Deewar, directed by The Yash Chopra, released 50 years ago. Starring Shashi Kapoor and Amitabh Bachchan Deewaar was a critical and box-office hit and is considered one of the best, a classic, and an iconic film of Hindi cinema.
Here are seven unknown facts about Deewaar.
1. The first choice for Vijay’s role in Deewaar was not Amitabh Bachchan. It was Rajesh Khanna. Director Yash Chopra, who had directed Rajesh Khanna in his first home production Daag, was keen to reunite with Rajesh Khanna. However, writers Salim-Javed put their collective clout into action and insisted on AB. And who said no to Salim-Javed those days?!
2. But here is the thing. AB was doing another film with Yash Chopra at that time. And post Zanjeer, there was no way he could accommodate two Yash Chopra films into his clogged date diary. Luckily, better sense prevailed. AB and YC trained their guns on Deewaar. The rest was hysteria.
3. Salim-Javed’s inspiration for Deewaar and Vijay were Ganga Jumna and Dilip Kumar. The idea of the two brothers on the opposite sides of the law was from Ganga Jumna. “But we contemporized the entire plot. We shifted the drama and action from the village to the city. In the end, I don’t think there was much of Ganga Jumna in Deewaar,” says Javed Saab.
4. Initially, Deewaar was planned as a songless film. But the distributors didn’t approve of a film without song breaks. This is where R D Burman and the two Kishore Kumar-Asha Bhosle duets ‘Keh do tumhe’ and ‘Maine tujhe manga’ filmed on Shashi Kapoor and Neetu Singh were brought in. Amitabh Bachchan’s Vijay didn’t sing at all. He didn’t sing in Zanjeer either.
5. Speaking of Zanjeer and Deewaar, both were rejected by Dev Anand. He wanted Vijay to sing songs in both, as he felt his fans would have felt cheated otherwise. Once, I asked Dev Saab about this, and he said, “No regrets. Every role, every film has its own destiny. Look what these two films did to Amitabh’s career.”
6. At the 23rd Filmfare awards, Deewaar won Shashi Kapoor the Best Supporting Actor, producer Gulshan Rai won for Best Picture, Salim-Javed for Best Screenplay. Amitabh Bachchan lost the Best Actor to Sanjeev Kumar in Aandhi. Weirdly, Suchitra Sen didn’t win for Aandhi.
7. Deewaar is one of the films included in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die by Steven Jay Schneider. It was the fourth-largest grosser of 1975, ranking next to Sholay, Jai Santoshi Maa, and surprisingly, Feroz Khan’s Dharmatma, a kitschy remake of The Godfather.
