Leonid Iovich Gaidai was a Soviet and Russiancomedy film director who enjoyed immense popularity and broad public recognition in the former Soviet Union. His films broke theatre attendance records and are still some of the top-selling DVDs in Russia. He has been described as "the king of Soviet comedy".
Early life and first success
Gaidai was born on 30 January 1923 in Svobodny, Amur Oblast, where he is commemorated by a statue. His father Iov Isidorovich Gaidai came from a Ukrainian family of serfs of the Poltava Governorate. At the age of 22 he was sentenced to several years of katorga for revolutionary activity and sent to the Far East to work at the railway. Leonid's mother Maria Ivanovna Lubimova was born in the Ryazan Oblast to Russian parents. She met her Iove through her brother Egor, also a katorga worker who sent her a photo of his friend along with a marriage proposal. After Gaidai's term expired, they settled down in the Amur Oblast where Gaidai continued working at the railway building site. Leonid was the third child in the family. His elder brother Aleksandr was a well-known poet and a war correspondent. Leonid took part in amateur dramatics from a young age. He graduated from school on 20 August 1941. In just two days the Great Patriotic War started. On February 1942, he was enrolled to the Red Army. He first served in Mongolia, then finished sergeant courses, becoming a squad leader. He worked in the military intelligence. On 20 December 1942, Gaidai was awarded the Medal "For Battle Merit" for killing three Nazi soldiers and taking hostages during the battle for Yenkino village. On 20 March 1943, he was heavily injured after stepping on a land mine. He spent nine months in military hospitals. In January 1944, he was sent home as war-disabled. In 1945, he joined the Communist Party. Gaidai studied at the Irkutsk District Drama Theatre's studio school, and after graduating in 1947 acted in theatre productions. He subsequently attended the Moscow Institute of Cinematography, completing his studies in 1955. He married the actress Nina Grebeshkova, who played minor roles in his future films. He initially worked as an assistant to director Boris Barnet on the 1955 film Liana, before directing the first of his own films in 1956. His 1958 comedy The Dead Affair was described by Minister of CultureNikolai Mikhailov as "a lampooning of Soviet Reality" and was cut to 47 minutes by censors as a result, and released as A Groom from the Other World. He subsequently avoided overtly political themes. His first success came six years after graduation, with a segment of the short film collection Sovershenno seryozno, which instantly became highly popular. In this film, Gaidai first introduced a comic trio of crooks – Georgy Vitsin, Yuri Nikulin, and Yevgeny Morgunov, who later appeared in several of his other films. After his characters and directing style won the public's love, his name gained massive selling power in USSR's cinemas.
Genre brilliance
Between 1961 and 1975, Gaidai directed a number of top-selling films, each one a huge financial success and becoming wildly popular in the Soviet Union. During these years, he filmed new adventures of the mischievous trio in The Bootleggers, a film adaptation of O. Henry's short stories, Strictly Business, Operation Y and Other Shurik's Adventures, and Kidnapping, Caucasian Style. Following his break with Morgunov, Gaidai disbanded the trio, while casting Nikulin in what was to become the most popular Soviet comedy ever made, The Diamond Arm. In the 1970s, Gaidai worked primarily with the comedians from his own studio group, which included Vitsin, Leonid Kuravlyov, Mikhail Pugovkin, Savely Kramarov, Natalya Seleznyova, Natalya Krachkovskaya, and his wife Nina Grebeshkova. All this cast was featured in his film adaptation of Mikhail Zoshchenko's short stories, It Can't Be!. He also filmed a play by Mikhail Bulgakov, , Ilf and Petrov's The Twelve Chairs, Nikolai Gogol's Incognito from St. Petersburg, and Borrowing Matchsticks'', a story by the Finnish author Maiju Lassila.
Commercial success
Gaidai's top-grossing film The Diamond Arm sold 76.7 million tickets in the Soviet Union alone, becoming the third highest-grossing Soviet film. At $8 per ticket, it would have generated revenue comparable to the US box office champion Titanic. In a 1995 survey by RTR, it was voted the best comedy ever made. It was followed closely by Gaidai's other comedy films — Kidnapping, Caucasian Style, Operation Y and Other Shurik's Adventures and . Due to the state-controlled nature of USSR film industry, all revenue from film sales went back into the state coffers. However, Gaidai personally received a small percentage of ticket sales as a government incentive. This didn't last long, though, since it soon became apparent that even with the tiny royalty offered he would quickly become a legal Soviet multimillionaire.
Later years
After 1975, Gaidai went into a period of significant decline; his only other notable work was a joint Soviet-Finnish film Borrowing Matchsticks, completed in 1980. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he directed only one more film, capitalizing on the early Perestroika business activities and starring Dmitry Kharatyan. Gaidai has a cameo in the final one, There's Good Weather in Deribasovskaya, where he plays an old gambler who tries to beat the one-armed bandit. In real life, Gaidai was addicted to gambling. These proved the most popular of his works filmed after 1975 but lacked the success of his earlier work. Gaidai was made a People's Artist of the RSFSR in 1974, People's Artist of the USSR in 1989, and died in Moscow on Friday November 19, 1993. He was buried at the Kuntsevo Cemetery.
Style
Gaidai's comedies have a very visual style of comedy, utilising slapstick and physical humour, with dialogue that has been described as "pithy, aphoristic, or nonsensical". He was a master of fast-paced comedy, his style and rhythm somewhat similar to Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. While his films on the surface portray socialist ideals, there are subversive elements and satire. He continued to suffer interference from censors, and said of his films "We will use the means of satire to fight the flaws which still sometimes hinder the lives of Soviet people".
Assessment
Gaidai remains most famous for the outstanding string of comedies he directed between 1961 and 1975, when nine of the ten films he made became Russian classics, selling between 20 and 76 million film tickets each, and becoming box office champions for several years in a row. He is less known outside of the former Soviet Union, due to the specific nature of his comedies, intrinsically tied to Soviet culture and lifestyle – unlike the motives of the characters of Kramer's "Mad World" being easily understood by the Russian public, living in the highly materialistic world of late Soviet Union. Gaidai's international recognition included a nomination for best short film at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival for Dog Barbos and Unusual Cross. and the Grand Prix Wawel Silver Dragon at the Kraków Film Festival in 1965 for the novel "Déjà vu" in the film "Operation Y and Shurik's Other Adventures".
