Heart of a Dog (film)

Heart of a Dog (Russian: Собачье сердце, translit. Sobachye serdtse) is a black-and-white 1988 Soviet television film directed by Vladimir Bortko. It is based on Mikhail Bulgakov's novel Heart of a Dog.

Plot

The film is set in Moscow not long after the October Revolution. A well-off surgeon Filip Filippovich Preobrazhensky implants a pituitary gland and testicles of a recently deceased alcoholic and petty criminal Klim Chugunkin into a stray dog named Sharik. Sharik proceeds to become more and more human during the next days. After his transition to human is complete, it turns out that he inherited all the negative traits of the donor - bad manners, aggressiveness, use of profanity, heavy drinking. He picks for himself an absurd name Poligraf Poligrafovich Sharikov, starts working at the "Moscow Cleansing Department responsible for eliminating vagrant quadrupeds (cats, etc.)" and associating with revolutionaries, who plot to drive Preobrazhensky out of his big apartment. Eventually he turns the life in the professor's house into a nightmare, and the professor with his assistant are urged to reverse the procedure. Sharikov turns back into a dog. As Sharik he does not remember anything that happened and is left to life in the professor's apartment.

Cast

• Yevgeniy Yevstigneyev as Professor Preobrazhensky
• Boris Plotnikov as Dr. Bormental
• Vladimir Tolokonnikov as Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov
• Nina Ruslanova as Darya
• Roman Kartsev as Schwonder
• Olga Melikhova as Zina

Details

• This screen version of M. Bulgakov's novel is famous for its attention to the original text: practically nothing was deleted for adaptation. However, there are some differences between the novel and the film (in the novel Bormental didn't meet typist in the cinema and Pyotr Alexandrovich - an important official cured by Preobrazhensky - didn't look like Stalin as it was shown in the film). The episode in which Bormental presents Sharikov who plays balalaika didn't exist in the novel. However, the phrases of Bormental were taken from the diary of Bormental which was in the original novel.
• Some scenes (spiritualism, circus) were taken from early Bulgakov's short stories, not from the novel.
• One of the scientists who witness the transformation of Sharik into a human is called Professor Persikov. He is the protagonist of another Bulgakov's science-fiction novel The Fatal Eggs.

External links

• Heart of a Dog at AllRovi
• Heart of a Dog at the Internet Movie Database