The Overcoat

The new overcoat that a clerk in a government office has come by with such difficulty is stolen. Nobody is willing to help him get it back, and he goes on with the matter even beyond the grave. The film takes as its subject the invisibility of the minor official: before the coat nobody noticed him either, and the coat won him a place for a short while. The account does not separate the ridiculous from the pitiful and does not make the clerk an object of mockery. It was adapted from a book and rests on a well known source in Russian literature. Rolan Bykov plays the lead in Aleksey Batalov’s seventy five minute Soviet film, completed in 1959.