Ardh Satya

aka The Half-truth 1983 130’ col Hindi d/c Govind Nihalani p Manmohan Shetty, Pradeep Uppoor pc Neo Films Associates st S.D. Panwalkar’s short story sc/dial Vijay Tendulkar, Vasant Dev m Ajit Varman lp Om Puri, Smita Patil, Amrish Puri, Naseeruddin Shah, Sadashiv Amrapurkar, Achyut Potdar, Shafi Inamdar

Nihalani followed his Aakrosh (1980) with this variation on Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971). The son of a brutally violent cop (A. Puri), Anant Welankar (O. Puri) is a sub-inspector in the Bombay police. Wanting to arrest the big gangster and powerful politician Rama Shetty (Amrapurkar), Welankar is constantly frustrated and vents his anger on less prominent targets, to the distress of his humane girlfriend Jyotsna (Patil). Although the example of the ex-cop Lobo (Shah), now an alcoholic wretch, is pointed out to him, Welankar cannot control his temper and he eventually kills a petty thief. Forced to ask Shetty for protection, he kills him instead and surrenders to the police. The fast- paced film, with almost continuous action interspersed with tightly framed close-ups of the lead character, was very successful and spawned numerous cop-on-rampage movies sharing none of this one’s serious intent. Its best-known remake is K. Vijayan’s Kaval (Tamil, 1985).

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