The Diamond Arm
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Brilliantovaya ruka | |
|---|---|
 Film poster |
|
| Directed by | Leonid Gaidai |
| Produced by | Mosfilm |
| Written by | Leonid Gaidai Yakov Kostyukovsky Moris Slobodskoy |
| Starring | Yuri Nikulin Nina Grebeshkova Andrei Mironov Anatoli Papanov Nonna Mordyukova |
| Music by | Aleksandr Zatsepin |
| Cinematography | Igor Chernykh |
| Editing by | Valentina Yankovskaya |
| Release date(s) | 1968 |
| Running time | 100 min. |
| Language | Russian |
| IMDb profile | |
The Diamond Arm (Russian: "Бриллиàнтовая рукà", "Brilliàntovaya rukà") is a Russian comedy film filmed by Mosfilm and first released in 1968. The film was directed by slapstick director Leonid Gaidai and starred several famous Soviet actors, including Yuri Nikulin, Andrei Mironov, Anatoli Papanov, Nonna Mordyukova and Svetlana Svetlichnaya. Brilliantovaya ruka has become a Russian cult film. It was also one of the all-time leaders at the Soviet box office with over 76,700,000 theatre admissions in the Soviet era.
Contents |
[edit] Brief synopsis
A Soviet-era boss of shadow economy (referred to as "The Chief" (Шеф)) wants to smuggle a batch of jewelry into Russia by hiding it into the orthopedic cast of a courier. By a confusing accident the contraband lands into the cast of a broken arm of a "simple Soviet citizen" Semyon Semyonovich Gorbunkov. He lets the militsiya know about this, and the militsiya captain uses Gorbunkov as a bait to catch the criminals. Most of the plot are various attempts of the crooks to lure Gorbunkov into a position when they could have quietly, without a wet job, taken the cast off him.
[edit] Catch phrases
 |
This section is a candidate to be copied to Wikiquote using the Transwiki process. If the content can be changed to be more encyclopedic rather than just a list of quotes, please do so and remove this message. Otherwise, you can help by formatting it per the Wikiquote guidelines in preparation for the duplication. |
Nearly every expression from the movie became popular or have passed into everyday use.
- "As a friend of mine... deceased now... used to say - I knew too much..."
- "And if the tenants refuse (to buy lottery tickets), we'll shut off the gas supply!"
- "A dog is man's best friend!" ---"Well, maybe in London a dog is man's best friend, but over here it's the UPRAVDOM (apartment manager)." (The upravdom woman finally became a caricature of a seemingly petty but influential social bureaucrat.)
- "Only aristocrats and degenerates drink champagne in the morning..." (Шампанское по утрам пьют только аристократы или дегенераты) (pauses, checks out the bottle and drinks right from it)
- (tears in his eyes) "They might even give me an award... post-humo-usly!" (sniffs)
- "You should come over and visit us in Kolyma (an infamous region in Russia's Far North where convicts are sent)." (Chokes on beer, coughing...) - "Thanks, but I'd rather you come here to see us."
- "Tsigel, tsigel, ay-lyu-lyu (ay-loo-loo)!" Many people seriously think that "Tsigel" (Cigel, Ziegel) means "time" in some foreign language. The (fictional) phrase "Ziegel, Ziegel, ay-lyu-lyu!" ("Цигель, цигель, ай-лю-лю!") expresses hurry and urgency, either for real or as a mockery. (Occasionally, Ziegel is "brick" in German and Yiddish.)
- "Ay-lyu-lyu" is also a jocular reference to sex as in another quote "Tsigel, ay-lyu-lyu?" as coming from a (Turkish) street hooker but answered with a hurried "Ay-loo-loo later on!" ("ай-лю-лю потом").
- "As our beloved Chief likes to say..." (Now, sometimes used when quoting one's boss)
- "Strike the iron without walking away from the cash register" (Куй железо не отходя от кассы) (a portmanteau of a proverb "Strike while the iron is hot" and an instruction for customers by each Soviet cashier's desk: "Count your money before walking away from the cash register")
- "Even teetotallers and those with cirrhosis will have a drink on someone else's tab!" In Russian it rhymes nicely: "За чужой счет пьют даже трезвенники... и язвенники!"
- "I haven't yet seen a husband who wouldn't want to become a bachelor for just an hour..."
- "If a person is an idiot, that lasts a long time" ("Если человек идиот, то это надолго")
- A curse: "May you live... only off... of PAYCHECKS!" (Чтоб ты жил... на одну... ЗАРПЛАТУ!) ("May you live off your salary forever!" with an implication of "never live like a crook again")
- A curse: "May I see you in a coffin, in white slippers!" (Шоб я видел тя у гробу! У белых тапках!) (A catch phrase styled in the fashion of Odessa Jewish humour, but pronounced with some unidentified, mocked Ukranian accent.)
- A mocking reproach: "Semyon Semyonych!..." (Of an absent-minded person to wake him up.)
- A comment to an embarrassing situation when a demo fails: "With a casual hand gesture, the pants are turning into... the pants are turning INTO... into a pair of elegant shorts!"
- "Obliko morale" (a mockingly Italianized Russian term "moralny oblik" (моральный облик), "moral character", a part of the cliché "moral character of a Soviet person". In the film it was uttered by the character when he tried to circumnavigate a foreign prostitute: "Russo turisto! Obliko morale! Verstehen?".
- "Flowers for his woman, ice cream for the kids. And don't mix it up, Kutuzov!" (Дитям мороженое, бабе цветы.... и не перепутай, Кутузов!)
- "I'm innocent! I'm innocent! He came by himself!" ("Не виноватая я... Он сам пришел!") (After Semyon Semyonovich was supposed to have "illegal" sex with a set-up call girl. Apparently, paroding Katyusha's lines from Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.)
- "Ksiva... Haza... Klient... Bye-bye, boy!..." (The ID? The place? The client? Bye-bye, boy!) (A parody on underworld slang as coming from a professional hooker. The vocabularly is authentic, although rarely used in real slang. "Haza" probably originates from English "house" or Hungarian "ház" (house).)
- "I'm not a coward... But I'm scared..." "Я не трус, но я боюсь!"
- "I've got an idea: what if we could..." -- "We couldn't." -- "I see... Then, maybe we should..." -- "No, we shouldn't." -- "Okay... In that case, maybe I'd rather..." -- "Why not, you could try that one." (A caricature of a militsia captain's superior who is so astute that he is almost a mind-reader -- a hidden allusion to the allmighty and omniscient KGB.)
- "As they say, that is c'est la vie!" ("такова се-ля-ви") (c'est la vie is French for "that is life", in other words the phrase is a double mis-translation: "that is that is life" Also, cf. later Dovlatov's catch phrase "таково се-ля-ви" ("such is c'est la vie", where "such" is used in the neuter gender, as if alluding to the Russian word for "crap"), which is clearly patterned on this quote.)
- "Hmm, well, we'll have to take appropriate action... What else can we do?" -- the apartment manager, who really has no business in tenants' affairs
- "But Lyolik, that is not aesthetic!" -- "That's cheap, reliable and pragmatic!" (rhymes nicely in Russian: "Лёлик, но это же не эстетично!" - "Зато дешево, надежно и практично.") (As preparing to hit Semyon Semyonovich on the head with a piece of metal wiring.)
- "I'll punch you carefully,... but hard!" ("Буду бить аккуратно, но сильно!")
- "Our people don't take a taxi to the bakery!" (In Russian: "Наши люди в булочную на такси не ездят!" (Mocking the cliché "our people" as referring to "the Soviet people" with "obliko morale". In fact, a catch phrase mocking the communist or socialist way of life in general.)
[edit] Songs
The metaphorical song "About Hares" ("Песня про зайцев") became a popular drinking song during the late 60's. It tells a story of some poor, terrified hares (or rabbits) stealthily cutting the grass at nighttime (a metaphor of money-making in the shadow economy), despite their fears of some frightening forest shadows, apparently representing superior forces of the state. Still, the hares boldly sing their refrain that can be roughly translated as "We don't give a damn!" ("A нам все равно!"). (Could it be seen as a very distant parody of "We Shall Overcome"?) Most public quickly realized that these frightened but courageous hares are nothing but an allegory of the common people stubbornly and defiantly doing their job, making their living or even getting involved with illegal activity, trying to fly below the radar of the socialist polytical system, where everything is strictly forbidden.
Another song "The Island of Bad Luck" ("Остров невезения") seems to be keen satire of the Soviet Union hidden behind the Iron Curtain where nothing works no matter how hard "the aborigines" try. ("Крокодил не ловится, не растет кокос, плачут, богу молятся, не жалея слез" -- "A croco won't get hunted, the cocos won't grow, so they weep, and they pray, sparing no tears".) The lyrics further suggests that it's all because of the abundance of Mondays which are thought to bring bad luck -- a rather vague allusion to the Communist Party apparatchiks' system, or probably the way the Party attempts to disguise some deeply-rooted political problems as a jinx ("Вpоде не бездельники и могли бы жить, им бы понедельники взять и отменить" -- "Looks like they are no lazy bones, and could have a good life, all they have to do is abolish all Mondays"). Ironically, that is utterly impossible, because "the damned island lacks a calendar" -- just another vague reference to the way the totalitarian regimes tend to hush up their internal issues. Therefore, the island natives have to live virtually out of time and "condemn their disgrace in an unknown year, on an unknown date", as if time itself stood still or ran in the wrong direction on the island.
[edit] Censorship
Despite all the anti-socialist insinuations the movie passed strict censorship and has been known as a great hit ever since. This is due to the fact that nowhere in his works Leonid Gaidai is in any direct opposition to the political system of his days, and all his films are disguised as common comedies. Only a few passages are known to be censored, such as "The party and the government has been left for the second year" ("Партию и правительство оставили на второй год") - a practice common only with the primary school F-students, and "I wouldn't be surprised to find out that your husband is secretly visiting synagogue" ("И вы знаете, я не удивлюсь, если завтра выяснится, что ваш муж тайно посещает синагогу"), as said by the upravdom woman, when she suspects that Semyon Semyonovich has sold his soul to the West, -- a vague allusion to the sneaky, state-directed anti-semitism, and the very fact that the whole movie is nothing but a great masterpiece of Jewish humor. In the latter case, the word "synagogue" was simply changed to "a mistress".
[edit] Screenshots
 This episode was unusually explicit for a Soviet movie. |
 Anatoly Papanov as Lyolik and Svetlana Svetlichnaya as Anna. |
 Yuri Nikulin as Semyon Semyonovich Gorbunkov and Stanislav Chekan as Mikhail Ivanovich. |
 Yuri Nikulin as Semyon Semyonovich Gorbunkov and Grigori Shpigel and Leonid Kanevsky as Contrabandists. |
 Yuri Nikulin as Semyon Semyonovich Gorbunkov and Andrei Mironov as Gesha |
[edit] External links
|
|||||
