Show Business: Asia's Bouncing World of Movies

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Movie actresses are the main stylesetters in India, both in manners and morals. Zeenat Aman, who claims to be 24 but is closer to 30, has personally replaced the sari with blue jeans in millions of young Indian women's wardrobes. Parveen Babi, 22, the fastest-rising new star, is presently acting in 20 movies. One reason Indian movie fans are fascinated with Parveen, aside from her sleek figure, is because of her candor. Young men and women all over India claim that it is the swinging lives of the stars that are suddenly making them much less hesitant about jumping into bed with each other. Indian Essayist Nirad C. Chaudhuri charges India's cinema with being the "aphrodisiac" responsible for his country's exploding population, which seems slightly unfair, since the birth rate was soaring long before movies.

In any case, cinema has now become India's seventh-largest industry. In all, 65 studios and 38 film laboratories spend $82 million to supply movies in 15 official languages to almost 9,000 Indian theaters (annual box office: $256 million). Bombay is the home of the big-budget Hindi hits, but it is Calcutta that has earned for India most of its international cinematic acclaim. That is mainly because of Satyajit Ray. Using Calcutta's swirling misery as a background for his low-budget masterpieces, Director Ray depicts Indian life with poignant realism. His famous trilogy, Song of the Road, The Unvanquished, and The World of Apu, has been applauded at film festivals all over the world, as has his more recent Distant Thunder. But Ray's movies are not popular in India. His new release, Jana Aranya, opened unheralded this spring in three obscure Calcutta movie houses.

In TAIWAN, movies last year attracted an audience of 235 million, indicating that every person on the island saw an average of 15 movies. Seven production companies with 20 sound stages turn out 120 films a year, mainly teenage tearjerkers, but occasional quality flicks too. A Touch of Zen, by renowned Director King Hu, won the Cannes Film Festival top prize in 1975 for technique. Ting Shan-Hsi, winner of the Asia Film Festival Best Director award, has just completed a $2.5 million epic called 800 Heroes, using a cast of 50,000 troops, 30 navy vessels and 50 refitted air force planes. Ting had a problem: protecting his players. Thirty had to be hospitalized because real TNT was used in some of the action scenes.

In the PHILIPPINES, Filipinos spend 20% of their leisure money on movies. Nearly 200 films are now being produced annually. Locally made skin flicks, called bomba, have been dampened by martial law sensibilities, so producers are now filming what they call "bold" movies, which are only slightly less explicit. The Philippines' most popular actor-director-producers are Joseph Estrada, who in real life is mayor of San Juan, and Fernando Poe Jr. Both are masters of swashbuckling adventures. Poe has just been signed to play the guerrilla hero Ferdinand Marcos−who was one in World War II and is now the country's strong-willed president.