Namrata Rao’s ‘Angry Young Men’, on Prime Video, is an easy watch, a nostalgic look at the Salim-Javed story, but there’s not much real insight
The best parts are the ones where they talk about their process… It’s interesting to know that Salim usually came up with the storylines, Javed’s strength was dialogue, and they both, then, worked on the screenplay.
In 1962, Shammi Kapoor played the lookalike of a gangster whose gang he would be asked to infiltrate, by the police. The film was called China Town, and it played like a regular “Hindi movie” of its time, with plenty of songs and comedy and dances. Only Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar can tell if they were inspired by China Town to write Don, but despite the similarity of the switcheroo-double role plot, the two films couldn’t be more different. Don is a far tougher beast, with far better lines, far less sentimentality. The point here isn’t that Salim-Javed may have crafted one of their biggest hits from the DNA of an older movie. The point is that they didn’t care. At one point in Namrata Rao’s Angry Young Men, Salim cheerfully says that originality is the art of concealing the source. It’s a great line. It would have fit right into one of the duo’s scripts.
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