REEL LIFE : Bombay Blockbusters Arrive With Some Long Stories to Tell : Popular Indian films are big on love, music and the amount of time it takes to view them, as a visit to a Simi Valley video store attests.

Just about every story on the film industry of India starts with the observation that India produces more films each year than any other country, including the United States.

Fascinating though it may be, we won’t repeat the fact yet again. We won’t repeat it because it’s self-evident after one visit to the India Movie Land video store in Simi Valley.

More than 1,000 titles line the shelves of the recently opened store. Owner Neeraj Newton said that represents roughly how many films his native country produces each year.

“Some of them have English subtitles,” Newton said, “but that’s very rare. Most are in Hindi.”

Popular Indian films are star-driven, usually about romance, often musical and always long.

“The shortest I ever saw was exactly three hours,” Newton said. “Some are 4 1/2 hours or more.”

If you think that’s a marathon, Newton said some dramatizations of classical Indian epics consume 20 to 25 tapes, each lasting three or more hours. The cinema is, after all, an escape in a country where many live under harsh economic conditions.

Describing the theater experience in India, Newton uses one word: “Crowded.”

Indians have bought more than a half-billion movie tickets since 1975 and that’s just for one film, “Sholay,” an Indian takeoff on “The Magnificent Seven.”

Most Americans know Indian cinema from director Satyajit Ray’s small, moody films like the 1956 “Pather Panchali,” which is also known as “Song of the Road,” or the work of Mira Nair (“Salaam Bombay!” and “Mississippi Masala”).

Popular Indian films are somewhat prudish. The nation that gave us the Kama Sutra doesn’t permit nudity in its films. However rape scenes are almost de rigueur.

Bikram Singh, a prominent movie critic, described a typical rape scene this way to the New York Times:

“The actress is disrobed or stripped as she is chased from room to room by the villain. Actual sex or full nudity is never shown but the audience knows what is going on, with screams from the woman and the camera focusing on torn bits of dress and leering thugs.”

There are even character actors who specialize in rape. One known as Ranjeet, said that in his countless films he has raped virtually every major actress in the Hindi-language film industry.

In the same article the the New York Times reported that women’s groups are having more success in protesting such portrayals.