Page 10 - Seniorstoday September 21

Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s quirky comedy
gave Amitabh Bachchan a break from
his ‘angry’ roles. He played an English
professor, who is forced to impersonate
his friend, botany professor Parimal
Tripathi (Dharmendra), to play a prank on
his wife’s (Sharmila Tagore) apparently
infallible brother-in-law (Om Prakash).
Complications arise when he falls in
love with Parimal’s sister-in-law (Jaya
Bachchan), while his friend masquerades
as a chauffeur. Dialogue writer Gulzar
had fun at the expense of Hindi language
purists.
6 Amar Akbar Anthony (1977):
In Manmohan Desai’s lost-and-found
drama, Bachchan played the boisterous
Anthony Gonsavles to Vinod Khanna’s
Amar and Rishi Kapoor’s Akbar. He
spoke Bambaiya Hindi and in one of his
most unforgettable scenes, jumped out of
a giant Easter egg, wearing tails, a top hat
and monocle, and sang gibberish about
haemoglobin in the atmosphere. The angry
young man was starting to cool down.
7 Trishul (1978):
Yash Chopra and Salim-Javed teamed
up again to give Bachchan the role of a
vengeful man out to destroy his father,
(Sanjeev Kumar) who deserted his mother
(Waheeda Rehman) when she was
pregnant, and married a wealthy heiress.
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On her deathbed she makes him promise to
take revenge. The illegitimate son goes after
his father’s business and family, vowing
to make him pay for all the suffering he
inflicted on his mother.
8 Don (1978):
Written by Salim-Javed and directed by
Chandra Barot, the thriller which had the
popular Khaike paan banaraswala number
has Bachchan play the lookalike of an
underworld don, who is sent to infiltrate
his gang. When the police officer who
planned the mission and is the only one
who knows about it is killed, the simple
Chhora ganga kinarewala has to save
himself from the gangster and prove his
innocence to the police. As entertaining as it
was nonsensical, the film showed that a star
at the top of his game can turn anything to
gold.
9 Coolie (1983):
Manmohan Desai’s film, in which Bachchan