Review of The Diamond Arm (1969)
Seen in 2025.
An ordinary bookkeeper gets caught up in a smuggling ring and is enlisted by Soviet police to identify the criminal mastermind who’s bringing gold and diamonds to the black market.
One of Leonid Gaidai’s comedies for Mosfilm. In form and function, it is a lot like a mainstream comedy from the Western world of the same period: The same bright colours, the same titillating “mini bikinis” and zip-off trousers, the same slapstick and fast-motion photography, the same moralism, and the same dysfunctional plotting. The dialogue is not particularly witty, the lack of synchronized sound hurts the comedic timing, and the few musical numbers—though well received by the original Russian audience—are a snore. There are some highlights in the craftsmanship, especially Andrei Mironov’s acting as a suave, gay-coded minor villain who has a very funny vision of Jesus Christ that could be a parody of Andrei Tarkovsky. The Soviet-specific touches also add interest. The smuggling ring’s foreign contact is located in an unnamed Mediterranean city, possibly in or near Istanbul; the sequence was actually shot in Baku. This charming amalgam of vacation destinations, exotic to the Russian cinemagoer of the time, includes a street sign that just says “ABC” in Latin script.
On a darker note, Nonna Mordyukova plays a corrupt official: The super of the main character’s housing complex. She buys lottery tickets and orders a functionary to sell those tickets to her residents at a markup, under the threat of having their gas cut off. She is later confronted with an uncorrupted hero of the police, but it is not clear that she is caught and punished. Meanwhile, the primary villain is superficially a lucky everyman, quite like the main character. He arranges for himself to “find” a stash of coins that he then hands in to the authorities for a reward, which means that he, too, is abusing the trust and generosity of the Soviet state, in what Mikhail Gorbachev would later call the Era of Stagnation. That subplot is the only really clever device in the script, and it’s appropriate for the place and the genre: Not too naïve, and not too dark or edgy.
References here: Ivan Vasilievich Changes His Profession (1973).