Of Rabbits and Wolves

The Golden Anniversary of Diamond Arm

No matter how many times I watch Diamond Arm («Бриллиантовая рука»), I never cease to wonder at the fact that this film managed to make it to screens all across the Soviet Union in April 1969 – just one year after the invasion of Czechoslovakia and a month after the Sino-Soviet border clash over Damansky Island. This was hardly a time of liberalization!

I can only assume that the powers that were decided to cheer people up with some slapstick comedy, but apparently – and thankfully – they did not watch the film very carefully.

First, there’s the overall plot: an ordinary guy, Semyon Semyonovich Gorbunkov, sets off for foreign parts on a cruise (!?). This was so unrealistic it struck people as simply laughable. Out of this premise arose a comedy of errors in which criminals trying to smuggle diamonds from some unspecified foreign country into the Soviet Union, through a case of mistaken identity, wind up embedding the loot in a cast placed on the arm of the upstanding and not terribly worldly Gorbunkov, who had temporarily lost consciousness after hitting his head.

The ingenuous and somewhat cowardly Semyon Semyonovich ultimately succeeds in outsmarting the devious smugglers (with some help from the police, of course). But a simple recounting of the plot misses the point. The unbelievable twists and turns and utterly absurd situations that proliferate over the course of Leonid Gaidai’s story of a timid simpleton (his favorite song is “Song about Rabbits”) turn the film into a grim parody of Soviet life. It so brilliantly encapsulates the essence of the time that it could be used as a classroom tool to teach children about the forgotten realia of the past.

Why was it that Semyon Semyonovich went on vacation abroad without his wife and children? Because, of course, entire families were never let out of the country together – someone had to be held hostage back home.  Why was it that the upravdom (a shortening of управляющий домом or building manager, someone who generally, but particularly in this film, is less concerned with maintaining and managing the building than with managing the behavior of the building’s residents) kept sticking her nose into the affairs of the Gorbunkov family, one moment urging Semyon Semyonovich to give a talk on “Istanbul, a City of Contrasts,” and the next publicly proclaiming “Shame on S.S. Gorbunkov and his drunken debauchery”? Well, it was because such niceties as privacy and the inviolability of family life was not something Soviet people were familiar with: cases of marital infidelity were discussed at party meetings, and divorce was enough to hinder a party career.

And also (if this rumor is really true), why did that same importunate upravdom, in pointing out to Semyon Semyonovich’s wife how much her husband had changed during his trip abroad, say in an earlier version of the film that was never released: “I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out he has been secretly attending a synagogue”? In the version that made it to theaters, the synagogue is replaced with a lover, but the idea that the Soviet people were living in peril from various plots – imperialist, for instance – was very much in the air. The Soviet paranoia that spies were all around us and the heightened suspicion that was generally encouraged is mocked at every turn in the film, in the person of the gallant police officer straight out of the pages of Soviet thrillers about the prodigious spy-catcher Major Ivan Pronin, in Semyon Semyonovich’s tendency to see enemies all around him, and in the famous line from the movie: “Our people don’t  take taxis to the bakery.”

The smuggler Lyolik works as a model in a “house of fashion” (of course) – what upstanding member of Soviet society would engage in such a frivolous profession? Similarly, the restaurant to which Lyolik lures Semyon Semyonovich at the bidding of the mysterious “Chief,” hoping to get him drunk enough so he can remove the cast and retrieve the loot, is a hotbed of debauchery, vice, and crime.

The popularity of Diamond Arm as soon as it opened was amazing. Everyone was going around singing the “Song about Rabbits”:

А нам все равно, а нам все равно,
Пусть боимся мы волка и сову,
Дело есть у нас,
В этот поздний час
Мы волшебную косим трын-траву

We don’t care a bit, we don’t care a bit,
Scared as we may be of the wolf and owl,
We’ve a job to do,
At this late hour,
We’re harvesting magical grasses.

This popularity is easy to explain: a comedy with a fabulous cast, toe-tapping songs, and incredible, sidesplittingly funny situations had stormed into the rather dull and monotonous life of the Soviet Union. That alone was amazing. The Soviet authorities, like any dictatorship, were suspicious of comedies. Of course, there were plenty of Soviet comedies, but all of them, even the best, were carefully crafted, drawing on a set menu of safe components. There was the obligatory touching love story, with strong emotion often getting at least one the lovers into some sort of difficult predicament, but always with a happy ending. They often featured a cheerful old man who is a font of folk wisdom, or someone with a theatrically exaggerated Ukrainian accent, a symbol of the friendship of peoples and the peoples’ optimism. The good cheerfully and bravely struggle against evil, and just as cheerfully and bravely triumph. Diamond Arm brought a startling absurdity to the screen, the absurdity of Soviet life, and in poking fun at this absurdity, gave us, for 90 minutes, an amazing sense of joyous liberation.

For those who sat in movie theaters across the country, slack-jawed with wonder as they watched for the umpteenth time the misdeeds of Gesha and Lyolik, who came up with such now immortal one-liners as «Туристо руссо, облико морале» (“the Russian tourist is a paragon of virtue” in some made up, foreign-sounding language), «шампанское по утрам пьют только аристократы и дегенераты» (“only aristocrats and degenerates drink champagne in the morning”), or «как говорит наш шеф» (“as our Chief says”), or who had worn holes in their records playing “Song about Rabbits” and “The Island of Bad Luck” over and over, this film was an absolutely astonishing breath of fresh air. Everything about it exuded freedom: its pacing and the opportunity it offered audiences to laugh at their fear of things foreign; at the petty and doltish upravdom, who bore a striking resemblance to the government in everything she did (twenty years down the road, when the Soviet Union began its collapse, how prophetic the line «Не купят лотерейные билеты, отключим газ» [“If they don’t buy lottery tickets, we’ll turn off their gas”] would prove to be!); the neighbors sticking their noses into other people’s business; and the belief that anything unfamiliar – pretty women, restaurants, houses of fashion – are dangerous and harmful.

And there was also the fact that it’s always nice to see a little rabbit outsmart a big (if stupid) wolf, as when the thuggish Gesha and Lyolik try to corner Semyon Semyonovich. How gratifying that the man who sings about rabbits comes out on top!