TODAY’S BEST BET: He Who Laughs Last Was Probably Brezhnev Не может быть!/You’ve Got to Be Kidding! (USSR. Mosfilm, 1975)(Ch. 5, 22:25). -- >“Kidding” is based on three separate pieces by classic satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, each one with a sharp point – about getting arrested, getting caught out of bounds by your spouse and getting married “by accident” – that good dialogue and good comic acting can do a lot with. And there are indeed some good laughs here, proving once again that 50 million Soviet ticket buyers couldn’t be wrong. OK, usually. If anything could bring a little lighthearted fun to the Deep Stagnation Nine that was Moscow in 1975, it was the fortuitous combination of Zoshchenko and comedy director Leonid Gaidai, the result of which was this hugely popular “musical satirical comedy.” Its back-story, however – as was frequently the case back in the Soviet day – is sobering: Zoshchenko (1895-1958) led a life defined by a saddening downward arc, his huge early success and nationwide popularity proving insufficient to keep him from suspect status as the Soviet lit biz was gradually "consolidated." After 1946, when he and A. Akhmatova were famously denounced by the scurrilous A. Zhdanov as “alien to Soviet literature,” MZ was anathema; he never recovered from the denunciation and essentially went into seclusion for the rest of his life -- so it was nice to see him finally getting some big-screen time, albeit shamefully long after the fact, when “Kidding” came out. On the upbeat side, Gaidai (1923-1993) did some of the great comedies of the mid-late Soviet period – incl. Кавказская пленница (1966), Бриллиантовая рука (1968) and Иван Васильевич меняет профессию (1973); he wrote the screenplay(s) for "Kidding" and deftly handled three fine casts, whose stars included a lot of folks you just love to see: L. Kuravlev, S. Kramarov, M. Pugovkin, L. Shagalova, G. Vitsyn, N. Grebeshkova, O. Dal and a bunch more. The situations are at once universal yet peculiarly (early) Soviet – and played for all they’re worth, which well exceeds the bounds of most modern sit-com fare. Tune in and get your spirits raised, as this is one of those cases where they really *don’t* “make ‘em like that any more” – which is a shame!
Posted on: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 04:49:50 +0000