Trailer
Plot summary
Jai and Veeru are small-time crooks who work as a team and split everything between them, and they once helped Thakur Baldev Singh fight off bandits. The Thakur, a former police inspector, tracks them down and brings them to Ramgarh with an offer: capture the bandit Gabbar Singh and bring him in alive, for twenty thousand rupees plus the fifty thousand rupee reward on his head. Gabbar's men arrive in the village to collect supplies, and the two newcomers send them back empty-handed. Veeru falls for Basanti, a talkative horse-cart driver, and Jai for Radha, the Thakur's widowed daughter-in-law. The villagers take heart from the pair.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Sholay (1975)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Sholay's villain Gabbar Singh was modelled on a real-life dacoit, Gabbar Singh Gujjar, who menaced villages around Gwalior in the 1950s; any policeman he captured had his ears and nose cut off and was released as a warning to other policemen.
- Producers first wanted Danny Denzongpa for Gabbar Singh, but he was committed to Feroz Khan's Dharmatma (1975); second choice Amjad Khan won the role and prepared by reading Abhishapta Chambal, a book about Chambal dacoits.
- Director Ramesh Sippy re-filmed scenes many times to get his desired effect, so the 5-minute song "Yeh Dosti" took 21 days to shoot, two short scenes of Radha lighting lamps took 20 days, and the train robbery sequence took over 7 weeks.
- Dharmendra used the Sholay shoot to court Hema Malini: he paid the light boys to spoil their romantic scenes, forcing retakes that let him spend more time with her. The couple married five years after the film's release.
- Sholay was the first Indian film to have a stereophonic soundtrack and use the 70 mm widescreen format, but because 70 mm cameras were expensive it was shot on traditional 35 mm film and converted to a 2.2:1 frame.
- Salim-Javed first approached Dilip Kumar to play Thakur, but he turned the part down; Dilip Kumar later said it was one of the few films he regretted refusing.
- Ramesh Sippy wanted Shatrughan Sinha for Jai, but Amitabh Bachchan, then not very popular, lobbied hard for the part and was cast on Salim-Javed's recommendation after their first collaboration, Zanjeer.
- For the Ramanagara shoot, the filmmakers built a road from the Bangalore highway, art director Ram Yedekar had a whole township built on the site, and one part of Ramanagara was for a time called "Sippy Nagar" as a tribute to the film's director.
