Khaidi

Veerabhadraiah (Raogopal Rao) is a feudal lord presiding over a village along with his henchmen, which include his assistant (Rallapalli) and the village sarpanch (Nutan Prasad). Veerabhadraiah lends money to Venkateswarlu (P. L. Narayana), who is a local farmer living with his widowed daughter (Sangeetha). His son, Suryam (Chiranjeevi) is a hard working student living in the nearby city and he falls in love with Veerabhadraiah's daughter - Madhulatha (Madhavi). Realising this, Veerabhadraiah asks Venkateswarlu to ask his son to stop seeing his daughter, to which Venkateswarlu does not agree. Veerabhadraiah kills Venkateswarlu and asks Suryam to pay the money which he had given as a loan. Suryam asks for some time and with the help of his elder sister raises crops to repay. Just as the crops are ready for harvest, Veerabhadraiah and his henchmen not only destroy the crop but also try to sexually abuse Suryam's sister, during which she commits suicide. Being the village head, Veerabhadraiah implicates Suryam in the death of his sister, saying that he was forcing her into prostitution, due to which his sister committed suicide. Suryam is arrested by the Police. The rest of the movie deals with how Suryam escapes from jail and with the help of Dr. Sujatha (Sumalatha) he avenges the decimation of his family.

• Chiranjeevi as Suryam
• Madhavi as Madhulatha
• Rao Gopal Rao as Veerabhadraiah
• Sumalatha as Dr. Sujatha
• Nutan Prasad as Munsiff
• Rallapalli as Sarma
• Ranganath as Police Inspector Dinesh
• Chalapati Rao as Forest Officer
• P. L. Narayana as Venkateswarlu
• Chidathala Appa Rao
• P. J. Sarma
• Samyuktha as Rosy
• Sangeetha as Suryam's elder sister
• Jayamalini in an item number in the song "Tappinchukolevu"
• Suthi Velu as Beggar
• Sivaprasad as Beggar

Dr. M. Tirupathi Reddy: "Kodandarami Reddy also hails from the same place of ours, and we thought of doing a film together and worked on a couple of subjects in Chiranjeevi and Kodandarami Reddy combination. However, I liked the subject of First Blood, and I asked Paruchuri brothers to come up with a story based on that film. They gave a wonderful script for the film. ...The protagonist was just a villager in our initial script, but we changed it to a student, and it clicked! The title Khaidi was my choice indeed!"

"Madhavi and Chiranjeevi were a hit pair, but Madhavi didn't work with Kondadarami Reddy before and thus I wanted to cast her in the film. Nitya already acted in a Tamil film. I liked her character in the film and we signed her in for the bubbly character of Rosy. Our banner name being Samyuktha, we rechristened Nitya as Samyuktha, and she continued to do more films, such as Sirivennela under the same name."

"The film's shooting was started at Prasad Labs on 30 April 1983, with the muhurtam shot on Chiranjeevi and Madhavi. (It was the continuation scene of Menaka-Vishwamitra song "Vedam, naadam...", where Madhavi asks Chiranjeevi about their love). The film was completed in three schedules. The number of shooting days were forty; forty film rolls were exposed for the movie."[6]

"The movie was sold for 2.5 million rupees even when we just announced it! Chiranjeevi was paid Rs.175,000, Madhavi Rs. 40,000, Sumalatha Rs. 20,000, and the director Kondarami Reddy was paid Rs. 40,000 too. As we wanted to make the film a very prestigious one, we spent all our money and we had not made much profit in the film's first run. As the film's rights were sold once every five years to exhibitors, we made profit on this film after five years and through the following years. After five years, we made a profit of 2 million rupees, and some more during the subsequent years. We have not made much profit on satellite rights as we were not aware that it would boom so much today."

"Most of the shooting was done in the village called Rebala near Nellore, while the climax was shot at Porur near Madras. The blasting of houses, and some other such scenes were done there at a specially erected set. The house set, indoors and minor patchwork of shooting was done in Madras. Madhavi, being a lady artiste, had an exclusive house in Talakona location, while everyone else adjusted in huts and houses in and around the village."[7]

"The now famous costume of Chiranjeevi was his own idea! We first thought of doing it ordinarily, but he wanted the getup to be somewhat different. In the last minute, he got a black trouser and black T-shirt from the house, took off the sleeves of the shirt and had the belt above the T-shirt. The getup clicked so much that he became a Khaidi in the hearts of lakhs of audiences with this movie."

Director Kodandarami Reddy talks about the film: "We initially planned the film with the story given by a Tamil writer, but it didn't work out. Tirupathi Reddy gaaru then gave the cassette of First Blood and suggested that we should develop the story based on the initial scenes of the movie. Paruchuri brothers gave wonderful story based on it. ...In those times, we never used to think that it could be risky to go out of the way to do something different! We always wanted to experiment on various things. The songs "Ragulutondi mogalipoda..." and "Idemitabbaa...?" were super hits at that time, because we did them differently! This was the first film of Chiranjeevi that crossed the ten million mark in collections, thus also giving him the star status.[7]

The Music Was Composed By K. Chakravarthy and Released by Tips Music. All Lyrics were penned by Veturi Sundararama Murthy.

The film was later remade in Kannada and in Hindi too. Vishnuvardhan did it in Kannada with the same name while Padmalaya bought the rights for Hindi and made it with Jeetendra there as Qaidi. Madhavi played the lead role in all three languages.

• Khaidi at IMDb