From the Rental Vault

Part of the fun of writing about the 2009 Bollywood movie 3 Idiots is in coming up with a good description of it. The closest I can get is a mash-up of A Separate Peace, Revenge of the Nerds and Animal House with elements of The Prince and the Pauper and The Paper Chase. With song and dance numbers.

Oh sure, you say. Anyone could make a mash-up of A Separate Peace, Revenge of the Nerds and Animal House with elements of The Prince and the Pauper and The Paper Chase, with song and dance numbers. Ah, but could they make one that works? Producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra, director Rajkumar Harani and principal screenwriter Abhijat Joshi, working from a 2004 novel by Chetan Beghat did.

Two of the titular idiots -- Farhan (R. Madhavan) and Raju (Sharman Joshi) -- rush off to meet an old college classmate who ten years ago bet them he would be a bigger success than their friend Rancho (Aamir Khan). Rancho is nowhere to be seen -- in fact, they haven't seen or heard from him since graduation. But the classmate has the address, and the trio take off to find him. Along the way, Farhan recalls their college lives in several long flashbacks. Rancho's free spirit and love of pure learning put him at odds with the by-the-book faculty of the Imperial College of Engineering. But his intelligence keeps him ahead of the game, including attempts by school dean Viru "Virus" Sahasrabuddhe (Boman Irani) to oust him and his friends. Along the way we also see Rancho fall in love with medical student Pia (Kareena Kapoor) and we learn how the pasts of both Farhan and Raju influence their work at the school and how they approach it. And of course, we have a few musical numbers, since this is a straight-ahead Bollywood movie and those movies make sure every entertainment base is covered.

3 Idiots owes its success to the uncomplicated storyline from Abhijat Joshi that keeps the flashback/today's storyline confusion to a minimum, the humor and hijinks mostly low-key but amusing and gives Madhavan, Sharman Joshi, Khan and Kapoor great characters and dialogue to work with. And even though it's sung in Hindi, the song "Zoobi Doobi" is an earworm you'd have a hard time getting rid of. The dramatic elements of the script seem sometimes to clash with its comedic tone -- Dean "Virus" is mostly played for laughs but some of his actions are simply monstrous. But that friction isn't often or overwhelming, so Idiots hums along quite a bit faster than you might expect a three-hour movie to do.

It holds the record for Bollywood box-office leader, both in India and around the world and is one of the few Indian movies to do well in China. It also carried off a heap of awards from moviemaking associations based in India and Southeast Asia. And I guarantee you it's the best mash-up of A Separate Peace, Revenge of the Nerds and Animal House with elements of The Prince and the Pauper and The Paper Chase, with song and dance numbers that you will rent this year.

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In Kansas City Confidential, ex-con Joe Rolfe (John Payne) was able to get a job driving a floral delivery truck. But when bank robbers use an exact duplicate of his truck to stage their daring heist, he finds himself suspected by Kansas City police and questioned by them. And in the pre-Miranda days of 1952 moviedom, police weren't all that concerned about how gently they handled their suspects, especially when they were sure of the suspect's guilt.

Even though new evidence springs Joe, the police still think he had a role to play and his boss doesn't want to keep him on after all the bad publicity. He resolves to find the real robbers and clear his name, or at least get revenge. Tracking them to Mexico, he waits for his chance: The robbers all wore masks, so they never saw each other's faces, and their meeting to split the take could give Joe an inside track to make his move. But that move will be complicated by law student Helen Foster (Colleen Gray), who's falling for the guy she thinks Joe is while Joe is falling for her.

Confidential is a pretty much by-the-book film noir, complete with Hero with a Past, Ruthless Criminals and Gal Who Knows Her Way Around. It works so well, though, because director Phil Karlson doesn't try to play cute with his noir conventions, like stark shadowy settings, strange camera angles and close-ups of sweating guilty or fearful faces. He just sells out for them like he believes in them, whether he does or not. It works well because Payne is unflinching as Rolfe, determined to have his revenge on the gang who wrecked his life even though he knows nothing about them nor they about him. And it works well because in criminal gang Neville Brand, Jack Elam and Lee Van Cleef, Karlson hit a trifecta of movie bad guys just before they made it big but after they'd learned how to create menacing characters. Elam especially shines as the cowardly Pete Harris, ruthless when he's behind you but craven when you face him.

Kansas City Confidential did well enough on release, but only later became appreciated as a defining noir work that could live up to its tagline and hit with "bullet force and blackjack fury!" In 1992, Quentin Tarantino would use much of the plotline for his Reservoir Dogs directorial debut.