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Video: Who became the prototype of the Soviet Robin Hood Detochkin in the film "Beware of the car"
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
55 years ago, the film "Beware of the Car" with Innokentiy Smoktunovsky in the title role was released on the screens of the Soviet Union. The lyrical tragicomedy was incredibly successful due to its positive energy. The image of the main character, a serial car thief, inseparable from the volume of Shakespeare, fell in love with the audience. Who became the prototype of Yuri Detochkin, the Soviet Robin Hood of the 20th century?
Urban legend
The plot of the film was born to Eldar Ryazanov and Emil Braginsky thanks to one of the legends. In the early 1960s, many heard about a kind of Robin Hood, who stole personal cars from citizens living on unearned income. True, the national hero spent the money received from the sale of cars not for his own joys, but to help orphanages.
According to the memoirs of Eduard Ryazanov, both he and the screenwriter Emil Braginsky heard this legend in different cities of the Soviet Union: in Moscow, Leningrad, Odessa. It was about this national hero that they decided to shoot a picture. Wanting to get factual material for working on the script for their new film, Ryazanov and Braginsky began to turn to the law enforcement agencies of those cities where they heard the legend.
Later, they expanded the circle of their searches until they were convinced: such a character does not exist, he is a fruit of folk fantasy. People just invented a hero for themselves and actually believed in him. However, the absence of a real Robin Hood of the twentieth century did not stop the filmmakers. They decided not to give up the idea and drew their inspiration from world culture and cinema.
The director later said that they were helped in inventing the image of the protagonist Don Quixote Cervantes, Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin of Dostoevsky and the legendary Tramp Charlie Chaplin. As a result, Yuri Detochkin appeared - a big, sincere child.
Alternative version
Despite the fact that the director and scriptwriter assured that the real prototype of the people's avenger did not exist, some argued that the real story of Boris Vengrover was the basis for the image of Yuri Detochkin.
The police officers knew him by different surnames, he was convicted nine times and served a total of 36 of his fifty years in prison. At the same time, he escaped with enviable regularity and was considered the unofficial king of burglars.
He was distinguished by a special nobility. He could enter any house, there were no complicated locks for him. But if Boris Vengrover found himself in the house of a poor man, then he immediately left without taking a penny, and even carefully locking the door behind him.
In addition, Boris Vengrover had a certain acting talent. Once he entered the apartment of the former director of a large plant, and at that time a pensioner of republican significance Vladimir Losev, who had gone to a nearby store for groceries. The landlord was absent for only an hour.
Returning home, he ran into a very decent man on the stairs in an expensive raincoat, obviously of foreign production. The stranger even raised his hat to greet Losev. The latter, only after returning home and discovering a complete rout, suddenly realized that the stranger was wearing his own cloak and hat.
If Boris Vengrover came across the owners of the apartments into which he entered, he presented himself as a law enforcement officer and even forced the victim to write an explanation about the origin of his wealth. At the same time, he spent most of the money obtained dishonestly on children.
Erik Solomonovich Kotlyar, author of a series of works about the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department, in his book “Stars of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department. The Golden Age of Moscow Investigation”wrote that Boris Vengrover invested a lot in the Sazhenevskaya boarding school in the Ryazan region, gave gifts to orphans and illegally trained children's football teams.
Whatever it was, but the image of Yuri Detochkin, a modest employee of an insurance company, became in the Soviet Union a symbol of nobility and purity of thoughts, albeit fighting injustice with illegal methods. And on one of the squares of Samara, the hometown of Eldar Ryazanov, 8 years ago they even erected a monument to this character.
The role of Yuri Detochkin became one of the brightest in the work of Innokenty Smoktunovsky, although it was originally intended for another actor, the film script was repeatedly sent to the shelf, and the director was accused of promoting an immoral lifestyle.
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