Unbelievable Adventures of Italians in Russia

Eldar Ryazanov dreamed of working with Italian filmmakers and in 1970 wrote a pitch for a comedy Spaghetti Russian-style with Emil Braginsky, but Goskino officials didn't like it as they found the Italian characters too stereotypical. Same year Sergei Bondarchuk finished Waterloo co-produced by Mosfilm and Dino De Laurentiis who ended owning Mosfilm a lot of money and suggested to return it by producing a light cheap comedy. This is when Ryazanov and Braginsky were contacted.[2]

They were joined by Franco Castellano and Giuseppe Moccia to finish the script. As Ryazonov wrote, he originally planned something in the vein of Cops and Robbers and his own Beware of the Car, with Alberto Sordi as a small Italian fraud and Innokenty Smoktunovsky as a Russian policeman attached, but Italian co-authors saw this idea as old-fashioned and sentimental and asked for a fast-paced commercial comedy.[3] In two months Braginsky and Ryazonov finished a new screenplay, only this time Dino De Laurentiis didn't like it and asked them to rewrite everything except for the scenes with a living lion. The final script was inspired by the comedy It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World which Ryazanov watched the same night at the hotel.[2]

It was Ryazanov's original intention to make a stunt-based comedy completely avoiding compositing, thus only practical effects were used.[3] The episode with a plane landing on a M1 highway among passing cars which parodied a scene from The Sicilian Clan was the hardest to make. It had to be shot at the Ulyanovsk Baratayevka Airport disguised as a highway since no road surface was hard enough for such task. The stunt was performed by a pilot and a deputy chief of the Ulyanovsk Institute of Civil Aviation Ivan Tarashan.[2][3]

The episodes with the VAZ-2103 driven by Olga chased by the Moskvich 412 driven by Andrei with Italians onboard parodied the Henri Verneuil's movie "Le Casse".[3]

Another episode with a filling station blowing up and various station and car parts flying in the air parodied Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point and was also shot without chroma key or miniature effects, although the station itself was a mere replica empty from inside.[3]

Most of the stunts during the car chasing scenes were performed by the acclaimed Italian racer and stuntman Sergio Mioni.[4] Actors Andrei Mironov and Ninetto Davoli did a number of risky tricks by themselves, including the scene with a moveable bridge where Davoli made a long jump with a suitcase in his hand while Mironov had to hang for awhile holding tight into one part of the bridge to pose for a close-up.[2]

For a real lion Ryazanov called Lev Berberov, a Baku engineer famous for raising several wild animals in his flat including a lion named King. Berberov insisted that more scenes and tricks with King should be added to the script. Yet it turned out the lion was hardly capable of even simplest tasks and didn't pay attention to anyone. Ryazanov described it as "untrained, ignorant and dull as it seemed" and the whole experience — as exhausting; during the first scene King scratched Ninetto Davoli which left all actors terrified.[3][5] Mikhail Kozlov, a leading research fellow of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, also wasn't complementary about the lion: "During the close-ups the lush mane disguised paws bowed by rickets, curved back, flabby muscles, but in motion all those problems showed up."[6]

Some sources wrongly state that during the filming King ran away and was shot by a police officer.[7] In fact by that time all scenes with the lion had been completed and the Berberov family moved to Moscow where King was temporarily kept in a gym of a secondary school № 74 near Mosfilm.[3][8] At one point it jumped through a window and attacked a student who had climbed over a school fence to get his dog ("to tease the lion" as the Berberovs would claim). His girlfriend started screaming, someone called the police, and Alexander Gurov — then a simple lieutenant — quickly arrived and shot King dead. As Gurov later recalled, the Berberovs didn't care for the student covered in blood, instead they started insulting him and later used their friendship with Sergey Obraztsov to reach the Minister of Internal Affairs Nikolai Shchelokov who also shouted at him until he heard the full story.[8] The family soon got a new lion, King II, who grew up and in 1980 killed their own son.[5][9]