The genius of eccentric comedy, Leonid Gaidai, often faced censorship claims, although he was never a dissident and did not keep a fig in his pocket against the Soviet regime. He just wanted people to have a little more fun in a highly regulated socialist society, where everything excessive and unpredictable causes fear, including a heightened sense of humor and the absurdity of the surrounding reality. On January 30, on the day of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the creator of the beloved film comedies of several generations, Izvestia recalls his life and work.
Against the stream
The desire to be an absurdist for the future author of Operation Y, The Diamond Hand and Ivan Vasilievich began to be discouraged from the very first independent production, which was entrusted to him by the director of Mosfilm Ivan Pyryev. In 1955, he sent a personal application for Leonid Gaidai, a graduate of the directing department of VGIK, who graduated from the institute not without problems. Enrolled in VGIK as an adult 26-year-old, who worked as an actor in the Irkutsk Drama Theater, Gaidai often contradicted teachers who did not see the opportunity to re-educate an already formed creative individuality and decided to expel him after the first semester. The obstinate student was saved by the appearance at VGIK of a new teacher, the coryphaeus of the cheerful comedy Grigory Alexandrov, who was recruiting a new workshop. For some reason, there was no particular influx of people who wanted to make funny films, and Gaidai was allowed to transfer to Aleksandrov, who appreciated Gaidai’s sketches, for a trial period.
At Mosfilm, the novice director established himself well as an assistant, and then, together with Valentin Nevzorov, he worked on the film “The Long Way” based on the Siberian stories of Vladimir Korolenko. After that, in the creative workshop of Mikhail Romm, Gaidai set about implementing the script “Dead Case” by Vladimir Dykhovichny and Maurice Slobodsky (who later, in tandem with Yakov Kostyukovsky, would become a co-author of the best Gaidai films). Its authors quite boldly went through the chicanery: the main character, the head of the Kustovoye Governance of Resort Institutions (KUKU), played by Rostislav Plyatt in the film, is mistakenly recorded as dead, and further comic conflicts revolve around his desperate attempts to prove that he is after all alive.
Photo: kinopoisk.ru
Poster for the film “The Long Way”
Gaidai’s topical film feuilleton, where almost Ilfo-Petrovsky signs please (“Gipropivo”, “Raypiyavka”, “Nezhilotdel”, “Zagotlyko”) and black humor unusual for Soviet comedy (“And who died in your country?” – “I’m at us died”), was generally greeted with sympathy by the Mosfilm officials, but, apparently, something touched the Minister of Culture Nikolai Mikhailov, who lay down against the film with his bones.
As a result, “Dead Case”, shortened to 47 minutes, was released under the title “Groom from the Other World” and became the first psychological trauma for Gaidai, which taught him to be more cunning and resourceful in the future., anticipating all sorts of claims of various managers of cultural institutions. In 20 years, the same painful blow will be the censorship castration of the film “Incognito from Petersburg” based on Gogol’s “Inspector General”, from which not only all attempts to modernize were cut out (for example, children meeting Khlestakov with flowers), but even the epigraph of the original source “On the Mirror there is nothing to blame, if the face is crooked.
word space
A popular version among film critics is that the enduring hero of several of Gaidai’s films, the handsome, bespectacled Shurik, is a kind of alter ego of the director himself. If, according to “Operation Y”, it can be assumed that Shurik is a representative of not the humanitarian, but the technical intelligentsia and studies the exact sciences, then the analogy becomes especially fruitful. Gaidai was a very scrupulous author and built his films according to strictly calculated formulas, literally adjusting the points in the development of the plot where the viewer should laugh with a chronometer. Yakov Kostyukovsky believed that the phrases from Gaidai’s films dispersed so well among the people precisely thanks to Gaidai’s science of counting each word in a replica: “A word is three seconds on the screen, and three seconds on the screen is three hours in a lifetime.”
Leonid Gaidai and Alexander Demyanenko on the set of the film “Ivan Vasilyevich Changes Profession”
Photo: kino-teatr.ru
Despite this strict timing, Gaidai always left his artists free space for self-expression and was in no hurry to say “Stop!”, even when the scene was already over. Thanks to this approach, strictly adjusted Gaidai films often delight with unexpected acting reactions: “Sometimes an actor can create something that he himself does not expect, and then I can insert this frame into some other scene. Sometimes it’s enough to make such a tiny insert, and the scene can become not just funny, but hilarious.” One example of such improvisation is the episode in the film “Ivan Vasilyevich Changes His Profession”, where Natalya Krachkovskaya was forced to extend her text “Unfortunate intellectual! They taught you on your own head! it is not clear where the seemingly illogical remark “Everyone has gone bald!”, which Gaidai enthusiastically included in the film, came from.
Audacity and compromises
As far as Gaidai’s communication with supervising cinematographic authorities, who looked for dangerous hints and too daring jokes in his films, he can no longer be compared with the ingenuous Shurik, but rather with a private detective or special agent played by Dmitry Kharatyan in Gaidai’s later films – ” Private detective, or Operation “Cooperation” and “The weather is good on Deribasovskaya, it’s raining again on Brighton Beach.” Gaidai, as an undercover agent, also had to disguise himself and show miracles of ingenuity in order to preserve his films to the maximum, to protect them from editing, which kills the best and most precious moments for the director.
His most virtuoso operation is connected with the “Diamond Hand”: the next editorial commission that watched the film was quite surprised to find the most natural atomic explosion in the finale of an entertaining story about smugglers. Gaidai calmly explained that a funny parody of a detective story is, of course, good, but as a civilly responsible artist in the finale, he was obliged to show the complexity of our time and return to the problems that really worry modern man, and this is primarily the threat of nuclear war.
Leonid Gaidai and Yuri Nikulin on the set of the film “The Diamond Arm”
Photo: kino-teatr.ru
Stunned by such a degree of absurdity, the Goskino commission spent all its strength to persuade the author to cut out an absurd explosion in the finale. But on the other hand, I have already turned a blind eye to many things unprecedented for Soviet cinema, which are filled with “Diamond Arm” and which clearly contradicted the “image of morality” of our viewer.
The Magnificent Trinity
However, despite the abundance of bourgeois attributes in the film, such as half-naked blondes, trips to the bakery by taxi and drunken revelry in restaurants, the story underlying the “Diamond Arm” was subtracted by screenwriter Kostyukovsky from the official Soviet newspaper “Abroad”, which reported on European smugglers who made caches in plaster under the pretext of fake fractures. In fact, Gaidai also learned from the Soviet press one of his best inventions – the immortal trio Coward, Dunce and Experienced. Licking his wounds after The Bridegroom from the Other World, the director, already having doubts about his choice of profession, went to his parents’ house in Irkutsk, where humorous magazines from the 1920s were stored in the attic. It was there that Gaidai came across a feuilleton about poachers and a conscious dog, from which a silent short film “Dog Mongrel and an Unusual Cross” was born, filmed in 20 days, shown at the closing of the Moscow Film Festival in 1961 and bought for hire in 102 countries.
Leonid Gaidai, Yuri Nikulin, Georgy Vitsin and Yevgeny Morgunov on the set of the film “Operation Y and Shurik’s Other Adventures”
Photo: kino-teatr.ru
Coward, Dunce and Experienced – a universal psychological construct, covering, in fact, the whole variety of human types and manifestations, became the trinity bird that gave additional drive and energy to many Gaidai films, until Dunce made an independent career, transforming into Semyon Semenovich Gorbunkov . It is Semyon Semyonovich, intellectually defenseless and blinding with the brilliance of his innocence, and not smart Shurik, who nevertheless remains the most striking and irresistible superhero of Leonid Gaidai, which of the three pillars of Soviet film comedy (besides him, these are Eldar Ryazanov and Georgy Danelia) is considered to be the most uncomplicated and “common people”. However, Gaidai never considered it shameful to occupy this particular niche, formulating his credo for the film crew in this way: “There are many directors who make lyrical comedies, philosophical, intellectual, and we are just a comedy, which means it should be funny.”
