Mackennas Gold

Firstly this legendary movie is of too big a stature to be reviewed by anyone now. I can only describe that it is a great treasure hunt adventure movie with fantastic cinematography and art direction, the story is set in the wild west, where Gregory Peck (Mackenna) a Marshall encounters an old Red Indian and finds his map to the gold, he memorizes the map and then burns it before getting captured by Omar Sharif and his confederates who force him to lead them to the Apache Indians gold, they have a lot of small skirmishes and difficulties on their way and are joined by more unwanted treasure hunters until they find the gold. This movie started a wave of similar Hindi movies in India, that is what this post is for.

The first remake was called Zalzala (Earthquake .... Earthquake???) and just like in the original has a narrator telling animatedly about an ancient Shiva temple of gold built by Raja Harshvardhana which is in a secret location in the mountains, and that if any sinner goes to the place there will be an earthquake. The scenes shown during this narration all look pretty ordinary.

Anyways from here the film rolls on its own track with a lot of western style bar scenes, lots of horses, and heroes and villains that are lookalikes or dressed up like characters from other westerns. Danny Danzongpa looks suspiciously like Angel Eyes from "The Good the Bad and the Ugly". Rajiv kapoor sleeping on a cot dragged along by his horse directly enacts Trinity from "They call me Trinity" but they have improvised and shown his horse to be a whiskey drinker!.

The 4 heroines are added for good measure, not counting the anonymous damsel who dances in front of the villains. The soundtrack is all American save for the emotional Indian moments, rest assured everyone seems to know horse riding very well, and can shoot accurately-without even using the sights. Heroines included. The U.S cavalry here is shown to be the Indian police.

The Shiva temple has one more great property that even the narrator fails to tell us. This golden temple gleams like crazy in the sun, but strangely upto 1988 no helicopter/plane or the forest Dept. has managed to spot it. Ever. The story of the original is set in the unexplored America of 1860 so cannot be accused of the same peculiarity.

After more than an hour of character/Plot building, the film gives up and rejoins the original starting with the scene of Shatrughan coming in waving a white kerchief like Eli Wallach in the original, from then on the story resembles the western blockbuster, with a few defiant changes, the huge rock that casts the direction giving shadow in the original, is a stone carved as a cobra here, and hilariously will cast a guiding shadow only if a conch shell is blown on the sunrise of Mahashivratri day.

Yet another pitiful comedy is that the idol of lord Shiva has to break out of the roof of the temple to get a straight line of sight to fire from the third eye. The director needs to have faith that the Almighty Shiva can punish sinners from his place, the film ends with the heroes worshipping the idol, and thus being protected by lord shiva from the villains and the subsequent earthquake that results from the blasphemy, although one hero and heroine is killed pointlessly by the script. In the end no one gets any gold.
 
Moral of the story: Stick to the original movie.