The Diamond Arm
| The Diamond Arm | |
|---|---|
Film poster
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| Directed by | Leonid Gaidai |
| Written by | Leonid Gaidai Yakov Kostyukovsky Moris Slobodskoy |
| Starring |
Yuri Nikulin Nina Grebeshkova Andrei Mironov Anatoli Papanov Nonna Mordyukova |
| Music by | Aleksandr Zatsepin |
| Cinematography | Igor Chernykh |
| Edited by | Valentina Yankovskaya |
| Distributed by | Mosfilm |
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Release date
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April 28, 1969 |
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Running time
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100 minutes |
| Country | Soviet Union |
| Language | Russian |
The Diamond Arm (Russian: Бриллиантовая рука Brilliantovaya ruka) is a Soviet comedy film made by Mosfilm and first released in 1969. The film was directed by director Leonid Gaidai and starred several famous Soviet actors, including Yuri Nikulin, Andrei Mironov, Anatoli Papanov, Nonna Mordyukova and Svetlana Svetlichnaya. The Diamond Arm has become a Russian cult film and is considered by many Russian contemporaries to be one of the finest comedies of its time. It was also one of the all-time leaders at the Soviet box office with over 76,700,000 theatre admissions in the Soviet era. The plot of the film was based on a real-life news item about Swiss smugglers who tried to transport jewels in an orthopedic cast.
The boss of a black market ring (known only as "The Chief") wants to smuggle a batch of jewelry from a foreign state into the Soviet Union by hiding it inside the orthopedic cast of a courier. The Chief sends a minor henchman named Gennadiy Kozodoyev (played by Mironov) to serve as the courier. Kozodoyev travels to Istanbul via a tourist cruise ship. The Turkish co-conspirators do not know what the courier looks like; they only know that he is supposed to say a code word to identify himself. Due to a mix-up, they mistake Kozodoyev's fellow passenger from the cruise ship, the "ordinary Soviet citizen" Semyon Gorbunkov (played by Nikulin) for the courier. They place a cast around his arm and put the contraband jewels inside the cast. Upon the cruise ship's return to the Soviet Union, Gorbunkov lets the police know what happened, and the police captain, who is working undercover as a taxi driver, uses Gorbunkov as bait to catch the criminals. Most of the plot are various attempts of The Chief's inept henchmen, Kozodoyev and Lyolik (played by Papanov), to lure Gorbunkov into a situation where they can quietly, without a wet job, remove the cast and reclaim the contraband jewels. In the meantime, Gorbunkov's wife begins to suspect that he has either been recruited by foreign intelligence, or is having an affair...
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Wikipedia