Shaan (1980)

After the super duper success of Sholay the Sippy's came up with this lavish James Bond type action flick. I really can't give the Sippy's enough credit for making Shaan so different to Sholay. Whilst Sholay was a mesh of different genres Shaan is more or less a straight forward action epic. You can see it's inspiration from the title sequence, which is reminiscent of the Bond movies. Even the villain Shakaal's lair is modelled on that of a Bond villain's. Amitabh Bachan,Shashi Kapoor and Shatrughan Sinha perform well whilst Sunil Dutt and Rakhee Gulzar provide fantastic support. Even Kulbushan Karbanda was extraordinary as the evil Shakaal. Shaan also benefits from having a good number of villain character actors, from what I remember there was Dilip Tahil, Sharat Saxena,Goga Kapoor,Sudhir,Mac Mohan and quite a few more. Kulbushan Karbanda had a tough job on his hands trying to match upto the tyrant Gabbar Singh but he delivers. Although half of that credit goes to writers Salim Javed for creating such a fantastic villain in the form of Shakaal Let me take this opportunity to mention an interesting fact, I had seen Kulbushan Karbanda in many movies as a child and had seen Shaan over 30 times yet failed to recognise him as Shakaal because I had never seen him bald. The songs by R.D. Burman were great, especially Pyar Karnewale and Yamma Yamma. Salim Javed had a tough job on their jobs trying to write a script to rival their previous movie Sholay but they delivered. The script was good but the action scenes were fabulous. Shaan is further proof that with Amitabh on board the Sippy's can create classics, even further proof was their next venture Satte Pe Satta.