The Safe Crackers

At the turn of the millennium, a special brand of safecrackers seemed to jump out of the pages of Indrajal Comics and Diamond Comics into Bollywood. These Superman-like characters were the headliners of films whose plots were too fantastic to be credible and yet told with amazing confidence.

The Safe Crackers. Illustrated by Saloni Garg: Visual Storyteller at ThisDay

Of course, these safecrackers of Y2K had their precursors in a few earlier films.

In Jewel Thief (1967), a con man commits heist after jewel heist across cities. He is a big fish in the international market, buying and selling diamonds and jewels worth lakhs of rupees. The police are baffled—no one knows what the jewel thief looks like. By reconstructing seemingly unconnected events, the jewel thief’s gang ingeniously misleads the police and the public, making them believe that the jewel thief is a handsome young man called Prince Amar, who is a spitting image of Vinay, the son of the police commissioner. The gang then proceeds to capture Vinay and brainwash him to make him believe that he was actually the non-existent Prince Amar, the jewel thief. The rest is easy for the villain—try and get Vinay bumped off, thus ‘killing’ the jewel thief and effectively ending the mystery of the unknown jewel thief as far as the police were concerned. And then the real jewel thief could comfortably hide in broad daylight. This was a Hitchcockian concept called MacGuffin by director Vijay Anand (who was a fan of Alfred Hitchcock)—creating a character in the story that doesn’t exist at all. The jewel thief also resembled the character of the English gentleman Sir Charles Lytton played by actor David Niven in the 1964 comedy The Pink Panther. Sir Charles leads a secret life as a thief known by the name ‘The Phantom’ who tries to steal the priceless jewel called the Pink Panther. Nobody knows that The Phantom is actually Sir Charles.

Krishna Shah’s Shalimar (1978) may be termed as one of the precursors to these millennial trickster thieves. Shalimar was a delightful galaxy of safecracking ‘artists’, each unique in his or her own way, none of whom had ever been caught—the lame and dumb Columbus, who had nicked an expensive diamond; the seductive Countess Rasmussen,a star trapeze artist who, to her credit, stole seven Van Gogh paintings and three statues; the near-blind Dr. Dubari, who had visited Jerusalem as a delegate of the Conference of Religions and made away with the cross of St. Timothy by hiding it inside his religious book; the modest K.P. Iyengar, who, unknown to the world, was the brain behind the gold heist from the Bank of Singapore and the lifting of a precious knife from a museum in France. Above all, there was the ailing Sir John Locksley (Rex Harrison) who had in his possession the 1200-carat ruby called Shalimar. The origin of this fictional ruby, which was worth INR 135 crores, could be traced back to the times of Alexander the Great and down to the Mughals, when it was located at Shalimar Bagh in Delhi. For the stock Hindi-film-viewing public, Shalimar, with a screenplay dominated by this assemblage of villain, may have appeared unconventional. But the time for films like these would come in a little over twenty years.

The popularity of the heist film can be markedly seen from 2004 onwards. An attempted clean-up of INR 18 crores’ worth New Year Eve collections from the basement vaults of Goa’s Taj Exotica hotel by Kabir in Dhoom (2004); raids launched from the sky on Namibian deserts by ‘A’ in Dhoom 2 (2006); a 200-million-dollar-insurance fraud plotted by Rajiv Singh in Race (2008) that involved Rajiv killing his stepbrother Ranvir; a racket of laundering ‘fake currency’ by Ranvir Singh and the attempted theft of the Shroud of Turin in the ruins of Antalya, Turkey by Armaan Malik in Race 2 (2013); the theft of the priceless ‘Rose of Samarkhand’ necklace from a jeweler in Amsterdam by Charlie and Riya followed by the robbing of a train on the Russia–Romania line containing pure Romanian gold worth INR 10,000 crore by a gang of thieves, each having a unique talent, in Players (2012); robberies inside art galleries to an underwater treasure hunt in the Bahamas in Blue (2009); centuries-old diamonds excavated in southern India in Cash (2007)—these robbers and con artists were portrayed with an unabashed ‘heroic’ lens, reducing the police to helpless, gawking admirers.

In Bang Bang! (2014), the invaluable Kohinoor diamond is apparently stolen from the Tower of London and brought back to India by an ‘invisible’ thief who has left behind no fingerprints. Neither have the CCTV cameras managed to capture a single picture of him. This unknown thief becomes an instant celebrity—we see grannies falling in love with this new jewel thief—with his act being justified in the Parliament because the Kohinoor belonged to India anyway. Well, the ‘theft’ in itself was a ploy by the British MI6 and Internal Secret Service to extradite a wanted terrorist. And the ‘thief’, Jai Nanda, wasn’t really a thief. But, for a significant portion of the film, the audience witnesses what they believe is a super thief in all his super-heroic glory.

These ingenious, daring thefts remind us of the 1975 film The Return of The Pink Panther in which a mysterious thief breaks into a highly guarded vault and makes away with the Pink Panther diamond, leaving behind a white glove embroidered with the letter ‘P’.

Some of the plotlines of these films have been borrowed from Hollywood. Replacing the stolen diamond with a laser light in Dhoom:2 was taken from a Lex Luthor scene in Superman 2 and the train-top fight sequence resembled those in Matrix; the trope of a bomb hidden in the car used in the three Race franchises was inspired by Speed (1994). While Players was an honest remake of The Italian Job (1969/2003), Prince (2010) was a take on the Bourne series. This category of films is also a label parade, with premier accessories like Winch 6000, Apple Mac laptops, Tanishq jewelry, Surfer skull caps, Batman face masks, Suzuki bikes, and biking accessories like Venom, Yamaha, Alpinestars, and Airoh getting plenteous screen-time. Micro-sensor fitted playing cards and display-screen embedded goggles in Race 2 helped tycoon Armaan Malik purchase casinos on the Altamash waterfront in Turkey.

Far from the silly beards of older films, ‘Mr. A’ in Dhoom:2 is a master of disguise. Unresearched generic terms like ‘pistaul’, ‘revolver’, and ‘bandook’ had gotten replaced by specifics like “44 Magnum with hollers point slugs” in Kaante (2002). Corporate-sounding phrases like “Please see the bigger picture”, “I’m in”, and “It’s time to win” sat comfortably with the personality of these new characters.

And then there was a promise of ‘watch-this-space-for-more’. Kabir leaps off the cliff on his bike in Dhoom but no dead body is found. We knew the franchise would continue. And it did. In Race 2, Armaan winks at the audience in his parting shot, “Race jahan khatam hoti hai, shuru bhi wahin se hoti hai (The race begins where it ends).” Race 3 (2018) signs off with, “So will there be one more race?” In the last frame of Cash (2007), the thief discloses that he is already planning his next heist.

There was a modicum of a demarcation between the policeman Jay Dixit and the thief Kabir in Dhoom. But soon, the lines are not only blurred, but actually crossed over, with certified heroes Abhishek Bachchan, Hrithik Roshan, Ajay Devgn, and Shahid Kapoor playing cool thieves. The glamorization and legitimization of crime was now official. By Dhoom:3, the policeman was reduced to a comedian for all practical purposes. “He is the perfect thief,” ACP Jay Dixit’s statement about Mr. A in Dhoom:2 has a tinge of admiration. “Chor ek tarah ka artist hota hai.” (The thief is a kind of an artist), advises the hardened convict Victor Dada (Vinod Khanna) in Players to the entire posse of policemen as they listen respectfully with bowed heads.

Somewhere up above, actor David Niven may be watching with satisfaction…

Extra chutney - Dhoom 2, starring Abhishek Bachchan, Uday Chopra, Bipasha Basu, and Aishwarya Rai, was the first major Bollywood film to be shot in Brazil. Check out the golden beaches of Rio de Janeiro amidst all the chase and action.