Jailor tey Qaidee (1975)
Cast: Neelo, Sultan Rahi, Iqbal Hassan, Mustafa Qureshi, Ilyas Kashmiri, Saba
Director: Daud Butt
Music Director: Wajahat Attre
Synopsis: Masala laden, vengeance-based pot-boiler has all the ingredients
Reviewed by: Omar Khan

 

Things get underway with boisterous Ilyas Kashmiri turning on his wife for being a prostitute and informing her that a kothaywali can never become a kothiwali, before roughing her up a little.

Poor hapless Saba. All she ever wanted was to leave the kotha for a "respectable" life and earn enough money to get herself a much-needed nose job.

Snout-bearing Saba's disarray is noticed by her "ghairatmand" brother Khanoo (Sultan Rahi), who flies into a rage at the deceit of his one-time friend Kashmiri and proceeds to take his revenge by carving up a bunch of Kashmiri's goons. Kashmiri himself is saved by the timely intervention of the cops, while Khanoo is sent packing to a jail known for its fanatically disciplinarian Superintendent, Mustafa Qureshi.

When Khanoo is summoned by Qureshi, he mocks the jail's discipline and promises to escape forthwith. They proceed to exchange a few typically rhyming dialogues before Qureshi accepts Rahi's words as a challenge, and so the game of Jailor te Qaidee is set to begin!

Meanwhile, dastardly, wife-beating Kashmiri has problems of his own, as his brother is on death row. He shows up at Jailor Qureshi's residence and attempts to administer a bribe. Little does he know that Jailor Sher Bahadur is not a man to be trifled with.

Meanwhile, back at the jail and true to his word, Rahi escapes, leaping over huge walls with the slightest of effort. However, when he leaps over one final barrier, he finds the Jailor waiting for him, twirling his moustaches like the fat cat who just caught its dinner!

Again, the two exchange deeply meaningful rhyming couplets before a fearsome fight erupts between them, ending with Rahi back in his cell.

Then fate intervenes in a manner exclusive to Lollywood potboilers of the era.

One rather tranquil evening, the Jailor receives a call from his loving wife Seema, asking when she should expect him home. Just at that moment, the call is interrupted as Seema is attacked by three hoodlums who have broken into her home. The Jailor flees homewards after a few electrifying impact shots and arrives just as the men are about to "quench their animal lust" on poor old Seema.

After admonishing and lecturing the rapists in typical jailorly fashion, Qureshi is finally compelled to open fire upon the scumbags, as his words appear to be falling on deaf ears. The cops show up and the poor upright Jailor is dragged away—now in shackles to serve his sentence for murder in the very jail he once lorded over.

The other inmates turn on the ex-Jailor and torture him by singing him an excruciating moralistic qawwali that seems to go on forever.

Later, when Qureshi stops Khanoo from fleeing the jail once again, a fuming Rahi is about to fly into an almighty strop when the ex-Jailor whips out another of his sanctimonious, moralising lectures and tells Rahi that he only stopped him from escaping for his own good, blah blah blah.

Suddenly, Rahi and the Jailor leap into each other's arms and profess undying brotherly love!

Time passes...

A lot of time, evidently, because Snouty Saba's daughter has now blossomed into a curvaceous beauty, albeit on the wrong side of 40 and still struggling through high school.

This is the pigtailed oomph girl Neelo.

She is being courted by none other than the Jailor's now-grown son, the robust, rotund and always exuberant Iqbal Hassan—who, coincidentally, like the dad he has never met, is training to become a jailor. Little does he know that destiny is going to assign him to take charge of the very jail in which his father is serving his sentence!

Then, just when the wedding of Neelo and Iqbal Hassan is on, news of Neelo's mum's past as a "tawaif" leaks out and all sorts of mayhem follows as the marriage is called off.

Matters come to a head when Saba's nasty ex-husband Kashmiri re-enters the fray and Rahi and the Jailor finally break free, with Khanoo still burning for revenge over Saba's humiliation at Kashmiri's hands.

Jailor tey Qaidee is a pretty typical potboiler from the '70s, containing the usual masala and revenge-based storyline that was so much the norm. There is a heap of melodrama, naturally the mandatory song-and-dance stuff, fights, rape scenes, intrigue and incredible coincidence as the story winds its meandering and convoluted way towards the inevitable showdown.

Strangely, the film is unusually talky for a typical pulpy genre film, but although the dialogue is ultra-melodramatic and totally OTT, Sultan Rahi and Mustafa Qureshi perform it with admirable earnestness and manage to infuse the film with a sense of drama and energy whenever they are on screen.

Clearly, these two performers complement one another when cast in appropriate roles—a point never better illustrated than in the legendary Maula Jat, which was to follow this film four years later.

A big weakness of the movie is the music, which lacks even one "masaledar" dance or sleazy song worth mentioning. The dances are nowhere near vulgar enough to be of particular interest, and the songs are all pretty horrid.

Neelo and Hassan make a pretty hefty couple, as the former was beginning to balloon by the mid-'70s while the latter was always a fine "healthy" specimen.

Direction is decent, with the action flowing thick and fast, and some of the camerawork is fun.

A highlight of the film is Ali Ejaz's brief appearance in a duo of comedy sequences totally unrelated to the main story, where he clearly demonstrates his brilliance, very much in the mould of Munawar Zareef yet arguably even funnier.

For the first time ever, one wishes that the comic stretches were more prominent, as Ali Ejaz is a riot doing his send-up of the typically moronic Lahori.

Delicious stuff, yet frustratingly there is so little of it.

Jailor tey Qaidee is a staple masala flick and quite unexceptional. However, the chemistry between Rahi and Qureshi is undeniable, and their performances lift the film from mediocrity even if the awful music is a huge letdown.

The film could have done with a club dance or two to spice things up a bit. Nonetheless, we've seen far worse Lollywood Punjabi films than this.