BigB@80: What’s common to these films? Jahil, Alishaan, Devaa

In the 1970s and 1980s, feature films in Bombay were launched with alacrity and dumped with abandon. Sometimes they never progressed beyond the muhurats, a series of advertisement in trade magazines, or, the recording of a few songs. Sometimes they even perished in the cans for lack of distributor interest. Like flowers in the wild, few saw them.

The history of Hindi cinema is littered with such stories of unfulfilled promises and unrealized dreams. But two films cleverly blended songs and sequences from incomplete projects with a script of their own to fashion a complete film. The first was Krishna Shah’s Cinema Cinema (1979), who had earlier made a name for himself in Hollywood (Rivals) and burnt his fingers in Bollywood with Shalimar (1978). The second was Film Hi Film (1983). Produced by Shahab Ahmed and directed by Hiren Nag, the films included scenes from K Asif’s shelved magnum opus, Sasta Khoon Mehnga Pani and Ramesh Saigal’s passionate anti-war endeavour, Shikwah.

Film Hi Film (1983) also hosted clips from two incomplete Amitabh Bachchan films of the 1970s. There was a clip from director Kailash Kapoor’s Ek Tha Chander Ek Thi Sudha where a very young Amitabh and Rekha croon and cavort. Khuda Gawah (not be confused with Mukul Anand’s 1992 film of the same name) was another shelved venture where Big B had a double role. In an action sequence shot in a bar, Bachchan 1 wearing a mask asks Bachchan 2, “Kya naam hai tumhara? “Tumhara baap,” he replies abrasively. The masked Bachchan retorts, “Hum naam pooch rahein hain, yeh rishte ki baat kar raha hai.” Dialogues like these would have surely drawn enthusiastic whistles and claps in sweaty, tin-roofed theatres across India. Uttam Kumar, Rishi Kapoor and Parveen Babi also starred in the movie which was directed by Surendra Mohan (Aap Ke Deewane, Dhanwan). Sadly, neither of the two films were completed.

Several other Bachchan films, announced with fanfare in trade publications, never took off: Prakash Mehra’s Sadhu Sant, Rakesh Roshan’s Jahil, Tinnu Anand’s Alishaan, to name three. Even Subhash Ghai’s much-discussed Devaa was a non-starter.

Every film has its own set of reasons for not being realized. But it can be safely said that raising finance wouldn’t have been an issue with any of them. In some cases, announcements were made without sorting out the details. The outcome: an abandoned project.