amirkhay

Another expensive set of typical Evil RRRussians cliche. I feel sorry for famous actors when they participate in West vs East propaganda movies. As a Russian tatar I laughed my Rs off about details. It's like when you watch movie about modern U.S.A. where Indians on horses make shooting against cowboys in front of White House, a train being robbed by masked band along the Wall street and a herd of bizons is rushing across the Beverly Hills while confederates siege the fort Alamo inside the N.Y. Central Park.

You won't believe that movie with the budget of 5 million dollars (by the time it was produced, now with the current currency value it is lower) can look like a 100 million dollars blockbuster. In the cinema it hits your brain like a truck. No CG-rendering of tanks, all those models of Pz-III, Pz-IV were scratch-built or borrowed from museums, though some models were smaller than real (like 1:1,5) and put after combined view processing. Guns shooting real bullets (experts of WWII might prove that), that's why sounds are real. All the blasts are real as well. Also the details of clothes, ammunition and tactics from both sides are perfectly given and approved by team of historical experts helping the director. The only woman in the movie takes like 16 seconds of your attention, all the 2 hours are about War. All in all, if you didn't understand earlier how Nazis lost 80% of their total armies in the East Front, that is a quite an example of real battle happened 16th November 1941 under Moscow near Dubosekovo (Petelino).

As a big fan of Ilf and Petrov's masterpieces I couldn't watch this version. It contains quite simple Gaidai's humor but not sharp and intelligent humor of authors. Zakharov's version is much closer to book and embodies original jokes. And, of course, genius Mironov is No2 Ostap Bender after Yurski. Though actors are great in both versions, 77's did the best. The very important part of Ilf & Petrov's literature is the author's voice, which was masterfully implemented in 1977 (by the way the one who worked as author's voice was famous Rolan Bykov, who played Panikovsky in 1968 Zolotoy Telenok (Golden Taurus)) but Gaidai didn't use such feature and lost the majority of book's spirit.