Diamond Arm, 2nd film of the Amazing May

The Diamond Arm (Бриллиантовая рука) is a 1968 Soviet comedy film filmed by Mosfilm and first released in 1968. The film was directed by slapstick 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. 


Here you may also read about the actors

Plot

The boss of a black market ring (known only as "The Chief") wants to smuggle a batch of jewelry into the Soviet Union by hiding it into the orthopedic cast of a courier. The contraband ends up in the cast on the arm of "ordinary Soviet citizen" Semyon Semyonovich Gorbunkov who gets mistaken for the courier while on a cruise shore excursion. He lets the militsiya know about this, and the militsiya captain uses Gorbunkov as bait to catch the criminals. Most of the plot are various attempts of two inept crooks, Lyolik and Gennadiy Kozodoyev,to lure Gorbunkov into a situation where they could have quietly, without a wet job, taken the cast off him.

Here you may read about the process of making this film

Catch phrases

• "A dog is man's best friend!" ---"Well, maybe in London a dog is man's best friend, but over here it's the UPRAVDOM (apartment manager)." (The upravdom woman finally became a caricature of a seemingly petty but influential social bureaucrat.)
• "Only aristocrats and degenerates drink champagne in the morning..." (Шампанское по утрам пьют только аристократы или дегенераты) (pauses, checks out the bottle and drinks right from it)
• A mocking reproach: "Semyon Semyonych!..." (Of an absent-minded person to wake him up.)
• "Flowers for his woman, ice cream for the kids. And don't mix it up, Kutuzov!" (Дитям мороженое, бабе цветы.... и не перепутай, Кутузов!)
• "I'm innocent! I'm innocent! He came by himself!" 
• "I'm not a coward... But I'm scared..." "Я не трус, но я боюсь!"
• "I've got an idea: what if we could..." -- "We couldn't." -- "I see... Then, maybe we should..." -- "No, we shouldn't." -- "Okay... In that case, maybe I'd rather..." -- "Why not, you could try that one." (A caricature of a militsiya commander who is so astute that he is almost a mind-reader)
• "As they say, that is c'est la vie!" ("такова се-ля-ви") (c'est la vie is French for "that is life", in other words the phrase is a double mis-translation: "that is that is life" Also, cf. later Dovlatov's catch phrase "таково се-ля-ви" ("such is c'est la vie", where "such" is used in the neuter gender, as if alluding to the Russian word for "crap"), which is clearly patterned on this quote.)
• "But Lyolik, that is not aesthetic!" -- "That's cheap, reliable and practical!" (rhymes nicely in Russian: "Лёлик, но это же не эстетично!" - "Зато дёшево, надёжно и практично.") (As preparing to hit Semyon Semyonovich on the head with a metal tool.)
• "Our people don't take a taxi to the bakery!" (In Russian: "Наши люди в булочную на такси не ездят!" 

info is taken from Wikipedia

photo is taken from the web-site Ruskino