Operation Y and Other Shurik's Adventures (1965) on Netflix
TV-G19651h 31mComedyCrimeRomance
Shurik, a student, quarrels with a bully named Fedya on a bus, then follows a girl named Lida to read her notes. The night he guards a warehouse, three crooks arrive.
- Netflix4.2/5
- IMDb8.4/1016,807 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
Three separate stories follow Shurik, a naive student who keeps landing in ridiculous situations. In the first, he rides a bus where a drunk named Fedya refuses to give up a seat set aside for children and disabled riders, so Shurik puts on sunglasses, pretends he cannot see, takes the place, and passes it to a pregnant woman. Fedya is arrested and ordered to do community work at the building site where Shurik has a part-time job, and he holds a grudge. In the second, exams are near, and Shurik, hunting for lecture notes, trails a classmate named Lida through the city, reading over her shoulder. In the third, a warehouse manager who has been stealing hires three crooks to stage a break-in.
Cast
Show all 20 cast
- Natalya Gitserotas Neighbour (segment "Navazhdeniye")
- Lyudmila Kovaletsas (segment "Navazhdeniye")
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Operation Y and Other Shurik's Adventures (1965)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- More than a hundred actors screen-tested for the role of student Vladik, but director Leonid Gaidai was unsatisfied with all of them; he had himself in mind, and chose Aleksandr Demyanenko after seeing his photo and meeting him, believing the bespectacled actor could play the awkward, naive student.
- Aleksandr Demyanenko's hair was dyed from brown to blond before shooting; according to his wife, the dyes of the time were so harsh that blisters appeared on his skin, though his thick hair survived the experiments.
- After a preliminary screening, the film's Art Council insisted on deleting the scenes in which actor Alexei Smirnov appears in blackface, but no changes were made.
- Actor Valery Nosik auditioned for the main role and ended up playing the student-gambler, while Mikhail Pugovkin, who played the construction site manager, had initially been cast as Fedya.
- Filming the third episode, about the burglary of a warehouse on a snowy winter night, was made difficult by a lack of snow.
- The film grew out of a screenplay called Light-hearted Stories by Moris Slobodsky and Yakov Kostyukovsky, about the comical adventures of student Vladik Arkov; for Gaidai's film the storyline was modified and an extra novella written.
- The film inspired campus monuments to its student characters: in 2012 a statue of Lida with Shurik reading class notes over her shoulder was installed at Kuban State Technological University in Krasnodar, and a sculpture modelled on Shurik went up at Togliatti State University.
