Overview
Coolie is a 1983 Indian action comedy film, directed by Manmohan Desai and written by Kader Khan. The film stars Amitabh Bachchan as Iqbal Aslam Khan, a railway coolie, who was separated from his mother Salma (Waheeda Rehman) due to Zafar's (Kadar Khan) obsession with her causes the destruction of her family and her mental breakdown. Years later, fate unites her sons, Iqbal and Sunny (Rishi Kapoor) and they set out to save Salma from Zafar's captivity. It also starred Rati Agnihotri, Shoma Anand, Suresh Oberoi and Puneet Issar.
The film was released on 2nd December 1983 and became the highest-grossing film of the year. It did in gross revenue. It made over per territory, a rare achievement for the time and was a huge blockbuster.
The film is also infamous for a fight scene with co-star Puneet Issar, during which Bachchan had a near-fatal injury due to a miscalculated jump. In the final cut of the film, the fight scene during which he got injured was frozen and a message appears marking the scene as the one in which he was injured. The original script showed Bachchan dying after Kader Khan shot him. But later on, after the injury-and-recovery episode, Desai thought that this would have a negative impact on the movie as well as a bad feeling in the audience, decided to change the ending. The modified ending has the hero recover after his operation.
Plot
A wealthy, but evil man named Zafar Khan, has fallen in love with a girl named Salma and wants to marry her, but she and her father did not let him. Zafar was arrested for various crimes and was imprisoned for 10 years, but when he is released, he sees that Salma is married to a good man named Aslam Khan. Zafar Khan wants to convince Salma to marry him but Salma refuses. Zafar murders Salma's father and plots his revenge by flooding the region in which Salma lives, nearly killing Aslam and injuring Salma, causing her to lose her memory. During this catastrophe, Salma is also separated from her young son Iqbal. On a railway platform, Iqbal attempts to go after her on foot while Salma is on a train, but he slips and the train leaves the platform. Zafar abducts Salma and tells the world she is his wife. He also adopts an infant from an orphanage in Kanpur, a boy named Sunny, for Salma to raise on the advice of a psychiatrist. Meanwhile, Iqbal is reunited with his uncle, who has lost his wife and son in the flood.
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