Ivan Vasilyevich Changes His Profession

A Soviet comedy set in Moscow. Shurik is an inventor. He builds a time machine at home, and during a test it opens the wall of the flat; behind it is the sixteenth century. At that moment Bunsha, the building superintendent, and a thief named Miloslavsky come into the room. The machine works and an exchange takes place: the two fall into the past and Ivan the Terrible arrives in present-day Moscow. Bunsha is the exact likeness of the tsar. At the palace they take him for the tsar and he has to sit on the throne. The thief beside him turns the situation to account at once: he receives ambassadors, grants lands and eyes the treasury. In modern Moscow the tsar walks about the building, does not understand the telephone, the lift or a tape recorder, and meets the neighbours. The humour comes from cutting back and forth between the two sides. The source is a play by Mikhail Bulgakov, which could not be staged when it was written. Aleksandr Demyanenko, Yuri Yakovlev and Leonid Kuravlyov are in the cast. Yakovlev plays both Bunsha and the tsar. Leonid Gaidai directed. It was among the most watched films of its year in the Soviet Union and its lines passed into everyday speech. An enjoyable choice for anyone who likes classic comedy and the idea of time travel. For a viewer watching with subtitles, part of the humour depends on the daily life of the period.