Beware of the Car!

Detochkin is a quiet man who works at an insurance office and rehearses Hamlet with an amateur theatre group in his spare time. He has a second job too: he steals and sells the cars of people who bought them with black-market money and sends the proceeds to orphanages. The investigator on his trail, Podberyozovikov, is his friend from the same theatre group. Eldar Ryazanov turns the theft into a question posed from inside Soviet morality: the man is guilty, and he is not guilty. Innokenty Smoktunovsky leads, and the joke sits exactly there, since Smoktunovsky had played Hamlet in Kozintsev's film two years earlier and here plays an amateur who cannot manage the part. The comedy is gentle and its target is not. Who it is for: viewers who like Soviet comedy and the tradition of soft satire. Who it is not for: anyone after fast, loud humour.