General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Hera Pheri (हेरा फेरी) (1976 film)

Hera Pheri (हेरा फेरी) is a 1976 Hindi-language action comedy film directed by Prakash Mehra, starring Amitabh Bachchan as the con man Vijay and Vinod Khanna as his friend and partner in crime Ajay, whose friendship collapses when Vijay discovers that the man who killed his father may be Ajay's long-lost father.¹^•² The title is now often associated with the 2000 comedy of the same name, but the 1976 film is a separate work made nearly a quarter of a century earlier.³

Key fact	Detail
Director / producer	Prakash Mehra; produced by Satyendra Pal under the Chaudhary Enterprises banner⁴
Lead cast	Amitabh Bachchan (Vijay), Vinod Khanna (Ajay), Saira Banu (Kiran Singh), Sulakshana Pandit (Asha Khanna)¹
Release	1976; IMDb lists 3 October 1976 (India), while other sources give 1 October 1976 and 10 September 1976⁵^•⁶^•⁷
Runtime	164 minutes (2 hours 44 minutes)⁵
Music	Kalyanji-Anandji, with lyrics by Anjaan and Indivar¹
Genres	Action, comedy, crime, drama⁸
Audience ratings	IMDb 6.6/10 from about 1,200 users; Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer 47% from 50+ ratings⁹^•⁸

Spoilers

Plot

Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan) and Ajay (Vinod Khanna) are best friends and small-time con artists who team up to swindle wealthy people with criminal backgrounds.² Their partnership breaks when Vijay discovers that Ajay's long-lost father, P.K. (Pinchoo Kapoor), now masquerading as the respectable Seth Ghanshyamdas, is the criminal who killed Vijay's father.² Despite Vijay's attempts to convince him, Ajay rejects his friend and sides with his father, setting in motion what the film's synopsis describes as a bloody saga of familial revenge.²^•⁸ The story asks whether Ajay will see through the conman claiming to be his father and reconcile with his friend.¹⁰

A fuller synopsis adds that Vijay first spots Sherry, who helped P.K. kill his father, while gambling, and that P.K. disguises himself as Ghanshyam and moves freely while pretending to be Vijay's friend before Ajay learns that P.K. is his father and joins him.⁶

Cast and crew

The film pairs Amitabh Bachchan and Vinod Khanna in the lead roles, with Saira Banu as Kiran Singh and Sulakshana Pandit as Asha Khanna.¹ The supporting cast includes Shreeram Lagoo as Police Commissioner Khanna, Pinchoo Kapoor as P.K. / Ghanshyamdas, Goga Kapoor, Mac Mohan, Asrani in an uncredited guest appearance, Yunus Parvez, Padma Khanna, Tun Tun, Urmila Bhatt, and P. Jairaj.¹^•¹¹

Behind the camera, Vijay Kaul wrote the story and screenplay, Satish Bhatnagar wrote the dialogue, and Anjaan and Indivar (Shyamalal Babu Rai) wrote the lyrics.¹ N. Satyen was the cinematographer and K.H. Mayekar and Jayant Adhikari the editors.⁷ The music was composed by the Kalyanji-Anandji team, Kalyanji Veerji Shah and Anandji Veerji Shah, with playback singing by Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, Kishore Kumar, and Mahendra Kapoor.¹ One listed soundtrack song, "Mujhey Pyaar Me Khaat Kisine Likha Hai", was performed by Lata Mangeshkar with lyrics by Anjaan and Indivar and music by the Shah brothers, released on Polydor records.¹²

Production and context

Prakash Mehra's streak with Bachchan. Mehra had produced and directed Zanjeer (1973), the blockbuster that established Amitabh Bachchan's Angry Young Man persona and began a working relationship that spanned seven more films, including Khoon Pasina, Hera Pheri, Muqaddar Ka Sikandar, Laawaris, Namak Halal, Sharaabi, and Jaadugar.¹³ Hera Pheri is also counted among Bachchan's best-known buddy films co-starring Vinod Khanna.¹⁴ Moviebuff notes that it is one of six films in which Khanna and Bachchan starred together, and that all their collaborations were quite successful.¹⁵

Box office. A retrospective review describes the 1976 Hera Pheri as one of the biggest hits of 1976, after which Mehra promptly planned his next film repeating Bachchan and Khanna.¹⁶

Reception and legacy

On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a Tomatometer score of 47% from 50+ ratings, with an audience Popcornmeter average of 3.5 out of 5.⁸ IMDb users have rated it 6.6/10 from about 1,200 votes.⁹ A contemporary-style user review on IMDb praises Bachchan's comedic work, made during the period of his angry young man image, and singles out Asrani's short part as the best of the film, while conceding that the plot itself is not the film's strength.¹²

A 2026 retrospective by the writer Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri, an author and editor in Indian film publishing, argues that the 1976 film remains one of the more curious outliers in Prakash Mehra's filmography, standing apart from his brooding dramas Zanjeer and Muqaddar Ka Sikandar, and shows a filmmaker in a playful, mischievous mood blending genres with a lightness of touch.³ The same piece emphasizes that for a generation of viewers the title now belongs to Priyadarshan's 2000 comedy and its 2006 sequel Phir Hera Pheri, whose characters and dialogue have entered everyday Hindi-film vocabulary.³

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026