This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on March 25, 2019.
One dark evening, a young woman, running from the police, takes refuge at the home of businessman K.B. Pillai (G.K. Pillai). Pillai and his family threaten to turn her over to the police unless she explains how she got to be there. Jayasree (Sheela) has run away from the home of her aunt and uncle, because they have arranged her marriage to an older man with six children who had already been married twice before.
The family decides not to turn Jayasree in, and then, since it’s late, they allow her to stay overnight in their home. They expect Jayasree to be gone the next day, but they find her cooking for them, and initially they think about hiring her as a maid. When they hear she is educated and skilled, and clearly overqualified to be a maid, they decide again that she must leave. However, Pillai changes his mind, and offers her a job in his business, the All Kerala Tin Company.
Jayasree’s honesty and trustworthiness is tested by Pillai and his manager – they have her make a bank deposit for them, and when she returns to the office she tells Pillai she deposited the 5000 rupees they told her to, but that she’d been given 6000 rupees, 1000 of which she has brought back to Pillai.
Convinced that she can be trusted, Pillai and his manager decide to send Jayasree to Kozhikode to deliver a substantial sum of money to his business partners there – she will travel by bus, on the Kannur Deluxe, and at the last minute she will be given an extra 25,000 rupees in counterfeit notes to deliver as well. Jayasree takes the extra money from the paper it’s wrapped in to put it in the bag Pillai and the manager have given her, and this catches the attention of Gopalakrishnan (Jose Prakash), who finds an exact duplicate of the bag she is carrying, causes a diversion, and steals the money.
When Jayashree discovers the theft, the bus conductor (Nellikodu Bhaskaran) sees that one passenger – Gopalakrishnan – has gone missing. He promptly replaces the driver at the wheel and turns the bus around. Gopalakrishnan flags down the bus, thinking it’s a different bus travelling in the direction he just came from. When he realizes his mistake, Gopalakrishnan tries to get off the bus, but he’s prevented from doing so by the other passengers, and the conductor drives the bus to the nearest police station, where Gopalakrishnan is taken into custody. Jayasree explains that the money is hers and that she’s delivering it on behalf of her company, and the bag with the money is checked out by the police, who realize that half of it is counterfeit bills – but they return it to her anyway, though not before asking a few questions about her employer and the people she is to deliver the money to.
Before Jayasree can leave the police station, two men arrive: Namboodiri (Prem Nazir) and Chandu (Adoor Bhasi). Namboodiri is clearly mentally challenged, and Chandu is clearly there to accompany him and look after him. Namboodiri and Chandu get on the bus, but before it can depart again comes the discovery that *another* passenger has gone missing — this time, Dineshan (Kottayam Chellappan), who we learn has been sent by Pillai to trail Jayasree, and to kill her before she can reach Kozhikode.
The bus ride resumes, and the antics of Namboodiri serve to either amuse or irritate his fellow passengers – he sings, he suggests he should drive the bus, and essentially establishes himself as the eccentric centre of the second half of the film. But it becomes apparent that Namboodiri and Chandu are keeping an eye on Jayasree, rescuing her from the clutches of Dineshan several times before the film’s denouement, where all the baddies band together to frame Jayasree for everything, until a number of twists reveal what’s really going on.
I rather enjoyed Kannur Deluxe – though I admit that for a few days I went mad trying to figure out the oh-so-familiar snippet of cha cha music used as part of the film’s background score, until finally a friend recognized it as the song “Wheels” (perhaps most famously covered by The Ventures), totally fitting with a film that spends much of its run-time on a journey on the iconic Kannur Deluxe bus route (the route, part of the Kerala State Road Transport Corporation, began operating two years before the film was made). Director A.B. Raj and screenwriter S. L. Puram Sadanandan (whose work on Chemeen I’m more familiar with, though thanks to Hotstar Canada and its library of older Malayalam films I’m sure that will change) give us a tidy little thriller that is peppered with lots of interesting details and characters, like the bus passenger Kammath (Sankaradi) with his little olakkuda (palm-leaf umbrella) that just doesn’t quite fit in the bus.
Carnatic musician V. Dakshinamoorthy created seven songs for the film, and each of them is so lovely, so it wasn’t surprising to me to learn that they were, and remain, popular. Some serve to further the plot (in “Ethra Chirichalum”, for example, K.B. Pillai’s son Venu reveals himself to be smitten with Jayasree, so much so that he will try to rescue her later in the film), some a little wedged in but still adding nicely to the film’s pacing – for example, the qawwali “Ee Muhabathenthoru” finds one of the film’s villains wandering into the place where this qawwali is being performed, but it’s such a lovely little set piece that I didn’t mind.
The fight scenes, too, are ripping good fun – one, for example, takes place at a sawmill, and of course Prem Nazir ends up on a log headed straight for a saw blade! And although I was pretty sure that there was more to Namboodiri and Chandu than meets the eye, the film gave us one more final, most excellent twist in its closing moments. Prem Nazir displays a goofy charm as Namboodiri, and the film is at its best when he and Sheela are together – perhaps not surprising from the iconic duo who worked together in well over a hundred films.
Kannur Deluxe is a delightful, old-fashioned thriller with lots of dishoom, goofy fun, and very pretty music – well worth a viewing!