Dir. Shakti Samanta
Like the contemporaneous Jewel Thief, An Evening in Paris taps into a certain "occidentalism," an Indian fetishization of the west that is the mirror reflection of the west's orientalist exoticization and fetishization of the east. It is a whirlwind tour of romantic locales - strolling along the Seine, skiing on the Jungfrau, water-skiing at a posh resort in Beirut, and spinning to a dramatic climax in the swirling rush of Niagara Falls.
Deepa (Sharmila Tagore) is a wealthy Indian debutante out for a sojourn in Paris. Tired of the endless gold-digging suitors who pursue her only for her wealth, Deepa longs for true romance, for a man who will love her for who she is and not what she has. Enter Sam (Shammi Kapoor), a bold and manic Indo-Parisian who aggressively courts the recalcitrant Deepa; following her around Paris and ultimately to the rest of the film's locales, donning disguises and pulling off elaborate schemes in his efforts to woo her. Meanwhile Shekhar (Pran), the son of Deepa's family servant, is down on his luck and in debt to some very dangerous gangsters. To pay them back, he determines to woo Deepa and her riches for himself. The gangsters, though, have other plans - they are looking to kidnap Deepa and sell her back for ransom. Thrown into the mix is Deepa's twin sister Rupa, kidnapped years before when the sisters were tiny children, and now a hard-boiled nightclub dancer and gangster's moll known as Suzy. From there, romance, adventure, mistaken identity, and other familiar masala elements take the action around the globe.
Like Sharmilee a few years later, An Evening in Paris packs a social message into its disposition of the twin sisters - Deepa, despite her jet-setting independence, is always an upstanding Indian girl at heart, while Suzy's skimpy clothes and sharp, westernized edge are paid for with an ambiguous fate. Indeed, in a sequence in which Suzy impersonates Deepa, it is her cigarette - a evocative symbol of the errant bad girl - that gives her away to the amorous Sam. (The same device reveals the evil twin's deception in Sharmilee as well.) And yet this moralizing is set against the backdrop of the lush western romanticism of Paris and the film's other exotic locations. Deepa enjoys her exotic jaunt to the fullest, but even when she falls in love her good-girl instincts never falter; she is scandalized by the sight of Parisians kissing in public, and despite Sam's gentle encouragement insists that such enjoyments wait until after marriage.
Aside from this social message - which really accounts for only a fraction of the movie - An Evening in Paris is a solid, entertaining masala meal, particularly in its first half, which is driven by Sam's relentless pursuit of Deepa. While I can see, with his wild gyrations and floppy hair, why Shammi Kapoor is sometimes compared to Elvis, he is a notch too tubby for my taste. Still, his antics in this film are charming enough, and the song density is unparalleled - the rocking tunes, like this one, come every fifteen or twenty minutes through the film's first half. Adding to the fun are crowds of perplexed Europeans in the background during the songs that were actually shot in broad daylight the streets of Paris, watching the dances. Unfortunately, as is often the case with masala thrillers, the film gets bumpier when the plot, such as it is, gets going in the second half - but the dramatic climax at Niagara Falls is worth hanging on for.