Operation Y and Other Shurik's Adventures

Operation Y and Other Shurik's Adventures (1965)

Операция «Ы» и другие приключения Шурика

The film consists of three independent parts: "Workmate", "Déjà vu" and "Operation Y". The plot follows the adventures of Shurik, the naive and nerdy Soviet student who often gets into ludicrous situations but always finds a way out very neatly.

Date of release
1965-08-16
TMDB
7.5 / 10 (532)
Runtime
1h 35m
Genres
Comedy
Director
Leonid Gaidai

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Sedova Street and Timura Frunze Street

Operation Y and Shurik's Other Adventures is a 1965 Soviet slapstick comedy film directed by Leonid Gaidai, starring Aleksandr Demyanenko, Natalya Seleznyova, Yuri Nikulin, Georgy Vitsin and Yevgeny Morgunov. The film consists of three independent parts: "Workmate", "Déjà vu" and "Operation Y". The plot follows the adventures of Shurik, the naive and nerdy Soviet student who often gets into ludicrous situations, but always finds a way out very neatly.

Production

The film was shot in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), Odessa, Yalta, in Mosfilm pavilions, at Sviblovo District of Moscow and near the Moscow State University. The filming began on 27 July 1964. In October bad weather in Moscow hindered the completion of the outdoor scenes, so the shooting was relocated to Odessa and was complete on 22 November. The rest of the scenes were shot in Moscow and Leningrad.

The film's plot is based loosely on a screenplay written by Moris Slobodsky and Yakov Kostyukovsky entitled Light-hearted Stories (Несерьёзные истории); it consisted of two novels about comical adventures of a young student Vladik Arkov, clumsy but very decent. A character of a "good guy" was popular in the Soviet art of that time, so Gaidai decided to follow this tendency shooting his next film.

More than one hundred actors took a screen test for the role of the student Vladik, but Gaidai was not satisfied with any of them. He had his own personality in mind as a prototype of the character, so when he first saw a photo of Aleksandr Demyanenko and then met him in person, he noticed the likeness to himself in the actor, and believed that the humble Demyanenko in glasses would be able to portray the awkward, naive and honest student.

Before the shooting it was decided to dye Aleksandr's hair from brown to blond. Years later, his wife Lyudmila Akimovna recalled: "He was dyed mercilessly, until blisters appeared on his skin. The dyes were terrible back then. It is a good thing that Sasha's hair was so thick that despite all the experiments he did not go bald."

Initially the name of the main character was Vladik (a diminutive of Vladislav). Later the director, impressed by Demyanenko, decided to name the character after the actor (Shurik is a diminutive of Aleksandr).

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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