About the film
Leonid Gaidai turns to Mikhail Zoshchenko, the great satirist of the early Soviet years, and builds a film out of three short stories. Each one is set in the 1920s, when private trade briefly came back and everybody seemed to be making a little money on the side.
In the first story a store manager fakes his own death to escape an audit. In the second a young man tries to find somewhere, anywhere, to be alone with a girl, and keeps meeting the wrong relatives. In the third a groom marries the wrong woman because he never really looked at the right one.
Gaidai fills the screen with his favourite comic actors and Alexander Zatsepin's catchy music. It is light, fast and very silly, and it is a good way to see how Soviet audiences laughed at greed and bureaucracy.
Did you know?
- Mikhail Zoshchenko's stories were among the most popular comic writing in the USSR in the 1920s.
- Georgy Vitsin and Savely Kramarov, two of Gaidai's regular comedians, both appear.
- The music is by Alexander Zatsepin, who also scored The Diamond Arm and Ivan Vasilievich.
