Amitabh Bachchan’s Kaala Patthar had Salim-Javed caring more about the cast than the story, leading to film’s mediocre performance

Kaala Patthar was set in a coal mine where the miners are fighting for fair living conditions. The ensemble of characters in this set-up included the brooding mine worker Vijay (Bachchan), the new engineer Ravi (Shashi Kapoor), the escaped convict Mangal (Sinha), the town doctor Sudha (Rakhee), the journalist (Parveen Babi) and the village belle Channo (Neetu Singh), and of course, the evil mine owner (Prem Chopra). In the years since, various memoirs and interviews have often revisited the rivalry between Bachchan and Sinha, and how that turned up the heat on the set of this film. The famous fight scene between Vijay and Mangal, which is broken up by Ravi, has been revisited by Sinha in his autobiography. But, after watching the film, it feels like the creation of Mangal, and even the casting of Sinha for this part, is all done to serve the publicity of the film.

Amitabh Bachchan plays a mine worker in Kaala Patthar.

Kaala Patthar is the story of Vijay’s redemption. His journey in trying to make up for the mistakes he made as a naval officer that resulted in various deaths. So whenever someone at the mine has to participate in a task that could be fatal, he offers himself. In the midst of all this, other characters become a catalyst in enhancing Vijay’s journey, but not Mangal. He is neither a catalyst, nor an obstacle to Vijay’s story. He just exists so that the audience in the theatre can add fuel to the fire of Amitabh and Shatrughan’s rivalry. The actors were probably not even aware as to how they were being utilised in the film’s marketing narrative as they were too involved in making the movie, and dealing with their interpersonal dynamics. “All the spontaneity was gone. We were concerned about how many punches each one of us had to throw,” Sinha said in ‘Written by Salim-Javed’.

Salim Khan, in Sinha’s autobiography, has spoken in great detail about how he insisted on Sinha’s casting as Mangal. “I put my foot down and said, ‘For this film, it will be only Shatrughan Sinha in that role’,” he said. But, as much as Sinha is remembered for his iconic dialogues in the film, he doesn’t really do much for the film’s larger story arc. Sinha too, in a recent chat with Arbaaz Khan, recalled how it was Salim Khan who made sure that he was a part of the film, even when no one else in the film’s team wanted him.

The problems of Kaala Patthar’s script were not lost on the writers. Javed Akhtar, for Chaudhari’s book, acknowledged that they shouldn’t have written a story about a coal mine sitting in a hotel room, thereby admitting that the film could not deliver on the realism that it promised with its premise. “I learned from Kaala Patthar that instead of sitting in a hotel room writing about a coal mine, if we had treated the script a little more realistically, it would have worked better. Either you don’t use a realistic plot or have a realistic locale in the first place, or if you do, you have to be very convincing,“ he said. The film was based on the true story of the Chasnala mining disaster of 1975 where hundreds of mine workers were killed after the coal mine was flooded. Amitabh Bachchan, before entering the movies, had worked in the Coal Department of Bird & Company in the 1960s and had visited various coal mines in Jharkhand where he witnessed many of the problems that were presented in the film. The writers consulted on the story with Bachchan.

Besides this, the film’s story also suffers from many other problems. Because it has several significant stars in its ensemble, it frequently digresses from the story at hand and indulges in some random fight sequences, song sequences, and love stories that don’t aid the movie’s larger plot. And the biggest victim of this is Sinha’s storyline, which feels like a separate film altogether.

Kaala Patthar did not deliver on the box office as it was designed to. In 1979, films like Suhaag and Mr Natwarlal, both starring Bachchan, did better than Kaala Patthar even though it was reverse engineered to be a hit. Kaala Patthar was the last film where Yash Chopra, Salim-Javed and Amitabh Bachchan, the iconic trio of Deewaar, ever worked together.