering changes and decisions on both the professional and personal front. Their long-time manager Brian Epstein had passed away, leaving behind a vacuum of professional management which paved the way for the travesty with Allen Klein; their idealistic yearning to find enlightenment under the wing of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at Rishikesh had soured when the latter was accused of sexual misconduct, thus turning Lennon and Harrison vehemently against the spiritual guru. 

And finally, when it came to recording the massive pile of material that they had written and thought up in all these days, the studio turned into a literal battlefield of big arguments and even bigger egos, resulting in 30 compositions that defy easy classification and categorisation. What better name for an album teeming with chaos than The White Album? 

Then again, what better name than The Beatles, given just how well this album, more than the others, showcases everything unique and great about them?

Listening to the Deluxe Edition of this massive, maddeningly brilliant double-album, restored brilliantly by Giles Martin, the son of the de facto 'fifth' Beatle, proves all the cranky critics of the record to be stupefyingly wrong. To call The  White Album as unfocused, variable in quality and even self-indulgent and pointless, is to miss the glittering moments of pop brilliance that you find even its minor marvels, the cheeky pastiche of Wild Honey Pie, the Sinatra-like moonlit beauty of the lullaby Good Night, the enjoyably bonkers recourse to early rock and roll of Birthday and even the cheerful, sunny optimism of Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da. Not to forget the unfairly maligned poetic disorientation of Revolution 9.

These are only some of the enjoyable and extraordinary moments to be found in an album that is alternately seething in anger, sly in lyrical repartee, slinky in its sexual allusions and sublime in its beauty and poignancy. When I called it my personal favourite of all the Beatles albums (and that is a tough call since even slightly off-kilter works like Magical Mystery Tour and Let It Be throw up many nuggets of exotic delight), I meant it because it was the Beatles firing on all cylinders, pushing themselves in both songwriting and lyrics and in the process, also laying down the groundwork for their own individually unique styles; they were no longer just the Beatles the band but they were also the Beatles the four musical legends with a firm sense of their respective individual strengths and talents. 

Today, while that original assessment holds up pretty well, it is also wonderfully refreshing to see that the Beatles actually return to their roots, to the early days of improvisation and bursts of clutter-breaking songwriting that defined their bare beginnings so distinctly. In four seminal works before The White Album, the Beatles had experimented successfully with the transcendent beauty of psychedelia. It was in the 1968 album that they returned to the jam sessions and jittery improvisation of their days at Cavern and Hamburg but with a palpably matured approach, blending their now-flawless skill at both wordplay and instrumentation with a rugged, reckless sense of audacity and anti-perfection. Barring the baroque melody of Harrison's Piggies and the heady vintage pop effervescence of McCartney's Honey Pie, most of the other songs see the Beatles presciently conscious of the limited musical viability of psychedelia, which makes them turn to hard rock, modern pop and even blues. 

Secondly, even with all the terse, frequently sudorific atmosphere of the recording sessions, there is a pulse-pounding and alive, albeit angry, taste of passionate, almost competitive output from all the four members. It is to be found in the most unlikely of corners, from Lennon's sombre bass beats in Rocky Raccoon lending the much-needed nihilistic weight that it needed to be  the Western-twanged country number it is to McCartney's twinkling piano intro of Sexy Sadie, adding to the sardonic tone of Lennon's slyly disguised rant against Maharishi himself. Harrison's writhing solo adds to the tongue-in-cheek effect of Yer Blues and Starr's pounding drums for Long, Long, Long is an upbeat surprise that offsets the haunting, almost elegiac feel of the song. 

Given my gushing love for The White Album, I was delighted, thrilled, moved and stunned in equal measured on rediscovering my absolute favourites and on stumbling upon more gems to add to my memories. Lennon's lusty and sweaty Happiness Is A Warm Gun is still my pick of the best song in the album, followed closely by Harrison's heart-rending While My Guitar Gently Weeps, which features guest Eric Clapton with a wailing guitar alongside virtuoso work from others and McCartney's berserk and bizarre Helter Skelter, possibly the hard rock song to beat all other hard rock songs. But there are so many songs that contend for lasting brilliance here, from the self-referential snark of Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey, the wistful romance of I Will and the colourful production of Starr's Don't Pass Me By. 

The voices and lyrics are top-notch too, from McCartney's African-American soul-inflected howls in Why Don't We Do It In The Road to Lennon's typically biting wordplay in Cry Baby Cry, an acerbic lament of neglect at childhood disguised as a nursery rhyme. I had always thought the faster version of Revolution, to be a more thrilling rocker but the album version, slowed down and made more bluesy by the shoo-be-do-wop in the chorus, is a snazzier piece of music, guaranteed. 

There is another reason why The Beatles was the four legends at their best. That brings me to the Esher Demos included in the Deluxe Edition. 

When the Beatles returned from their bittersweet Indian pilgrimage, they met together at Harrison's home in Esher, Surrey. This was the fertile ground on which they pitched their songwriting ideas to each other, many of which would go ahead to form the upcoming album and some which would be a mainstay of their respective solo careers, just a couple of years away from beginning. 

Little did the four know, at the time of their improvised jam sessions at Esher, that there would actually be cracks that would divide them for once and for all. In fact, as the easy-going, languid air of these sessions, available for the first time on the Deluxe and the Super Deluxe Editions, proves, the Beatles were still sharing that infectious and relentless dynamic that itself makes the unplugged demos of most of the songs from the album so endearing in their own way. 

There are, of course, musical delights to be found in these recordings as well. Harrison's acoustic version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps sounds purely sublime; Lennon's Dear Prudence and I'm So Tired are as lively and sardonic, laced with his witty mutterings, as the album recordings and McCartney's Blackbird is melodically immaculate without a rhythm out of place, as a sign of his musical craftsmanship. There is also two alternate versions that deserves special mention. The stripped-down first take of Yer Blues is moodier, bluesier and belongs ideally to Lennon's acoustic work in his solo years and his Everybody's Got Something To Hide…has a cheekier mood with recklessly strumming guitars.

Included in the Esher demos is a clutch of half a dozen songs recorded that did not make it into any of the Beatles albums. Harrison's Sour Milk Sea was given away eventually to Jackie Lomax to make his debut with Apple Records the same year; McCartney's austere Junk remained what it had begun as: a purely acoustic guitar song. Lennon's Child Of Nature, rather interestingly, morphed from his response to Mother Nature's Son into the confessional love ballad Jealous Guy in Imagine. Similarly, Harrison used the hauntingly melodious Not Guilty and Circles in his later solo albums. Most unfortunate, however, was Lennon's quirky What's The New Mary Jane, which was left out of the album at the last minute.

In 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated as yet another crusader of idealism and it was also when the Soviet Army invaded Czechoslovakia, thus ending the brief spring of freedom that the country had enjoyed from its steel-fisted grip. The Beatles aka The White Album feels like a subversive, troubled and urgent response to the erosion of this idealism from the world; Back In The USSR imagines, blissfully, how it would be on the other side of the Iron Curtain and Revolution takes a jab at the very thick-headed revolutionaries who 'go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao' with 'minds that hate'. Its counterpart, Revolution 9, also portrays the horrifying images of fear and chaos that anarchy or violent revolution would mean for the world. And all these songs also inspired, by a freak accident, Charles Manson and led ultimately to the most shocking happenings of the generation. Is it any wonder that this was the Beatles at their most revolutionary? 

30 Great British Films- Part 2

20- Peeping Tom (1960)

Dir- Michael Powell

This was the reportedly infamous (at the time) film that destroyed the career of one of Britain's true filmmaking legends. And this is a travesty since Peeping Tom, released in the same year as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, is a stealthy, superbly crafted slasher in its own right. Both films also feature compellingly socially awkward male protagonists who are grappling with demons that stem from their childhood; in case of Powell's suitably sordid and grimy tale, filmed also in the choicest of seedy streets of Soho, it is a superbly stifled and tormented Carl Boehm  as Mark Lewis, a secretive shutterbug who lurks around corners stealthily and arouses the curiosity of his demure-faced neighbour Helen (Anna Massey). Meanwhile, two women have already been murdered with fear frozen literally on their faces. Powell's gripping gritty visual style might have put off conservative viewers and critics back then but it serves the morbid premise perfectly. Ultimately, Peeping Tom has more questions than answers and is a bit unwieldy towards the climax. But with spine-chilling effect, it proves that we love to stare at fear and sleaze like the titular voyeur himself.

19- The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

Dir- Alfred Hitchcock

Almost all Hitchcock fanatics and even Francois Truffaut swore that his 1956 Hollywood remake of this early British thriller is a classier job, what with the touristy Moroccan locales and the more sensational stunner in the Royal Albert Hall. So, what makes me prefer the 1934 film, with its gritty, improvised flavour, over that more lavish film? There is a good reason for that: the original version is not only leaner and meaner but also laced with a disarming sense of goofball humour that undercuts the simmering menace very effectively. With a running time of less than 90 minutes, Hitch dispenses with the buildup arc that would be a signature in his subsequent works and instead cuts right away to the meat. Instead of the deceptively leisurely buildup of the remake (Doris Day singing Que Sera Sera, anyone?), this one is a pure white-knuckle entertainer with a brisk, businesslike air and the director even strips the reveals of melodrama. There are none of Day's hysterics to be found here. Shorn of all the flab that makes the later film occasionally weary, this is just more thrilling overall.

18- Lawrence Of Arabia (1962)

Dir- David Lean

One David Lean is who made Brief Encounter, the magnificent Dickens adaptations in the 1940s and also one of the most intelligent World War II films of all time. The other is the man who preferred an epic and lavish scale to balanced storytelling. Lawrence Of Arabia falls somewhere between these two distinct filmmaking styles; it is as staggeringly spectacular a period epic and costume drama as Doctor Zhivago and A Passage To India and yet it has none of the silly bombast of Ryan’s Daughter. And let’s be even more generous: this immaculately crafted desert war adventure has lost none of its dazzling visual beauty, its flashes of poetic profundity and its irresistible old-school charm as exuded by its extraordinary cast. Leading an ensemble of greats like Sir Alec Guinness as a silky Prince Feisal and Anthony Quinn as the boisterous Auda abu Tayi is Peter O’Toole’s charismatic yet compellingly vulnerable Lawrence, both a rousing, rallying hero and a man confronting his inner demons. It is also shot with a transcendent beauty by Freddie Young and scored with mesmerising, almost romantic fervour by Maurice Jarre.

17- The Ladykillers (1955)

Dir- Alexander Mackendrick

Like The Italian Job, you can forget safely the redundant Hollywood remake (so what if it was directed by the Coen Brothers?) and settle down to the loony and deliciously dotty pleasures of this timeless Ealing comic caper. Scripted ingeniously by American writer William Rose, the nutty and naughty The Ladykillers is one of those wacky comedies that you wonder why didn’t anybody else think of before. The gentle, If sometimes overwhelmingly earnest, Mrs. Wilberforce (a delightful Katie Johnson) allows the cunning and grinning Professor Marcus (a devilishly brilliant Sir Alec Guinness) and his motley crew of fellow heist artists to lodge in her jaunty little house, thinking them as musicians. When the gang botches up the robbery, the truth is soon revealed and soon, each of them decide to take turns to dispose of the dowager to darkly hilarious results. Director Alexander Mackendrick orchestrates the shenanigans with a smooth, silken touch punctuated by Rose’ split-second repartee. And meanwhile, the film also takes us back to a quaint old post-war London of bumbling bobbies and wizened ladies that feels like an altogether different world today. 

16- Sabotage (1936)

Dir- Alfred Hitchcock

More than The 39 Steps, Sabotage reveals Hitchcock laying down his trademark template for his more introspective thrillers firmly in place: an infuriating moral conundrum, sweltering tension in the space of slightest movements and split-seconds and compellingly crafted set-pieces that grip the viewer without relenting. Set in a London teeming with literal chaos, the film is an ingenious spin on Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. Suspicious-looking cinema owner Mr. Verloc (Oskar Homolka) is nudged into a dastardly anarchist conspiracy intended to make the loudest noise. Unknown to him, a diligent plainclothesman from Scotland Yard has his eyes and ears open but is it already too late to prevent the upcoming disaster? What follows is a tightly written and compellingly shot yarn that unfolds with an authentic urban flavour. The suspense is sombre, the signature Hitchcock characters are hilarious (watch out for a seedy pet store owner and a toothpaste pedlar in particular) and somewhere in the middle of it is a deliciously protracted scene of nerve-wracking, ticking bomb dread that pulls us right into the suffocating hold of city traffic. 

15- Kind Hearts And Coronets (1949)

Dir- Robert Hamer

Of all the Ealing comedies, Robert Hamer's Kind Hearts And Coronets is the one that is laced with the most acidic of laughs, aimed with cold-blooded perfection at the snobbish and stiff upper-lipped pecking order of England and how it deems only the rich and affluent as worthy of greatness. Dennis Price plays Louis D'Ascoyne Mazzini, the erstwhile scion of the Dukes of Chalfont who is denied his legitimate claim to the title because of his parentage: his father was a mere Italian opera singer. Not to be put off by this cold-blooded snobbery, Mazzini swears revenge served cold and cynical as he sets out to despatch, one by one, all the potential successors that stand in his way. All of them are played, in a phenomenal stroke that would make Peter Sellers fume with envy, by the chameleonic and charismatic Sir Alec Guinness, who breathes quirk, gruff indifference and even welcome warmth in these hapless victims. But there is more. As Mazzini himself comes closer to his coveted goal, Hamer paints a brilliant portrait of selfish arrogance akin to the aristocracy that he detested. 

14- Victim (1961)

Dir- Basil Dearden

As of now, Basil Dearden’s Victim is just the barnstorming cry of protest against homophobia and prejudice that we need with urgent immediacy. In our own India, as pig-headed attitudes are being obliterated and our own hypocrisies are being re-examined, we need a film this stirring and powerful, about an upper-crust London lawyer tugged into a vicious scandal of blackmail targeted at homosexual gentlemen, more than ever. But even beyond its undeniable resonance, this is also a taut, terse drama that unravels like a ticking time bomb of nervous emotion. Dirk Bogarde is indelible as the suave lawyer Melville Farr who, after a shocking incident, decides to stand up for the right thing regardless of the consequences. Filmed across the city buzzing with malice and paranoia by London-veteran cinematographer Otto Heller, the film is an edge-of-the-seat thriller that reveals our hideous demons of loathing and prejudice, all the while demanding that a country or culture can never be progressive and free if people are victimised for their differences rather than their failings. As it happened, the message got through and Britain legalised homosexuality in 1963.

13- The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957)

Dir- David Lean

Like the Pierre Boulle novel on which it is based, The Bridge On The River Kwai is both a rattling men-on-a-mission yarn and an intelligent examination of military pride and racial ego and a man hell-bent on preserving them against all odds. That man is the infectiously affable Colonel Nicholson, played with fastidious, almost manically delusional brilliance by the incredible Sir Alec Guinness. When ordered by his steely Japanese captor Colonel Saito (a wonderfully well-rounded Sessue Hayakawa) to allow his officers to aid his war-worn soldiers in building a bridge from Thailand to Burma, Nicholson refuses obstinately to give in; when he does relent, it is only to take over the whole project and get the bridge made with maddening perfection in a bid to prove the might of English resilience and craftsmanship in face of adversity. Parallel to this engaging battle of wits and personalities is the second narrative of a ragtag British commando unit dispatched into the jungles to blow the bridge up. The visual and verbal pyrotechnics explode in the film’s anarchic climax, where Lean demonstrates his flair at both drama and scale. 

12- Barry Lyndon (1975)

Dir- Stanley Kubrick

Was it a fortune to Britain and a matter of regret to America that Stanley Kubrick migrated to the former, leaving behind Hollywood? Indeed, only there the auteur was able to do his unforgettable work without big-studio interference. Of them all, his magisterial, meticulously crafted adaptation of Thackeray’s novel ranks as an extraordinary achievement. No other modern epic has boasted of such jaw-dropping grandeur, not merely indulgent but rather authentic, but crystallised like a tableau of life of that era. The director with cinematographer John Alcott created marvels of staggering beauty, vistas of the idyllic English countryside that resembled the ethereal works of Joseph Turner, marching columns of Redcoats, deliberate duels in glinting sunlight and candle-lit interiors that were shorn of the merest trace of electric illumination. And art directors Ken Adam and Roy Walker captured the wistful social serenade of the milieu from the pastoral farms and gritty battlefields to the opulent castles and svelte boudoirs. Yes, you can argue that the film is as cold-blooded as its American critics perceived it but that is the point of it all: the diminished place of empathy and agony in face of the larger-than-life facades of stiff-lipped orthodoxy that England was all about in those days.

11- Brazil (1985)

Dir- Terry Gilliam

It is oddly bittersweet to know that more than 3 decades after its release, Brazil refuses to age even a day, not only as a brilliant satire on the manipulative evil of bureaucracy in urban society but also as an acerbic portrait of an alternative dystopia that feels so starkly believable. The passage of time has made us viewers only more aware of the disturbing vision that it presents; the outrageous hilarity of Gilliam’s trademark oddball, Python-esque kitsch is offset by his more resonant understanding of human predicament and despair when faced with an infuriatingly apathetic system of paperwork and numbers.  That said, it is also typically English in mood and milieu, populated by devilish dowagers and bumbling cops, dotty old-timers and paper-pushing stiff clerks and mashed together with the disillusionment of Orwell with the urbane cynicism of Huxley. In the heart-pounding and ultimately shattering climax, when Jonathan Pryce’s hapless Sam Lowry croons the eponymous song as a haunting echo of blissful escape, we know why Brazil is still timely: ordinary life is cold and cruel but a song can still take you to a warmer, jollier place.

Andhadhun: A Spellbinding Thriller Of Blood And Blindness

I wonder if The Third Man had been that effective, that clever without Anton Karas' zither strumming every time a new plot twist was dished up on the screen. Sure, it would still have Sir Carol Reed's finely calibrated direction, the legendary Graham Greene's sardonic and swift script and Robert Krasker's twisted yet poetic camera angles (not to forget those memorable turns from Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles) but would it be that much fun as an unforgettable slice of cocoa-dark noir as it was with those jaunty strings ringing whimsically, be it when people are chased through cobblestoned, cold-blooded Vienna at night or when they are discovering inconvenient truths about each other? I don't think so. 

Indeed, the greatest, most sleekest of our cinematic mysteries need to have some of the loveliest music of all time. We need a Bernard Hermann to make us hear the frenzied slashing of a knife, we need a John Williams to make our collective hearts beat when something under the water is heading our way. And as evidenced in Reed's classic, we need, of all things, a zither to orchestrate mayhem. 

In his latest firecracker of a thriller, Sriram Raghavan picks out a grand piano.

References would be obvious, especially to the fascinating short film The Piano Tuner but the director, always with a flair for doffing his hat to eclectic reference points and then tweaking them in his own inimitably saucy style, uses that one concept, of a prodigy whose impairment works as heavenly inspiration as well as a social disguise, and fleshes it out beautifully, almost audaciously, into a rattling good yarn of murder, betrayal and greed that would have made the Coen Brothers rub their hands in anticipation. All this while the piano keeps on tinkling as it should be, like a Ray Manzarek solo any to lend poetic weight to Jim Morrison's psychedelic visions. 

Akash is an aspiring pianist who also happens to be blind. He is all alone and he has enough reason to grumble about being holed up in Pune's Prabhat Colony with only a cat for company but he is always looking at the brighter side of things. A winsome and vivacious girl warms up to his deft finger-work at piano keys after she nearly runs him over with her two-wheeler and soon, things are looking even sunnier than ever. Until, of course, an ageing and visibly self-indulgent Bollywood old-timer, with his heyday long behind him in the past, is equally won over by his talents and asks him to come home one afternoon for an anniversary surprise for his wife. 

Yesteryear chocolate boy Anil Dhawan plays this faded celebrity Pramod Sinha with juicy relish and as witnessed in both Johnny Gaddar and Agent Vinod, Raghavan and co-writers Arijit Biswas, Pooja Ladha Surti, Yogesh Chandekar and Hemanth Rao have a rollicking time with this veteran actor cast largely as a self-obsessed version of himself, poring over comments on videos of his memorable songs on YouTube and gloating that he has lovers from a country as far as Denmark. To which his wife, a strikingly handsome and alluringly comely dame, played by one of the finest actresses of all time, pipes, a little more than helpfully, 'Isn't that where Hamlet was set?' 

At the appointed hour, Akash comes with practiced fingers and innocence and we find this wife, who was, moments earlier, cooking up crab with more mischievous allure than Nigella Lawson herself, all harried and dazed. Perhaps it is time for us all, as Raghavan demonstrates with devilish wit, to pull off our blindfolds and see just what is happening. 

Many a thriller has come on Bollywood that has played with the same tropes of unwitting witnesses to the most dastardly of crimes. What distinguishes Andhadhun from them all is how it subverts the template completely and becomes so much more than just about a death in the afternoon. This film is not just one Agatha Christie murder mystery told with the grimmest of humour and the most juicy, pulpy detail; it is, in fact, more than all noir classics piled up together, a film doffing its hat more to the moral greyness found in the 'entertainments' of Graham Greene than to Fargo yet beautifully original, berserk and even poetic in its own way, a bar of the darkest chocolate filled with much fruity oddballs and nutty laughs to enjoy along with the unmistakably bitter taste of cocoa. 

I refuse to reveal anything more about what happens. It would be suffice to say that the director, like a potboiler writer on steroids, hurtles us through a racy and raunchy narrative that keeps on pulling the rug beneath our feet. It is all marvellously heady writing, even audacious as the film leaves behind the main crime and instead plunges us and its characters into shenanigans that would be deemed incredulous in any other film. Indeed, they are outrageous but they become such daring leaps of narrative direction that they become ingenious, intuitive twists that we never are able to see coming. 

The cast is uniformly brilliant, with my special praise reserved for Manav Vij as a beefed-up yet easily embarrassed cop who is touted to gobble up 16 eggs in a day, by his ernest wife played brilliantly by Raghavan regular Ashwini Kalsekar, and Zakir Hussain (another Raghavan favourite) as a shady practitioner; yet, that is all I am going to say about all these wonderfully written and acted characters, including not-so-familiar faces cast in delicious parts that do them justice. Ayushmann Khurrana, playing the seemingly naive Akash, is irresistible in his boyish charm and, as the film darkens handsomely with each minute, we see him revealing layer after layer and by then, he is already an entertainingly unreliable narrator of the increasingly tangled thread; we might not trust him completely anymore but thanks to Khurrana's pitch-perfect spontaneity, we root for him nevertheless. 

Then, there is Tabu. A consummate performer who seldom lets us down, here is the already incredibly ravishing and hypnotic actress at her best, playing a lady who is called, in yet another brilliant stroke of snark, as 'Lady Macbeth' by a character but who is really a lot more enigmatic and lethally lovely than any description. The lady has always been unbelievably good with dames that struggle with their hearts and minds but in Andhadhun, she is made to balance the loveably raw naïveté that made her so endearing as a sweet-faced leading lady in the 1990s and her impeccable flair in flashing every shade of grey, as evidenced in her incredible portrayals in serious fare. It is a tall order but Tabu edges both sides neatly and creates a compelling woman we cannot help being seduced by, even if it only means our inevitable doom. She is not just a femme fatale; rather she is a femme with whom we share a particularly fatal attraction. 

And finally, as with all Raghavan films, the music is as indispensable as the rest of the craft, as intriguing and compelling as K.U Mohanan's slick, stealthy camerawork that cleverly omits little details so that they can then play ingeniously into the narrative when least expected. Amit Trivedi's swooning piano solos are blended brilliantly together with those of Beethoven and the director's trademark retro fetish is as devilishly entertaining as ever. Covers of classics of both Dhawan's films and Rajesh Khanna blockbusters are played to underline the choicest moments with subtle yet spiky irony. 

Andhadhun is not just a thriller for ages. It is also, like the immaculately crafted Johnny Gaddar, a delicious slice of absurdist comedy that plays out in this utterly believable theatre of suburban noir staged to perfection, a rattling yarn that transforms from a whodunnit to a who-saw-what and who-did-not-see-what blended together. And somewhere in the midst of it all, there is a 'third man' involved. Now that is really special. 

My Rating- 5 Stars Out Of 5