Anecdote – Victoria No 203
Brij (father of actor Kamal Sadana?), a Director, was producing his second movie Victoria No.203 in 1971-72 and he signed Dada Muni- Ashok Kumar and Pran as main characters along with Naveen Nishchal as young hero and Saira Banu as heroine. When Ashok Kumar and Pran reached on the sets for the first day’s shooting, they asked Brij, what are the scenes and where is the screen play. Duo were taken aback when they were told that screen play was not ready as something was wrong with the writer writing screen play. Ashok Kumar and Pran were busy artists even at that stage and they could not afford more dates for this film. They told Brij clearly that he has to finish film within schedule else there is no hope to get their dates soon. Brij was also worried.
Then Ashok Kumar and Pran jumped in to the field of screen play themselves and they used to write scenes day by day themselves on the sets with instant improvisations and these scenes were picturised by Brij.
Victoria No 203 is a thriller with comedy involved in the plot. Its old diamond stealing plot which are hided by a thief in a Victoria (numbered 203) and whole film is revolving around the search of these diamonds.
Victoria No 203 is known for a daring song and dance sequence of Saira Banu draped in two bath towels. She had suggested the picturization of this song and towels were her ideas.
Its an entertaining movie.
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Interestingly, Victoria No. 203 was released in the year 1972, a year when Dada Moni had the maximum number of releases of his career i.e 11 of them.Of these few went uncredited and only Anuraag and Victoria No. 203 are remembered till date for the critical and commercial success.