The original Don — the template from which two later versions are built.
What it is
Don was released in 1978, directed by Chandra Barot and produced by Nariman Irani, who died in an accident during production; the film was completed and released posthumously. It stars Amitabh Bachchan in the dual title role — as Don, a feared Mumbai crime boss, and as Vijay, a look-alike street performer from the city's poorer quarters who is recruited by a police officer to take Don's place after Don dies. The film was written by Salim–Javed, the screenwriting duo of Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, whose collaborations dominated Hindi popular cinema through the mid-to-late seventies. Kalyanji-Anandji composed the score.
The shape it establishes is a lookalike plot: a man with no criminal intention is placed inside a criminal network by the police to gather evidence, while managing constant exposure to people who knew the original. The premise requires the audience to track which man is on screen at any moment — a problem the film solves partly through performance, partly through costume and setting, partly through Bachchan's deliberate differentiation of posture and speech between the two characters.
Structure and plot
The film opens by establishing Don as a figure of genuine menace — controlled, stylish, capable of violence. His accidental death, observed by the police officer D'Silva, creates the opportunity. D'Silva knows Vijay, who resembles Don closely enough to pass, and installs him into Don's organisation. The first half of the film is largely occupied with Vijay learning to hold Don's position without being detected: by associates, by rivals, and by the organisation's leadership abroad.
A revenge subplot runs alongside the central deception. A man named Jasjit, and a woman named Roma, are independently seeking the people who destroyed their families — threads that eventually converge on Don's network. The two storylines press toward the same targets from different angles and resolve together in the final act.
D'Silva's death partway through removes the one person who knows the full truth of the substitution. That single structural fact — the loss of the officer who arranged everything — is the film's pivot. Vijay is now inside, unable to prove his own identity, and the situation that was a controlled operation becomes something considerably more dangerous. The diary at the heart of the criminal network's records becomes the object everyone needs, for different reasons.
The ending of the 1978 film resolves the deception and clears Vijay's name. It is a resolution that the 2006 remake deliberately and completely reverses.
What it established
Don (1978) belongs to the masala tradition of Hindi filmmaking — a mode that accommodates action, comedy, romance and sentiment within a single film without treating those shifts as contradictions. The film moves between chase sequences, comedic scenes involving Vijay's adjustments to his new life, and the harder dramatic material of Roma's grief and pursuit. Kalyanji-Anandji's score includes the signature title song, which became one of the most recognisable pieces of music associated with the film and was carried forward, rearranged, into the remake.
The film was a major commercial success and is consistently cited as one of Bachchan's defining performances of the period — a period in which he had already established the "angry young man" persona through earlier Salim–Javed collaborations. What Don adds to that persona is a layer of playfulness: Vijay is not the urban anti-hero of those other films but an ordinary man under extraordinary pressure, improvising his way through a world that could kill him. The contrast between the two characters — one a predator, one a survivor — is the engine the whole premise runs on.