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| Images courtesy of Mosfilm |
In 1993, Russia lost arguably its very own Soviet King of
Comedy with the passing of writer-director-actor Leonid Iovich Gaidai, one of
world cinema’s greatest purveyors of slapstick physical comedy since Charlie
Chaplin. Born in 1923 to
Russian-Ukrainian heritage, Gaidai got involved in amateur theater before
getting drafted into the Great Patriotic War.
After suffering a war injury from stepping on a land mine, the
war-disabled veteran joined the Communist Party and began studying theater
acting as well as cinematography before taking up shop as an assistant
director. Though one of his earlier
films consisted of the dramatic subgenre with 1956’s A Weary Road and
one of his earlier comedies The Dead Affair was censored and reedited into
A Groom from the Other World, Gaidai soon established a particular brand
of comedy with his contribution to the anthological Soviet comedy film Absolutely
Seriously where he introduced a recurring subset of bumbling idiot
criminals dubbed Coward (Georgy Vitsin), Fool (Yuri Nikulin)
and Pro (Yevgeny Morgunov).
Utilizing a unique mixture of silent and sound comedy where
non-diegetic sound effects and musical montage take over the sound onscreen,
Gaidai immediately established a unique brand of hilarity with one foot firmly
set in the past while the other hastily finds ground in the present. With scenes where the frame rate seems to
speed up, making characters move or act quickly as the soundtrack by recurring
composer Aleksandr Zatsepin whips up a silent comedy accompaniment frenzy and
generally silly yet scheming characters getting in over their heads or caught
up in ridiculous scenarios, Gaidai’s comedy is distinctly Soviet Russian yet
has an impish rib-tickling quality that’s universally appealing to pretty much
any viewership encountering it. With one
of his films even spawning an English language remake by Mel Brooks, The
Twelve Chairs, and his final film Weather is Good on Deribasovskaya, It
Rains Again on Brighton Beach being co-financed with American money, Gaidai
amassed over the 1960s and 1970s some of the most beloved comedy films the USSR
had to offer.
Characterized by his fast speed style of comedy echoing that
of Stanley Kramer’s Ultra Panavision 70 comedy epic It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad,
Mad World, Gaidai’s work is regarded as arguably the most famous Soviet
comedy filmmaker with ten of his pictures becoming modern classics still
celebrated to this day. While much of
his comedy is intrinsic to Soviet lifestyle with subtle sly satire and
subversion which inevitably got curtailed by the censors, the audiovisual style
of Gaidai’s comedy with his sped-up silent-film styled frame rate is plainly
broadly appealing to world cinephiles too.
Though his work still remains largely unknown outside its country of
origin, those keen on investigating the annals of Soviet cinema thanks to
Mosfilm’s ongoing efforts to restore and rerelease their back catalog for the
streaming 4K digital generation have been given something of a comedy
cornucopia with Leonid Gaidai’s oeuvre.
While diverse and prolific, let us take a closer look at three of his
career-defining pieces that all but shaped the face of distinctly Soviet comedy
made by a master in total command of the cinematic medium.
Operation Y and Shurik’s Other Adventures (1965)
In this slapstick comedy film split into three subsections Workmate,
Déjà vu and Operation Y, with all three stories loosely connected
to awkward nerdy but lovable brightly blonde-haired student Shurik (Aleksandr
Demyanenko), Operation Y and Shurik’s Other Adventures follows the
misadventures of the title character as he encounters everything from an irate
co-worker named Fedya (Aleksei Smirnov) to falling in love with a fellow
university student named Lida (Gaidai regular Natalya Seleznyova) and
eventually crossing paths with the aforementioned bumbling trio of idiots
Coward, Fool and Pro, resulting in a hilarious standoff between the unlikely
trio. Through all of the episodic
stories, slyly satirizing Soviet lifestyle from transportation to work to
college and eventually the film’s hero besieging a warehouse robbery attempt,
Gaidai intersperses his trademark brand of fluctuating in and out of silent
comedy (often mid-scene) and achieves in Soviet color a kind of impish
playfulness where you want to see Shurik succeed at his endeavors while fending
off dumb double-crossers.
Filmed in Saint Petersburg and throughout much of Moscow as
well as a snow-covered warehouse filmed near the winter and spring, lensed in
1.33:1 by recurring Gaidai cinematographer Konstantin Brovin and scored by the
aforementioned Aleksandr Zatsepin following breaking ties with Nikita
Bogolovsky who scored Moonshiners, Operation Y loosely based on a
screenplay by Moris Slodobsky and Yakov Kostyukovsky called Light-hearted
Stories comprised of two novels about a bumbling but well-meaning student
with the name changed from Vladik to Shurik, the early episodic comic
masterpiece by Gaidai is an early example of the improvisational comedy skills
of Yuri Nikulin and his comrades Georgy Vitsin and Yevgeny Morgunov. Though primarily following Aleksandr Demyanenko’s
misadventures after the casting process went through over a hundred actors
before they accidentally landed on the now legendary actor, the heart of the
film seems to come back to Gaidai’s favorite trio of petty criminals who show
up again in the director’s next film Kidnapping, Caucasian Style a year
later.
Released in 1965, Operation Y and Other Shurik’s
Adventures against mixed criticism begame one of the top selling films of
the Soviet Union that year, having amassed close to 70 million in ticket sales. Cementing Leonid Gaidai’s status as a box
office leader, it became one of the country’s most quoted films which film
critic A. Prokhorov noted could be ‘watched with equal pleasure by both a
high-brow critic and a three-year-old-child’.
Deceptively innocent and endearing (despite one brief instance of
blackface mid-movie), the film managed to be both an adaptation of two
disparate literary works and a crossover introduction of three of Gaidai’s most
beloved characters. In the years since,
honoring the film’s anniversaries throughout the 2010s, as many as four monuments
to the romantic couple Shurik and Lida were installed throughout Russia namely
of them reading together on a parking bench.
With the newly formed quartet of comic heroes and villains established,
Gaidai only over a year later moved forward with the musical kidnapping comedy Kidnapping,
Caucasian Style.
Kidnapping, Caucasian Style (1967)
After the success of Operation Y and Other Shurik’s
Adventures, screenwriters Yakov Kostyukovsky and Moris Slobodsky expressed
demand for another one detailing further misadventures of the lovable bright-blonde
golden boy nerd Shurik (Aleksandr Demyanenko) and the Soviet Three Stooges Coward,
Fool and Pro. Despite some protestations
from Gaidai feeling the iconic comedy trio peaked in his last film, the two
screenwriters eventually convinced the director to go ahead with this screwball
comedy involving circus tightrope walker Natalya Varley the eventual arch
villainess of Viy. While two of
the three idiots expressed reservations about coming back until Gaidai agreed
to adjust the script to make it somewhat more plausible and Gaidai further clashed
with recurring actor Vladimir Etush, the two-part brisk comedy reunited the
director with his composer and cinematographer and thus Kidnapping,
Caucasian Style was born.
Favorite naïve student Shurik (Aleksandr Demyanenko) is back
this time traveling by donkey to the Caucasus in search of learning ancient
tribal customs and traditions regularly practiced by residents and locals when both
his donkey stops moving and a passerby truck driver’s car stops. Only then when young athletic and studied Nina
(Natalya Varley with dubbed voiceover by Nadezhda Rumyantseva) is strolling by
do the car and donkey start up again, raising the eyebrows and interest of
Shurik who learns her uncle is a chauffeur for town tycoon Comrade Saakhov (Vladimir
Etush) who plans to marry Nina. In an
illicit deal struck between Saakhov and her uncle Dzhabrail (Frunzik Mkrtchyan)
for her hand in marriage in exchange for sheep and an imported Finnish
refrigerator, it is decided that the girl ought to be kidnapped since she’d
most definitely refuse agreement and the now notorious comedy trio of Coward,
Fool and Pro are tasked with the abduction.
From here, the hapless innocent Shurik is briefly drawn into the kidnapping
plot only to figure it out after its too late, turning into an increasingly
absurd action comedy of errors replete with a car chase, mistaken identities
and the so-called ‘law of the mountains’.
Far more plot driven with all of the episodes linked
together rather than feeling like discordant vignettes, Kidnapping,
Caucasian Style shot and scored by the same creative technicians almost got
withheld from theatrical release. Initially
censored in the screenwriting stage with some dialogue exchanges omitting the
word ‘Soviet’ from the sentences, the film faced being blocked outright by
Goskino censors until Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev watched the film and
expressed admiration not only for the film in question but Gaidai’s oeuvre as a
whole. As a result, Goskino relented to
allowing the film on Soviet cinema screens where it became the number one box
office smash hit of 1967 amassing almost 77 million ticket sales. From here, many passages of dialogue from the
film became part of Russian repertoire including ‘let us drink to our desires
always meeting our capabilities’.
Sometime in 2014 the film was remade by Maxim Voronkov but was rejected
by critics and audiences into bombing, a testament to filmgoers’ reverence for
not only the original but the voice and personality of Gaidai in general.
The Diamond Arm (1969)
After firing out two smash hit comedy classics into Soviet
movie houses, Leonid Gaidai had all but mastered his form and style of
storytelling and rib tickling, retaining his playful use of music, drifting in
and out of silent comedy and screwball over the top performances by his
ensemble casts. From there, the
writer-director decided it was time to shift gears and rework his aesthetic and
casting to some degree while expanding the scale of his comic vision. Jettisoning his usual cinematographer Konstantin
Brovin in favor of Pugachev cameraman Igor Chernykh and expanding the
screen space from squared 1.33:1 to panoramic Sovscope 2.35:1 widescreen while
retaining his usual composer, the film loosely based on a real news story told
of smugglers trying to sneak stolen jewelry from a foreign nation into the
Soviet Union by hiding them in an orthopedic cast. In Gaidai’s hands, however, co-written by his
usual screenwriters, it becomes an expansive screwball comedy of errors and
mistaken identities cranked up to increasingly ludicrous effect.
When a mercurial black-market “Chief” sets out to smuggle
stolen jewels into a cast and then into the Soviet Union, a henchman nicknamed
Gesha (Andrei Mironov) is tasked with traveling to Turkey via cruise ship where
he will meet up with co-conspirators that will place the cast of jewels onto
his arm. Only problem is they don’t know
what Gesha looks like and they mistake the guy sitting next to him, unassuming
civilian Semyon Gorbunkov (Yuri Nikulin in maybe his most famous role), as the
courier and they plaster the cast on his arm instead. Alerted to the situation he’s found himself
in, Gorbunkov reports the crime to authorities who elect to use him to bait the
culprits into being arrested. Meanwhile
Gesha and fellow henchman Lyolik (Anatoli Papanov) try their best to lure
Gorbunkov back into their hands where they can steal the cast back from his
arm, more or less being pulled in both directions like a rag doll. Eventually the situations get more outlandish
including Gesha trying to get Gorbunkov drunk only for the twosome to cause a
ruckus forgetting each others’ missions.
It doesn’t help that Gorbunkov’s wife mistakenly suspects the whole
thing might be an extramarital affair.
A star-studded ensemble action-crime comedy film in Sovscope
35mm, The Diamond Arm was up to that time Leonid Gaidai’s boldest and
most striking comedy epic where every inch of the 2.35:1 canvas is used to
hilarious audiovisual effect. Having
figured out how to dodge the censors by distracting them with more prominent elements
such as an unused epilogue of a nuclear detonation so he could sneak in Billy
Wilder-esque references to stripping, public intoxication and prostitution, Gaidai
was able to subvert not only the expectations of comedy but himself as well featuring
at least three blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos.
Mixing in elements of the action-comedy ala Eldar Ryazanov’s Beware
of the Car (which prompted the casting of Andrei Mironov) with his own
sense of labyrinthine screwball overlapping plotlines colliding together, it
works almost as an analogue to Some Like it Hot involving ordinary saps
getting caught up in a criminal scheme.
Opening in 1969 to over 76 million ticket sales as the
number one (and eventually all-time) box office leader, The Diamond Arm which
seemed to springboard from the action-comedy format became an instant smash hit
at the Soviet box office. Winning the
Vasiliev Brothers State Prize of the RSFSR for both Leonid Gaidai and his
leading man Yuri Nikulin, the colorful crime comedy is at once a parody of the
heist thriller replete with James Bond inspired enemies and red herrings. As with Gaidai’s others, it involved the use
of several songs as well as sound effects with composer Zatsepin also acting as
sound designer, making it again a silent-sound comedy hybrid of sorts. Years later monuments to the subset of
characters of Gorbunkov and his family were erected in Sochi while a monument
to the antagonist Gesha appeared in Novorossiysk. To this day among Russian critics and
audiences alike, it is still regarded as perhaps the greatest comedy film the
country has ever produced with much of its dialogue part of Russian national
repertoire and the now legendary Leonid Gaidai tap dancing silly walks across
the stage with widescreen comedic gusto.
--Andrew Kotwicki
