Shandel was a golden boy with a soaraway future in commercial cinema if he just played his cards right. Unfortunately, he chose an uncommercial model on which to base his first feature film in the complex person of Federico Fellini. Plus, he aimed his satire too close to home for comfort and got his movie knocked off the circuit after only seven days in one cinema. The Ukrainian community in Canada was not having this raucous, slipshod movie unleashed on the world. They did not fully understand it (nobody did except Shandel) but they knew one thing: it intended to be damn rude about Ukrainians. Shandel bit the hand that fed him big-time by delivering to his producers a picture that scarcely made any sense except in its offensive intentions. Even the poster showed the cast holding up a finger to the audience ---- except their fingers were the polite way round. This error symbolised the misconstrued nature of this 'auteur' effort that badly needed some script doctoring and directorial focus. This forgotten picture's failure to open said everything about blurred self-indulgence at the end of the 1960s. Sadly, the sloppy production caused early damage to a movie-making career that had great potential.
