Amar Akbar Anthony (1977)

Amar Akbar Anthony Movie Trailer 1977

Crew

  Directed by       Manmohan Desai
  Produced by       Manmohan Desai
  Written by       Smt. Jeevanprabha M. Desai ,Kader Khan,Prayag Raj,Pushpa Sharma,K.K. Sukla
  Music by       Laxmikant-Pyarelal
  Cinematography  Peter Pereira
  Editing by       Kamlakar Karkhanis

Cast

    Vinod Khanna     as Inspector Amar Khanna; first son (raised as a Hindu)
    Amitabh Bachchan as Anthony Gonsalves; second son (raised as a Christian)
    Rishi Kapoor     as Akbar Allahabadi/Raju; third son (raised as a Muslim)
    Parveen Babi     as Jenny; Anthony's girlfriend
    Shabana Azmi     as Laxmi; common thief and Amar's love interest
    Neetu Singh      as Dr. Salma; Akbar's neighbor and Akbar's love interest
    Nirupa Roy       as Bharati; mother of three boys
    Pran             as Kishanlal; driver profession, father of three boys, husband of Bharati
    Jeevan           as Robert, the mob boss
    Ranjeet          as Ranjeet
    Yusuf Khan       as Zebisko, the bodyguard
    Helen            as Special appearance

Story

Kishanlal (Pran), a chauffeur, takes the blame for a fatal hit-and-run accident committed by his mob boss employer, Robert (Jeevan), on the assurance that his family's income will be tripled and their welfare looked after. He returns from prison to find his wife Bharati (Nirupa Roy) suffering from tuberculosis and his three sons starving. Seeking help from Robert for the sake of his family, he is ridiculed, humiliated and repudiated, until he turns on Robert and tries to kill him. Making his escape, Kishanlal inadvertently takes a car containing a shipment of gold bullion. Robert's goons give chase.

Kishanlal goes home to rescue his family — only to find his wife's suicide note. Unknown to him, she fails and is struck blind. He leaves his sons in a public park (at the foot of a statue of Gandhi) while he draws off the pursuing goons. In the car chase that follows he crashes, is thrown clear of the wreck, and discovers the gold. But by the time he returns to the park with his riches, his three children have vanished. Amar, the oldest, has been adopted by a Hindu policeman; a Muslim tailor adopts the youngest and names him Akbar; and a Catholic priest, finding the middle son asleep on the steps of his church, fosters him and names him Anthony.

In revenge, Kishanlal kidnaps Robert's daughter Jenny and raises her as his niece, using the gold to destroy Robert's business and set himself up as mob boss instead.

Amar (Vinod Khanna) becomes a policeman; Akbar (Rishi Kapoor) becomes a singer; the middle brother, Anthony (Amitabh Bachchan), becomes a likable, socially conscious scamp who runs quasi-legal operations and makes God his 'partner' by donating half his income to charity. The three meet when they donate blood for an accident victim, unaware that they are related — or that the recipient is their biological mother Bharati.

Their lives become entangled in an incredible web of coincidences and furious action sequences — interspersed with songs — when Amar's adopted father is seriously wounded and Anthony falls in love with Jenny, Robert's long-lost daughter. Because of it his adoptive father, the priest, is murdered. In their pursuit of justice their paths cross again until, combining efforts, the brothers discover both the culprit and their mutual heritage.

In addition to the ongoing feud between Robert and Kishanlal, each son meets and courts — with greater or lesser difficulty — their love interests. When the grieving mother regains her sight at a Diwali festival in honor of Sai Baba, one by one the family is re-united and Robert, who caused their suffering, is finally imprisoned.


Did you know?

1. In order to shoot the action scene where the villain falls in a well with his car while chasing the hero, director Manmohan Desai asked cameraman Peter Pereira to get inside the well with his camera.
2. According to Director Manmohan Desai, the character of Anthony Gonzalves (played by Amitabh Bachchan) was based upon a real person from his youth.
3. When there were shooting for the mirror scene, Manmohan Desai was shooting the climax of Parvarish on another floor of the studio, Amitabh Bachchan while rehearsing shot the scene in absence of MDK.
4. The song 'My Name is Anthony Gonsalves' was composed by duo Laxmikant-Pyarelal. The character Anthony Gonsalves is named after a music teacher of Pyarelal who goes by the name of 'Anthony Gonsalves' and was one of the most famous music arrangers in Bombay in the 1930s. He had among his students the likes of RD Burman apart from Pyarelal.
5. The opening line in the song 'My name is Anthony Gonsalves', "sophisticated rhetorician intoxicated by the exuberance of your own verbosity", that is spoken by Anthony when he emerges from the Easter egg, is an almost exact quotation from a speech in the Parliament of the United Kingdom given by British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in 1878. Disraeli (who was referring to William Ewart Gladstone) used the word "inebriated" rather than "intoxicated.