In hindsight, it’s always easy to play the ‘What If’ game. What if Dev Anand had said yes to Prakash Mehra? Dapper Dev would have turned Zanjeer into a series of tilted angles and bouffant moments. What if Shashi Kapoor or Feroz Khan, the two heroes Mehra had worked with before, had done the film? The Kapoor charm and the Khan machismo in a film which foregrounds a conflicted cop, out to get the killers of his parents? Close your eyes and send up a prayer.

The man who gave us Zanjeer the way it was meant to be, passed away last week. Prakash Mehra didn’t know it then, but when he released the film on May 11, 1973, he was instrumental in irretrievably altering the course of Hindi cinema. It is fitting, perhaps, that his end came in the same month, just a few days after that historical marker: Zanjeer smashed every single box office record and created a towering star. Till then, Amitabh Bachchan had lurked, like every other star aspirant, on the periphery of success; post Zanjeer, he was both the unstoppable force and the immovable object that kept every other potential star at bay for two full decades.

The coming together of Prakash and Amitabh was ordained. The former, who started out as a production assistant in the early 50s, had tasted directorial success with a couple of early films. He made Haseena Maan Jayegi in 1968 with Shashi Kapoor, and gave the crooked-toothed charmer one of his best remembered hits. In 1971, he got Feroz and Sanjay Khan together for Mela,which also made money. There was also a Dharmendra starrer called Samadhi, which was an average earner. These kept him in the reckoning, but he was waiting for the big one which would make him the ‘sikandar’ of his ‘muqaddar’.

... contd.