On Manmohan Desai’s birth anniversary today, we remember the Bollywood director and producer by presenting 10 unknown facts about his iconic film ‘Amar Akbar Anthony’.
- During the famous mirror scene, Manmohan Desai was actually shooting the climax of ‘Parvarish’ on another floor of the same studio. Big B thus shot the scene in absence of Desai
- The line, “sophisticated rhetorician intoxicated with the exuberance of your own verbosity”, spoken Amitabh before the ‘My Name Is Anthony…’ the 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’
- 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
- 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
- In one of the earlier scenes in the movie, Rishi accidentally refers to Neetu Singh by her real name. Neetu’s character in the film is named Salma
- When an injured Amitabh 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
- ‘Amar Akbar Anthony’ was remade in Telugu as ‘Ram Robert Rahim’ (1980) and in Malayalam as ‘John Jaffer Janardhanan’ (1982), starring Mammootty
- 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
- 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
- The movie was a big hit in the West Indies as well
- Amar Akbar Anthony” is now an inspiration for the Harvard University Press for a book on Bollywood, Brotherhood and the Nation.
