Valentina Vitali's Hindi Action Cinema is a most welcome contribution to contemporary scholarship on the Indian film industry. Vitali explores how and why “action” became an important narrative and commercial element at specific times during eighty years of film making in India. Vitali eschews a conventional approach that simply plots Hindi action cinema along a conventional historical grid. Instead, her method understands film “as technologically and industrially bundled discursive constellations animated by the very substances and rhythms that we refer to as history” (p. xiv). Films are thus both “commodities” and “clusters of narrative strategies” (p. xxii).

Vitali begins her examination in Chapter 1 with the Sharda Film Company and its star, Master Vithal. In the 1920s, Sharda Film Company first introduced stunts as a marketing device. Master Vithal's agility, constrained as it sometimes was by his aristocratic costumes, allowed a loosening of “hierarchical bonds” and the disentanglement of “physical energy as a new source of value” as it animated the cinematic restaging of feudal relations (p. 41). In Chapter 2, Vitali considers women in action films during the 1920s and 1930s. Most interesting is Vitali's examination of the iconic significance of Fearless Nadia, and her famous film Hunterwali. Fearless Nadia was white (she was born in Australia) and also quite plump. Vitali argues that Fearless Nadia's weight gave visual gravity to scenes by establishing the full presence of a “human figure in motion” whose agility was dialectically conveyed by gestures and a distinctive soundtrack (p. 104). Later, however, Nadia's style was perceived as “too modern for Indian cinema” but not modern enough for those specific constituencies drawn to a fantasy of industrialization (pp. 114–115).

The period immediately following independence is discussed in Chapter 3. During this period, action films receded into the background as India reflected on appropriate forms of social behavior in the wake of independence. Chapter 4 focuses on the 1960s and the action films of Dara Singh. Vitali argues that the former wrestler modeled a different kind of physical energy than had been seen in earlier films. Since the Indian economy had changed, with an ascendant small-scale sector combining capital and intensive heavy labor, Dara Singh's films had an important role in forming this workforce by projecting “a fantasy of muscular power as value” (p. 179).

In Chapter 5, Vitali examines the films of Amitabh Bachchan. Vitali charts a trajectory, beginning with the film Zanjeer and culminating in the blockbuster Sholay, in which the action film becomes a form of “advertising address” by presenting itself as a commodity. The action film also had the salutary benefit of using time-saving filming techniques that allowed films to be produced quickly and cheaply and thus re-circulate capital “in a quicker manner than had previously been demanded” (p. 224).

Marketing and fantasies of luxury have come to increasingly dominate the action genre. In the monograph's final chapter, Vitali calls attention to how the 2006 remake of Don re-articulates notions of “middle-classness” by valorizing access to electronic consumer goods and other commodities. But more important for contemporary Hindi action cinema is its fantasy of land as “speculative value” as opposed to simply a “source of rent or a means of production” (p. 235). In addition to creating bogus film cities as a means of land speculation, Hindi action cinema has articulated a wholly different understanding of the city: gone are slums and action sequences are shown from a subjective standpoint that mark the “diegetic transformation of urban space into a distinctive place” (p. 235). In this way, Hindi action cinema reflects, channels, and projects the pressures and opportunities of a rapidly changing Indian society and economy.

Hindi Action Cinema is not a survey of the history of Hindi action films. Instead, it is a sophisticated attempt to theorize the complex relationship between the action genre and Indian modes of production and capital generation. The heavy theoretical framework of Vitali's discussion would not lend itself well to beginning or intermediate courses on Indian or world cinema on the undergraduate level. However, for advanced undergraduates in film studies, and for graduate students and scholars, Valentina Vitali's engagement with Hindi action cinema will become an important touchstone not only for understanding the Indian film industry but also for exploring broader questions of how cinematic bodies in motion reveal and channel the complex conditions of their production. Hindi Action Cinema is an intellectually challenging work that will reward the attention of readers whose interests range from South Asian studies to global film and broader issues in the contemporary analysis of culture, society, and economy.