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Features

Banned but Never Forgotten: The Passing of the Great Looti

May 29, 2018
Arash Azizi
11 min read
A star of pre-revolutionary cinema in Iran, Malakmotiee had been effectively banned from acting for close to four decades
A star of pre-revolutionary cinema in Iran, Malakmotiee had been effectively banned from acting for close to four decades
Malakmotiee (middle) accepts an award at a ceremony in Tehran, 2017
Malakmotiee (middle) accepts an award at a ceremony in Tehran, 2017
Three legends of pre-1979 Iranian cinema: Malakmotiee, Mohammad Ali Fardin and Behrooz Vosughi
Three legends of pre-1979 Iranian cinema: Malakmotiee, Mohammad Ali Fardin and Behrooz Vosughi

People were genuinely shocked and in mourning. Hours after news broke that 88-year-old Iranian actor Nasser Malakmotiee had died, social media was abuzz with remembrances, film clips and witty quotations from the famous actor. The surprising part? A star of pre-revolutionary cinema in Iran, Malakmotiee had been effectively banned from acting for close to four decades. Choosing between exile or staying put at home, he had mostly picked the latter. How was it then that he was now being remembered not only by those old enough to have lived through the 1960s and 1970s but by kids of today — even whose parents weren’t born when Malakmotiee was a top star?

Malakmotiee’s enduring appeal was seen as an act of revenge on the Islamic Republic that had tried to bring him down. He was known for playing the role of chivalrous good guy who would stop at nothing to make things right, a very particular type of Iranian masculinity known not for mindless aggression but for sensitivity to grievances of the weak and a selfless readiness to assist. The fact that a symbol of Iranian chivalry had been so blatantly wronged — barred from appearing in films for the crime of simply having been a successful actor — was the subject of many a social media post and opinion piece, a bitter reminder that Malakmotiee had been forced to retire in his prime. 

Even voices that usually approve of the Tehran regime expressed dismay that a patriot like Malakmotiee had been forced to retire at the height of his career. At his funeral in Tehran, prominent cinema figures joined tens of thousands of fans to mourn his death. Many spoke from the podium, including Parviz Parastooyi, an actor who has not shied away from raising the plight of Malakmotiee and his kind, despite being something of a favorite for many regime enthusiasts himself. The keynote speech of the funeral, however, was not made by any of those present. It was the broadcast of a recorded message by the California-based Behrooz Vosughi, the last man standing of the golden male trio of Iranian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, whose other star, Mohammad Ali Fardin, passed away in 2000. 

“For 40 years I have been away from my homeland and my people,” Vosughi said. “And now my voice is being broadcast among my people, in the very soil of my homeland. But I have to speak with remorse still. Remorse of losing an elder, a brother, a pioneer, a master; a man who waited 40 years, like I have.” 

 

Gym Teacher to Tramp

Malakmotiee was born in Tehran in 1930. His father, previously an employee of the telecommunications ministry, owned the Cinema Shoq (“Passion”) on Tehran’s Sirus Street, where Iran’s most well-known pianist, Javad Maroofi, played tunes to the silent films popular before the talkies emerged. Malakmotiee the father would go bankrupt, but the love he had kindled for cinema was taken up by his son. 

Like many upwardly mobile middle-class men of his generation, Nasser Malakmotiee enrolled in Tehran’s prestigious teachers’ college while taking acting classes on the side. Upon graduation, he found a job teaching gym in high schools. With his athletic built and broad shoulders, sports had always been a hobby and he even took courses to become a referee in wrestling, Iran’s national pastime. But the course of his life changed after he auditioned for Spring Verite (1949), produced by the industrious Esmayil Kooshan, labeled by some as the father of commercial mass cinema in Iran. Malakmotiee was chosen, and he starred among some of the best and the brightest of the Iranian theater. As luck would have it, his first film was also the first for Ezatollah Entezami, a man who would go on to become perhaps the most celebrated Iranian actor in history, something of a Laurence Olivier to Malakmotiee’s Gary Cooper. 

Malakmotiee’s real break came in 1952 when he played in Tramp (Velgard), directed by the 21-year-old Mehdi Rayisfirooz. He played his namesake Nasser, a simple married man who is destroyed by bad decisions but is able to re-discover his wife and kids and start life anew. Malakmotiee made his first acting money from the film, earning 5,000 rials for Tramp and 10,000 more when the film became a hit at the box office. His monthly salary as a teacher was 2,450 rials, and he had much more love for cinema than for teaching gym. He entered Iran’s film industry, where he made 10,000 rials a month for making two films a year. 

As the studio industry expanded in the 1950s, Malakmotiee soon became a favorite in Iran. He played in the country’s first color film, Gerdaab (1953) and, together with the teenage star Vida Ghahremani, made what came to be canonized as the first on-screen kiss in Iranian cinema in Samuel Khachikian’s The Crossroad of Events (1955). But more than particular performances, it was the archetypal role that he personified that made Malakmotiee a household name and something of a national symbol. The archetypal figures of Jaahel, Laat and Looti had long been popular in the Iranian psyche and had obvious cinematic potential. Rooted in traditions of chivalrous brigandry, Looti is a vagabond who represents a minority who hasn’t lost touch with traditional values of justice. Jaahel and Laat refer to neighborhood toughs who fancy themselves as Lootis and are loved by the neighborhood and its elders, even if their violent conduct runs counter to the law. 

 

The Archetypal Laat and the Iconic Film Gheysar

It was probably Majid Mohseni’s Laate Javanmard (the Chivalrous Laat, 1958), starring the director himself as the leading actor, that did more than any movie to popularize a cinematic version of this neighborhood chivalry. Malakmotiee repeated the role in film after film — some more mediocre than others — in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Donning black suit and pants, a white shirt, a sharp-pointed pair of shoes, a velvet chapeau, a silk handkerchief and a green prayer bead-string, Malakmotiee became the archetypal Laat who was a Looti too —a neighborhood tough known for knife fights, but loved by the community who never doubted his commitment to justice. The way Malakmotiee carried his hands or moved his eyebrows, as well as his witticisms and heroic stories, became household favorites. 

The archetypal role had limits familiar to any actor who becomes known as a “type.” People wanted the Nasser they knew and nothing else. In Kakoo (1971, directed by Shapoor Gharib), Malakmotiee played a Laat who is released from prison and looking for a calm life, which is why he calls the police when a skirmish breaks out in the neighborhood. But the lovers of the great Looti hated nothing more than a snitch. In cinemas in the southern city of Shiraz, people threw food and shoes at the screen to protest. 

Malakmotiee still got to play a large variety of roles which, somewhat annoyingly, are sometimes not as well remembered today. In 17 Days to Execution (1956), he was directed by Hooshang Kavoosi, the French-educated snobby film critic known for coining the term Filmfarsi, meant to be a critical take of the studio productions of the 1950s and 1960s, exemplified by stars like Malakmotiee. In 1962, Malakmotiee himself directed a critically-acclaimed detective thriller, Merchants of Deathstill considered to be one of the best of the 1960s. In other films, he was cast as village men, a navy officer, and even historical figures such as the legendary King Abbas of the 17th century or Amir Kabir, the reformist Iranian prime minister of the mid-nineteenth century. He was also somewhat unique among the Filmfarsi stars in being invited to play in the more intellectual films of the Iranian new wave. 

Together with Fardin and Vosughi, Malakmotiee formed a triangle of male heroes and cinematic sex symbols that continue to be household names in Iran, despite the brutal banning that they abruptly experienced after the 1979 revolution. Vosughi was often the rogue hero, skeptical of traditional values of the likes played by Malakmotiee; Fardin, a joyous, shake-and-dance alternative to the knife-wielders. And Malakmotiee continued to play the Looti loved by families and the community. 

In 1969, two of the three came together for one of the most memorable films of Iranian history, Gheysar. Malakmotiee’s short cameo in this film remains his undoubtedly best-remembered scene, if not the also the most memorable scene in Iranian cinema. Directed by the intellectually-inclined Masoo Kimiayi, Gheysar tells the story of two brothers — Farman and Gheysar, respectively starred by Malakmotiee and Vosughi — seeking revenge for their sister, who has committed suicide after being raped by a shopkeeper. Malakmotiee’s cameo lasts only a few minutes. Being something of a neighborhood tough, Farman has swore not to take up a knife again. His parents convince him to hold to his oath as he goes on to fight the rapist and his brothers with his bare hands, like a good old traditional wrestler. He is brutally murdered by the brothers, his last word becoming a canonical line of Iranian cinema: “Gheysar! Where are you now that they’ve killed your brother?” Gheysar returns from a trip, embarking on a mission to revenge not only the dead raped sister but Farman. Understandably, he will have no problem taking up arms. Made just around the time when the genteel opposition to the Shah’s government was taking a turn toward armed struggle after being barred from all parliamentary activity, Gheysar became the voice of a generation and Malakmotiee a symbol of bygone values and methods, which were worthy of respect but not up to the tasks of the day. 

The Puritanical Power of the Revolution

The Shah’s government was brought down in 1979 in a popular revolution, supported by much of the Iranian cinematic and literary community, who had played their part in protesting the injustices of the monarchy. But the Islamic Republic that Ayatollah Khomeini swiftly moved to establish was to introduce a puritanical streak that made all the art and culture of the Shah’s era suspect. With all the sexuality and supposed decadence that it displayed, the Iranian cinema became a target of puritans, as can often happen after revolutions. It was something of a lucky break that the entirety of cinema and music wasn’t banned, although it came close (the national broadcaster, for instance, was not allowed to show any musical instrument, a ban that has endured.) Few of the pre-revolutionary stars were lucky enough to be able to re-invent themselves for the new times. The vast majority fled the country, often for California, where the once giants of Iranian pop culture were sometimes reduced to playing in cabarets. Few preferred to remain in Iran, languishing in obscurity yet remaining popular with the new generations, as the enduring popularity of Malakmotiee shows. 

Perhaps the most enduring symbol of the Iranian pop culture of 1970s was the singer Gogoosh, who took the same decision as Malakmotiee, staying put in Iran, even if it meant not being able to work again (she only left for exile decades later). On tour in Vancouver in late May, Gogoosh reacted to Malakmotiee’s death with deep remorse. She remembered the first time she had met him after the revolution — in a detention center. 

Gogoosh remembers a room full of cinema and music stars presided over by a rude cleric, who shouted at them as he asked them to confess to their crimes in writing. Malakmotiee couldn’t take it anymore and asked: “Hajji [a respectable term for those have gone on pilgrimage to Mecca]! Have we killed someone?” 

“What you’ve done is worse,” the cleric retorted. 

“Mr Haaji! I have always tried to make people happy,” Gogoosh remembers Malakmotiee having responded. “Wherever I go, people welcome me.” He then went outside and came back after a few minutes, with eyes red from crying. The great popular Looti of the streets of Tehran had been put down by the brutal clerics. 

 

A Man of Purgatory

It was not only puritan clerics who banned Malakmotiee, but also revolutionaries bent on renewing all aspects of social life. In 1982, Iraj Ghaderi, a rare Filmfarsi figure who was able to re-invent himself under the Islamic Republic, made The Men of the Purgatory (sometimes billed in English as The Imperilled). The film starred Fardin and Malakmotiee, who played a group of ordinary prisoners who were freed after the 1979 revolution, bent on leaving the country but who ending up enlisting in the fight to repel the Iraqi invasion that soon followed. The film’s message could hardly be clearer: The Lootis might not have been revolutionaries but they were Iran-loving patriots, ready to serve their nation. The film was madly popular and it broke box office records. But the pro-regime zealots would have none of it, and they organized hooligans to shut the film down. The hooligans were led not by a neighborhood tough but by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, an Islamist guerrilla fighter who became a pro-regime propaganda filmmaker but was to later emerge as a critical director, one of Iran’s best known, and celebrated in film festivals all over the world. In the early 2000s, under the hardliner president Mahmood Ahmadinejad, Makhmalbaf would be forced to leave Tehran for Europe, just as he had forced other artists underground in his zealot youth. 

Over the last week, as Iranians all over the world mourned Malakmotiee, there were still a few prepared to denounce him. For instance, the newspaper Jomhouri Eslami attacked him as a “corrupt actor of the monarchy era” who shouldn’t be regarded as a “man of art.” It attacked the state newspapers that had eulogized the great Looti for “having joined the chorus of dirty elements who want to bring back the corrupt art and culture of the monarchical era, change the taste of our society and let us forget our religious and moral values by presenting such corrupt elements as artistic role models.” 

As the Islamic Republic finds itself mired in a crisis of values, massive corruption and oligarchic inequality, one could bet that the great Looti’s reputation will survive the theocracy that banned him for 40 years — but was never able to ensure he was forgotten. 

 

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