The restoration of the film was performed by a team of professionals from Mosfilm’s Computer Graphics Group. Learn more at https://cg.mosfilm.ru
Film comedy. Insurance agent Yuri Detochkin—a completely wholesome and naive man—driven by a sense of justice, steals cars from people living on illegal income, sells them, and gives the profits to orphanages.
Director: Eldar Ryazanov
Screenplay: Eldar Ryazanov and Emil Braginsky
Film Score: Andrei Petrov
Camera: Vladimir Nakhabtsev and Anatoly Mukasei
Production design: Boris Nemechek and Lev Semyonov
Starring: Andrei Mironov, Oleg Yefremov, Anatoly Papanov, Lyubov Dobrzhanskaya, Innokenty Smoktunovsky, Yevgeny Yevstigneyev, Georgy Zhzhonov, Tatiana Gavrilova, Olga Aroseva, Gottlieb Roninson, Sergei Kulagin, Viktoria Radunskaya, and Boris Runge
Source: Mosfilm (YouTube), 21 June 2016. Annotation translated by the Russian Reader
The wife’s all-time favorite Soviet comedy and certainly well up there among my Top 10, Beregis/Auto has survived into the new millennium and continues to flourish as a New Year staple on Moscow TV—which is sorely strained these days to offer viewers something, indeed anything, to laugh about.
What strikes me today, while looking back at the mini-review below—in the role of a post-post-Soviet appraiser eyeing a post-Soviet impression of a mid-Soviet comedy—is not just how other-worldly both of these recent pasts can now seem (which of course they do), but how much the human mind (and heart) want to keep these eras, with their flawed but well-understood mores, sensibilities and now-appreciated modest virtues, from being erased altogether.
Because part of you, you recognize, goes off the chalk board with them—the part the new nihilists desperately want you to abandon as they clumsily and ahistorically attempt to redesign the past, social and political, to serve their nefarious present purposes.
Orwell was not only right, he was right twice, in stages. Put briefly, we need to remember both why Beregis/Auto worked so well when we first saw it—and then why it could still serve as an anchor in reality while a new generation of bad guys was busily turning their sad and saddening unreality into a Double Plus Good fake-reality that nobody could call out in public. And now decidedly can’t.
But praise be: Beregis/Auto is still there, on celluloid and on television, to remind Muscovites and everyone else that decency could and did appear and persist in consecutive yet differently indecent times—and can now raise our hopes that it will reappear as this dark period finally gives way to dawn.
Source: Mark H. Teeter (Facebook), 2 January 2024. Thanks to Mark for his kind permission to repost his somber New Year’s reflection and the eighth-year-old movie review (below) which prompted it on this website.
MOSCOW TV TONITE: The USSR’s Auto-Robbin’ Hood
Берегись автомобиля/Grand Theft Auto (USSR, 1966)(Dom Kino, 19:00)
If you get the joke at the heart of Beregis’/Auto, you get the Soviet Union, a society in which irony knew no limits and “found humor” was literally all around you, just daring you to laugh…which was the risky part. The movie is based on the jocular metaphor of a Soviet Robin Hood – a morally upright socialist citizen who is pursued by the police, naturally, for taking morality into his own hands: he steals cars from “bad people” (who make “illegal income”) and gives them to good ones (OK, orphanages).
With this suggestive premise E. Ryazanov began an unbroken string of 7 serio-comic Mosfilm hits that ran through Гараж/Garage (1979), with the latter affirming that even if you could steal automobiles in good conscience, as in Beregis’/Auto, there was still no safe place to park them!
The Ryazanov Septet corresponded with the onset, entrenchment and fossilization of late-Soviet Глубокий застой (“Deep Stagnation 9”) and neatly defined the predominant modi vivendi of High Brezhnevism – gaming the system and/or simple theft – but did so, remarkably, without getting the director incarcerated or, even curiouser, blackballed by Goskino. Eventually somebody’s dissertation will tell us why.
Beregis’/Auto was ER’s first collaboration w/ screenwriter E. Bagrinsky and one of the best: the two carefully crafted a “good-hearted saddening comedy” (“добрую, грустную комедию”) about two “friendly enemies,” one representing the state and the other the individual. They are doomed to find themselves eternally at odds, the viewer understands, as the social system they inhabit can’t cope with abstract legality any better than it can abstract art.
Yet however telling its plot and finely tuned its direction, Beregis’/Auto still wouldn’t succeed without its exceptional cast. The праведник-hero – a childlike naïf nicely dubbed Detochkin – is played by the only person who *could* have played him, in retrospect: I. Smoktunovsky, the actor of his generation, who could do (and did) everything from Chekhov to Shakespeare – indeed, he had just done his stunning turn as Hamlet for G. Kozintsev (Lenfilm, 1964) when Beregis’ came out, making the movie’s amateur play-within-a-film staging of the melancholy Dane a big “inside” joke that every contemporary Soviet viewer got immediately.
Supporting, indeed matching Smoktunovsky as Detochkin’s Inspector Javert is O. Efremov in one of the great roles of a great career, making you *believe* in a Soviet police detective who both does his job and regrets its consequences – the only appropriate response there was to the Detochkin case – and on whose office wall in place of the standard Dzerzhinsky photo hangs a picture of…Stanislavsky! Beyond these two beacons of Soviet cinema, Beregis’/Auto offers a collection of supporting players that’s hard to match in *any* film of its era: A. Papanov, A. Mironov, E. Evstigneev, G. Zhzhenov – even D. Banionis (later the hero of Solaris) has a cameo (undubbed) as a bribe-taking Baltic pastor!
Enough. Add Beregis’/Auto to your must-see list and tune it in this evening (or watch on YouTube below).
Oh, and some free advice: if you (try to) drive in the Greater Moscow area, remember to keep your nose clean and your car insurance paid up. If today’s anti-corruption Robin Hoods start stealing cars, there’s no guarantee they’ll distinguish between your Škoda and Alexei Miller’s Lamborghini.
