Unbelievable Adventures of Italians in Russia

Unbelievable Adventures of Italians in Russia (1974)

Невероятные приключения итальянцев в России

In Italy, a dying woman tells her granddaughter that she hid her treasure many years ago in Russia, in the city of Leningrad. As more people learn about it, they head to Leningrad to find the lion where it is rumoured to be buried.

Date of release
1974-01-31
TMDB
7.3 / 10 (151)
Runtime
1h 42m
Genres
Comedy, Adventure
Director
Eldar Ryazanov

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Saint Petersburg

Unbelievable Adventures of Italians in Russia or A Crazy, Crazy, Crazy Race in Russia is a 1974 Soviet-Italian comedy film directed by Eldar Ryazanov and Franco Prosperi. The plot is about a group of Italian treasure hunters who set on a journey to find long-forgotten treasure in Leningrad.

Production

Eldar Ryazanov dreamed of working with Italian filmmakers and in 1970 wrote a pitch for a comedy Spaghetti Russian-style with Emil Braginsky, but Goskino officials didn't like it as they found the Italian characters too stereotypical. Same year Sergei Bondarchuk finished Waterloo co-produced by Mosfilm and Dino De Laurentiis who ended owning Mosfilm a lot of money and suggested to return it by producing a light cheap comedy.

They were joined by Franco Castellano and Giuseppe Moccia to finish the script. As Ryazonov wrote, he originally planned something in the vein of Cops and Robbers and his own Beware of the Car, with Alberto Sordi as a small Italian fraud and Innokenty Smoktunovsky as a Russian policeman attached, but Italian co-authors saw this idea as old-fashioned and sentimental and asked for a fast-paced commercial comedy.

It was Ryazanov's original intention to make a stunt-based comedy completely avoiding compositing, thus only practical effects were used. The episode with a plane landing on a M1 highway among passing cars which parodied a scene from The Sicilian Clan was the hardest to make. It had to be shot at the Ulyanovsk Baratayevka Airport disguised as a highway since no road surface was hard enough for such task.

The episodes with the VAZ-2103 driven by Olga chased by the Moskvich 412 driven by Andrei with Italians onboard parodied the Henri Verneuil's movie "Le Casse".

Another episode with a filling station blowing up and various station and car parts flying in the air parodied Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point and was also shot without chroma key or miniature effects, although the station itself was a mere replica empty from inside.

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

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