Ravi Tandon, who directed taut and trendy thrillers such as ‘Majboor’ and ‘Khel Khel Mein’ in the 1970s and delivered the 1980s box-office biggie, Khuddar, passed away at his Mumbai house on Friday. He was 86. He was suffering from lung fibrosis for the past few years and died due to respiratory failure at 3:30am, a family member told PTI.

“You will always walk with me, I will always be you, I’m never letting go. Love you papa,” his actor-daughter Raveena Tandon messaged on a social media platform.

The Agra-born director knew the craft of constructing riveting thrillers within the matrix of popular Hindi cinema without compromising on quality. Both ‘Majboor’ (Amitabh Bachchan-Parveen Babi) and ‘Khel Khel Mein’ (Rishi Kapoor-Neetu Singh) were slick and pacy, a cut above the regular fare. Even the whodunit ‘Anhonee’ (Sanjeev Kumar-Leena Chandavarkar) had a couple of nerve-jangling scenes and a neatly-concealed plotter.

Tandon’s gift for building tension is best exemplified in the ‘Majboor’ climax. For a large part, the scene involves a bleeding, dying man (Pran) aiming his gun at a killer (Satyen Kappu) in a hut. It’s a tribute to Tandon’s skills that the proceedings remain pulse-pounding and the audience edgy all along. The film’s 18-minute finale seems to be gone in 180 seconds.

The film director had a good ear for music too. ‘Khel Khel Mein’s’ cool and bouncy tracks, fashioned by an inform R D Burman, were a rage among the young. ‘Majboor’ had an ensemble of catchy compositions by Laxmikant-Pyarelal. ‘Khuddar’s playful number, ‘Angrezi mein kehte hain’ (singers: Lata-Kishore, lyrics: Majrooh, music: Rajesh Roshan) topped the annual Binaca Geetmala, the popular weekly radio show of Hindi film music chartbusters, in 1982.

Thrillers were Tandon’s forte but he also directed the moderately successful drama about the old and the aging, ‘Zindagi’, which relied largely on the acting skills of Sanjeev Kumar with whom he collaborated regularly. The 70s were the high noon of Tandon’s career. However, in the earlier 80s, along with the watchable winner ‘Khuddar’, he delivered another hit — the trite lost-and-found ‘Waqt ki Deewar’. But these films lacked his signature.

The 1980s saw major changes hit the industry: film piracy and the rise of television being two of them. The resultant shift in content adversely affected many filmmakers. Tandon was no exception. His later films — ‘Rahi Badal Gaye’, ‘Bond 303’, ‘Nazrana’, to name just three — crashed at the cash counters. He also directed his own son, Raj, in the forgotten ‘Ek Main Aur Ek Tu’. Among those who mourned Ravi Tandon’s passing on social media were actors Juhi Chawla and Namrata Shirodkar.