Amar Akbar Anthony or why I love 70ies movies

Where else do you have so much happening storywise before the opening credits even run?

In those 23 minutes we learn how dad (Pran) went to prison for his boss and how this scumbag did not, like he promised, take care of the now fatherless 3 sons and their mom. So dad returns after his release to find his wife striken with tuberculosis, the boys on the verge of starving and after confronting evil boss














he has to flee, while doing that steals (and carries ! ) a box filled with gold bars, finds his wifes suicide note (that she couldn´t follow through as she was knocked down by a tree and lost her eyesight) On top of that the boys are separated during these events, and found and brought up by 3 different men.
Amar (Vinnod Khanna) is raised by a policewala and becomes a policeman as well, Akhbar (Rishi Kapoor) saved by a muslim tailor, grows up to be a qawali singer and Anthony found by a catholic priest is now a small time crook and bar owner.

The three meet (but don´t recognise each other) while donating blood for their blind mother after she has an accident (of course she also does not make them out as her sons). And finally the opening credits are running.














Btw. if you want to know who is who in this screencap, just look out of the windows...

The main part of the film is "just" how the sons meet and get some girls, encounter some evil people and get to know that they are all infact still alive.
The evil boss (now a pauper thanks to now also evil dad) tries to become wealthy again.
On the boys and their girls front things also get going. As chance will have it, Akhbar´s girl is moms doctor (Neetu Singh), Anthony´s ladki (Parveen Babi) is the daughter of the evil boss who was kidnapped by Pran as a child and sent to boarding school as revenge for the loss of his sons. The third girl (Shabana Azmi) gets rescued by Amar from her criminal evil family (and very flowery dresses stepmom)














Since the human brain can take in only so much before overloading it gets pretty tough to follow through the rest but after another batch of hair-raising conincidences the family finally reunites. Mom regains her eyesight. Dad sees the err in his semi-evil ways of revenge and the boys get together to free two of the girls from evil boss/pauper/now again wealthy evil crime lord in a very slick manner.















Two factoids that I can´t let pass.

- One of the actors (not characters) who plays a baddie is called Hercules.
- Divine Helen gets to say two sentences in her cameo. And she does NOT dance.















If you haven´t seen it so far, it´s the perfect movie for watching with a crowd.

Oh I Love it. Love it. Love it.