Guns, Knives and Swords: Arms in Cinema Publicity

In this coloured lobby card, a powerful image is constructed to depict the iconicity of the nineteenth century warrior Queen of Jhansi. She, an accomplished swords person and horse-rider, and her consorts hold their swords up high while looking down at an assembly of British soldiers.

The film's publicity material includes this striking lobby card of the Maratha ruler Shivaji's mother Jijabai imperiously holding the Bhavani talwar, the legendary sword associated with the eight-armed deity Bhavani.

With the film's climactic scene of Mother India shooting her own son to punish him for his transgression, Nargis' depiction of the idealised matriarch transcended into an enduring archetype. In the handpainted posters of the film, a towering Nargis holds, with ease, both plough and rifle - talismans of her role as Mother India.

In this Arabian Nights fantasy film, a dancing girl falls in love with a prince in disguise thus fulfilling the prophecy of a gypsy soothsayer. Pradeep Kumar plays the overthrown Prince Haider who seeks to reclaim his throne.

A group of strangers are stranded in a mansion and discover there is a murderer in their midst. The thriller begins with a dance at the nightclub Sea Princess - a shake and twist extravaganza with masked dancers and a rock n' roll band.

N.A.Ansari is a suave rifle-toting eye surgeon in this murder mystery that ends in a climactic shoot-off in the snow-clad Himalayas.

The espionage thriller spanned through the city of Beirut, Tokyo, the backwaters of Kerala and, even, a Sheikh-owned dungeon with a tiger. Like those made in the genre during this period, flamboyant villains were an integral part of the film's atmosphere.

In this lobby card, we see Dharmendra who is on the hunt for a group of technologist enemies of the state including the suave Madam (Lalita Pawar) and Lily (Daisy Irani).

The trope of the police in disguise as the criminal to catch a larger-than-life villain came to be very popular in the action dramas of the seventies. In this case, the police is disguised as a knife-wielding "mental patient" played by Sanjeev Kumar to solve a murder mystery.

In 'Benaam', Amitabh Bachchan's family life is disrupted when he saves a stabbed man and is, soon, blackmailed by the assaulter. Fashioned as a stylish thriller, the film had several car chase sequences through the city of Bombay.

Revenge and justice were recurring themes as we see Sridevi toting a gun in Inquilaab. This revenge drama ends with Amitabh Bachchan, an unjustly accused honest policeman who turns into a politician, shooting a cabinet room full of corrupt ministers. The film ends with a handcuffed Bachchan crying out Inquilab Zindabad (Long Live the Revolution).

There's also Sanjay Dutt brandishing a gun in 'Naam'. Mahesh Bhatt's rendition of the action film with the "good" and "bad" brother trope had a heightened emotional pitch with Sanjay Dutt's vulnerable portrayal of the rebel without a cause.

In terms of narrative tropes, 'Don' perfectly combined elements of the stylish spy, noir, whodunit and thriller genres that were popular in the late fifties and sixties with the action drama that would dominate the seventies. The suave and stoic internationally wanted criminal Don (Amitabh Bachchan) is replaced by his doppelganger Vijay, a man of the people reminiscent of his role in 'Deewar'.

While the plotline of the film carried archetypes and tropes from films made before it, Deewar was groundbreaking in its portrait of a man in righteous rage. The writing team of Salim-Javed had introduced the angry young persona Bachchan would be idolised for in the film Zanjeer. However, Deewar's Vijay in his love for the working man and aching rage against the status quo became a spectre in films made in the subcontinent for the next several decades.

In Yudh, Anil Kapoor plays identical twins - a lawyer and a hit man. One of the defining characteristics of the action dramas of the period was the unforgettable "villain" who were often equipped with colourful catchphrases.