Remembering Manmohan Desai through his film- Amar Akbar Anthony

Remembering Manmohan Desai through his film Amar Akbar Anthony.

On Manmohan Desai's birth anniversary today, we remember the Bollywood director and producer by presenting 10 interesting facts about his iconic film Amar Akbar Anthony, which came out in the year 1977.

1. During the famous mirror scene, Manmohan Desai was actually shooting the climax of Parvarish, which also came out in the same year, on another floor of the same studio. Amitabh Bachchan thus shot the scene in absence of Desai.

2. The line, "sophisticated rhetorician intoxicated with the exuberance of your own verbosity", spoken by Bachchan before the My Name Is Anthony song is distinctly similar to a quotation from a speech given by Benjamin Disraeli, a former British Prime Minister, in 1878. Disraeli had used the word inebriated instead of intoxicated.

3. For a scene where the villain falls in a well with his car while chasing the hero, Desai asked the cameraman Peter Pereira to go inside the well with his camera.

4. The character Anthony Gonsalves is named after the actual music teacher of Pyarelal. Gonsalves was a famous music arranger in Mumbai (then Bombay) in the 1930s. Incidentally, the song My Name is Anthony Gonsalves was composed by the Laxmikant-Pyarelal duo. Gonsalves passed away in January 2012.

5. In one of the earlier scenes in the movie, Rishi Kapoor accidentally refers to Neetu Singh by her real name. Neetu's character in the film is named Salma.

6. When an injured Bachchan is in jail, half of his face is black, but when he reaches Pran's place, the marks disappear only to come back when he is put in jail a second time.

7. Amar Akbar Anthony was remade in Telugu as Ram Robert Rahim (1980) and in Malayalam as John Jaffer Janardhanan (1982). The Telugu version had Rajinikanth and Sridevi, the Malayalam one had Mammootty.

8. The song Humko Tumse Ho Gaya Hai was unique in the sense that it had the voices of Lata Mangeshkar, Kishore Kumar, Mohd Rafi, and Mukesh. It was the only time the legends sang together.

9. Desai pulled off the unbelievable when in the blood donation scene, he had the characters of Amitabh Bachchan, Vinod Khanna, and Rishi Kapoor, all donating blood together to their on-screen mother, played by Nirupa Roy.

10. The movie was a big hit in the West Indies as well.

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