7  Unknown Facts About Deewaar Which  Clocks 50 Years Today

7  Unknown Facts About Deewaar Which  Clocks 50 Years Today

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 23^rd 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.