With just five days left before June arrived, a film hit Indian theatres on 27 May 1977 that would go on to rewrite the rules of mainstream Hindi cinema. Packed with action, tragedy, comedy and a touch of divine miracle, the film was called Amar Akbar Anthony, and one of its songs, Hamko Tumse Ho Gaya Hai Pyaar Kya Karein, remains a go-to anthem for lovers confessing their feelings even today. What made the track truly rare was that four of Hindi cinema's biggest playback singers, Lata Mangeshkar, Mukesh, Kishore Kumar and Mohammed Rafi, lent their voices to it together, a combination almost never seen in a single song.
A newspaper story sparked the idea
The premise for the film came to director Manmohan Desai from a news report he read in a newspaper. The story was about a man named Jackson who, worn down by a life of alcoholism, abandoned his three children in a park. Desai shared the story with his friend Prayag Raj, and the two of them worked together to craft a screenplay that would eventually become one of Bollywood's most celebrated films.
A star-studded cast and Desai's first outing with Bachchan
The film's lead cast included Vinod Khanna, Rishi Kapoor, Amitabh Bachchan, Neetu Singh, Parveen Babi, Shabana Azmi, Nirupa Roy and Pran. Kader Khan wrote the dialogues, while the story was credited to Manmohan Desai's wife Jeevanprabha Desai and Prabha Sharma. Amar Akbar Anthony was a full-blown masala entertainer built around the lost-and-found formula, where siblings separated in childhood are reunited years later. It also marked the first time Amitabh Bachchan worked with Manmohan Desai, and it was Desai's first production as well.
Seven songs, all of them hits
Laxmikant Pyarelal composed the music, and Anand Bakshi wrote the lyrics. The film had seven songs in total, and every single one became a hit at the time. Two of them, Hamko Tumse Ho Gaya Hai Pyaar Kya Karein and Shirdi Wale Sai Baba, Aaya Hai Tere Dar Pe Sawali, remain just as popular today as they were on release. Hamko Tumse Ho Gaya Hai Pyaar Kya Karein was set in Raag Bilawal. Kishore Kumar sang for Amitabh Bachchan, Mukesh for Vinod Khanna, and Mohammed Rafi for Rishi Kapoor, while Lata Mangeshkar sang the portions for Parveen Babi, Neetu Singh and Shabana Azmi. The film's qawwali, Parda Hai Parda, also became hugely popular around the same time.
One bottle, three brothers' blood and a theatre erupting in cheers
Manmohan Desai's films always leaned on emotion over logic, and he himself was famously unconcerned with whether a scene made scientific sense. Amar Akbar Anthony had several such moments. The most talked-about scene shows Vinod Khanna, Amitabh Bachchan and Rishi Kapoor donating blood to save their mother, with all three men's blood collected in a single bottle before being transfused into her, something that makes no medical sense at all. Yet when that scene played out on the big screen, audiences erupted, cheering and whistling through the moment.
Made for 1.2 crore, it earned back fifteen times over
Amar Akbar Anthony was made on a budget of around Rs 1.2 crore and went on to collect Rs 15 crore worldwide, making it the second highest-grossing film of 1977. That same year, Manmohan Desai released three other films, Dharam-Veer, Parvarish and Chacha Bhatija, and remarkably, all four of his films that year turned out to be successes at the box office. The lost-and-found formula had already been used before in films like Waqt and Yaadon Ki Baraat, but Desai's own films always cast the ordinary common man as the hero, which is what made audiences connect with them so strongly. Amar Akbar Anthony carried that same connection, and it is part of why the film remains one of the biggest successes of its era.
