Roop Ki Rani Choron Ka Raja

1992 190’ col/scope Hindi d Satish Kaushik pc Narasimha Enterprises p Boney Kapoor s/lyr Javed Akhtar c Baba Azmi m Laxmikant Pyarelal lp Anil Kapoor, Sridevi, Anupam Kher, Jackie Shroff, Paresh Rawal, Johnny Lever, Bindu, Deepak Qazir, Ajit Vachhani, Dalip Tahil, Akash Khurana, Siddharth

Romeo (Kapoor), the handsome safecracker, encounters the sexy Seema (Sridevi), a rival in his profession. The two are hired by the criminal Chukran (Kher) to steal some diamonds. In return, Chukran promises to reveal the name of the man who killed Seema’s father. Chukran himself had killed both Seema’s and Romeo’s fathers, and both had grown up together at an orphanage and were childhood sweethearts. Chukran, the criminal mastermind, had also killed his own good twin brother Manmohanal (Kher again), which allows him to pose as a millionaire philanthropist. Jackie Shroff plays the honest cop, pursuing both Romeo and Chukran, who is revealed to be Romeo’s long-lost brother. The film’s mixture of elements from Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955) with the penny-dreadful world of Spielberg includes the famous scene of Romeo and Seema hanging over a cauldron of acid before they are rescued by Romeo’s pet pigeon Django. Made as a spectacular and touted as the most expensive Indan film ever, it was a financial disaster, a feat later trumped by Ghai’s even more expensive Trimurti (1995). Most of the money was spent on spectacular sets and elaborate, sometimes innovative, song picturisations.

Film