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 'Gesha' Kozodoyev (played by Mironov) to serve as the courier. Kozodoyev travels to Oriental state via a tourist cruise ship. The local 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, Gesha 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... Read more on Wikipedia.
MPAA Rating: | NR |
Genre: | Adventure, Comedy, Crime |
Directed By: | Leonid Gayday |
Written By: | Leonid Gayday, Moris Slobodskoy, Yakov Kostyukovskiy |
Cast: | Nikolay Trofimov, Aleksandr Khvylya, Anatoliy Papanov, Nina Grebeshkova, Georgiy Vitsin, Leonid Pleshakov, Lev Polyakov, Maksim Nikulin, Nonna Mordyukova, Viktor Uralskiy, Ivan Zhevago, Roman Filippov, Vasiliy Kupriyanov, Nikolay Romanov, Yuriy Nikulin, Georgiy Svetlani, Leonid Kanevskiy, Igor Yasulovich, Evgeniya Melnikova, Svetlana Svetlichnaya, Grigoriy Shpigel, Vladimir Gulyaev, German Kachin, Apollon Yachnitskiy, Andrey Fayt, Aleksandra Lisyutina, Andrey Mironov, Tatyana Nikulina, Stanislav Chekan |
In Theaters: | Nov 01, 1998 |
Runtime: | 1 hour 40 minutes |
Production: | Mosfilm |