“Petrovka, 38”: what had to be sacrificed for the film adaptation of the famous detective

Some monotony of Soviet police films (thrillers? action movies? detective stories? A little bit of everything) was noticed, of course, even at a time when they were “fresh”, only came out on the screens. Cartoon parodies “Robbery by …” or “The Adventures of Vasya Kurolesov”, and even Gennady Khazanov’s monologue from the cartoon about the parrot Kesha: “All posts! The perpetrator is armed! Polischuk is chasing on a motorcycle!” So, of course, they saw, understood and laughed.

All three of the mentioned cartoons can be considered parodies specifically of Boris Grigoriev’s film “Petrovka, 38” – well, because both the robbery, and the shooting through the door at the raspberry dacha near Moscow, and the dashing pursuit of an armed criminal on the Volga are present in this film. But with the same success, the prototypes of parodies can be found in the series “Village Detective” about the district police officer Aniskin, and in the largest crime series of the Soviet era “Investigation is conducted by ZnatoKi”, and in “Profession – Investigator”, and many other places. Starting with the hits of the fifties – “The Motley Case” and “The Street Is Full of Surprises.”

It’s easier to name which Soviet detectives did not have masks: for example, the great “The meeting place cannot be changed.” It has its own, individual plot and its own characters that break out of traditional roles. But this is an exception (and for it to take place, it took the remarkable efforts of the entire creative team, starting with the screenwriters of the Weiner brothers and ending with the main actor, and in fact the co-director of the picture, Vladimir Vysotsky).

And “Petrovka, 38” – a picture, we repeat, is typical, on the example of which it is convenient to analyze all the conventions of the genre. And when compared with Yulian Semyonov’s early story, which served as the basis for the script, one can see what had to be sacrificed by converting the action-packed fiction of the time of the Thaw, innovative for its time, into a win-win blockbuster from the time of the Olympics.

Mask set

In folk comedy (of which the Italian commedia dell’arte is best known, but the Russian one, with Petrushka, is no worse), standard plot masks are provided to save the creative efforts of all participants (artists, they are also authors, and viewers). Each of them has its own external and speech code, behaves approximately the same in all plays, which means it is predictable. Which gives the viewer a basic peace of mind: everything is going according to plan, the end will be good.

All the same is typical for cinema, especially when it comes to second-row films (B-movies). A detective story, an action movie, a movie about a massacre with space aliens – masks reigned everywhere in the golden age of Hollywood. However, somewhere since the sixties of the last century, it has become good form to “hack” masks, to use them only as an object for the game (do you think you know how everything will turn out? Ha, but you didn’t guess!). But in some cultures and genres – just like in Soviet police cinema – masks have been preserved. Who is guilty? In our case, in many respects they were high-ranking police officers who advised (and coordinated) profile films, or even simply ordered them. This paid off: dozens of police films well “bleached” the reputation of the Soviet police, made service in it much more respectable than it was considered in the post-war years.

So, the masks of “Petrovka, 38”. In the foreground is an operational-investigative group consisting of three detectives: Colonel Sadchikov (Georgy Yumatov), ​​Captain Kostenko (Vasily Lanovoy), Senior Lieutenant Roslyakov (Evgeny Gerasimov). The trio of investigators is apparently a sacred number, because this happens in other police films, take at least “Connoisseurs”. But if Znamensky, Tomin and Kibrit had clear roles within the group, then not here – all three, fortunately in different ranks, carry out the same operational work, are friends on an equal footing and are generally united in three persons.

Sadchikov, the eldest of them, is unmercenary with an eternal cigarette in his mouth, wearing plastic-framed glasses, which were already unfashionable at that time (comparable to the fashionable “Rabans” of the hippie thief Chita), in a simple shirt under a police tunic. Kostenko is like the hero of Humphrey Bogart, in an immaculately fitted suit and hat (he, as the most representative of the three, is “entrusted” by the authors to put a gun to the back of the murderer Sudar). And a little dude and the most informal of all (youth!) Roslyakov. Which, of course, turns out to be a real superman: to impress his girlfriend, he opens a bottle of champagne with the edge of his hand.

By the way, he is the only one of the trinity who is “allowed” to unleash a love line on the screen (not rich, but at least some!). Sadchikov, as the eldest, is happily married, but about Kostenko … we know nothing (we know from the book – but more on that below). In general, the standard implies: no nonsense, we are catching criminals here, that is, we are saving the Motherland, and not that’s all.

The trio of “bad guys” of the police detective are just the opposite, hedonists. Here is Chita: “taverns and women were brought to the zugunder”, as another film bandit said, but on a similar occasion. Here is Sudar: he is also voluptuous, but he also loves and knows how to drive a car and is a complete cocaine addict. Finally, the “glavgad” is Prokhor: age and status are not conducive to excesses, but all the same, the old man licks his lips at the girls and listens to gypsy romances on the gramophone. However, as it should be among the “head guards” of all times and peoples, the passion for money and power replaces all drugs and all women combined for him.

Another feature that is inherent in the “bad”, from minor to major, is religiosity: if someone has icons hanging in their apartment, or someone is baptized, or weaves church sayings into speech, it’s clear to everyone: a bastard as it is! Not our man!

The secondary masks are even simpler: the good ones are a positive general (Nikolai Eremenko, Sr.), Sadchikov’s wife. Both have a tired look, patience in their eyes. Of the negative ones – a shabby girl of easy behavior Nadezhda (looks older than her years), a cowardly “master of sports and a father of many children.”

True, there are such (also traditional) roles that are neither strictly positive nor strictly negative. Their function is to make the plot “multidimensional”, at least a little complex. And here you are: Papa Samsonov with “an award Walther signed by Marshal Rokossovsky (apparently an honored man, from the elite, but a terrifying family man). Or the intellectual Lev Ivanovich, a teacher of Russian and literature, who takes care of Lenka, who is confused, but makes friends with the main characters.

As for the figure of Lenka himself (and this is the standard for adventure novels like Treasure Island, the figure of a boy who finds himself in the center of events and becomes a de facto narrator) – perhaps it is she who still makes Petrovka, 38 a kind of film. Because the police canon itself does not require such a figure.

Things that give out

The film takes place at the very end of the 1970s – that is, in the era modern for the release of the picture. But the story, which formed the basis of the script, was written almost 20 years before filming – and very often this “breaks through” in the remarks. Nevertheless, the film’s set designers did a good job in order to produce a picture that is not historical, but quite modern. Depicting albeit an idealized, but quite realistic picture of the police work of the late Brezhnev era.

In the credits of the film, we see the work of the hot line “02”: giant tape recorders, female operators manually switching calls to departments, interesting analog devices that make up identikit. A little later we see the car-“nurse” of the investigation team – “Volga” 24-02 with a station wagon body. Recall that the “station wagon” of the previous model (“GAZ-22”) drove the trinity of the main characters in the first series of “Connoisseurs”.

Another police high-tech shown in the film is a mechanized filing system (a replacement for Sherlock Holmes’ mahogany locker). And a huge wall-length panel of color TVs in the “situation center” (aka the general’s office). But in general – and this is necessary for the viewer to feel the policemen as their own people, and the police as a completely earthly institution – there is an ordinary electric samovar in the dining room, and a kettle with a stove in the operatives’ closet. And fish, fish in the aquarium (is there a hint of “catchers of men” here?).

But the police are, in fact, the only zone in the film that is definitely “modern” for the 1970s. If we take the Samsonovs’ large apartment (and in the film’s prologue, we recall, we see a family quarrel between Lyonka’s parents, obviously not poor and difficult), then basically it is an apartment from the fifties, but not from a later period. On the table of Papa Lenka (that same writer, or professor, or official with a premium Walther) is a “Stalinist” table lamp and a white telephone, similar to the “Kremlin”. And his wife is wearing an expensive silk robe.

Yes, and he calls their quarrel as a joke – “Mironova and Menaker”, these are also the stars of the fifties. Two things modernize the Samsonovs’ apartment: a brand new Yugoslav typewriter “Unis” and again an electric samovar, a bestseller (and gifts) of that time.

There was no need to modernize the room in Lev Ivanovich’s communal apartment – according to the plot, this hero should be a kind of eccentric antique dealer. So – here you are, viewers, a smartly shabby geyser in the bathroom, an old bureau and other things. The room of Chita, which is searched by the opera from our trio, is the same: everything that is in it could belong not only to the hippie of the 70s, but also to the dandy of the Thaw period (which we find in Semenov’s story).

Let’s add to this quite realistic and timeless “metal repairs”, suburban stations, houses in Bolshie Vyazemy … The rain that falls as if in the films of the sixties, but it is not lyrical, but rather dull … Typically “Svemov” (as opposed to “Agf” , from the fifties) colors … And we get an outlandish genre: film noir (these are films in the original with the same Humphrey Bogart, where hats, and sharp chiaroscuro, and the silhouette of a gun is reflected on the wall under a night lamp …) in color.

As Zhvanetsky said around the time of the Petrovka film, we have an electric samovar, and we ourselves are rather insincere.

Spoke – were silent

Dialogues for the film Yulian Semyonov did not rework too much. Therefore, they feel some (for 1980) antiquity. The teacher Lev Ivanovich “does not want to be capitalized”, the caught swindlers swear by the pre-war word “milton”. Finally, the nickname Chita itself: it is obvious that there were such “drivers” at the time when the film “Tarzan” (whose character Chita, the monkey, is) was on the screens. And this is the fifties.

The more interesting are the cases when something in the film still changes relative to the book. Here, for example: Lenka, having run away from home and getting drunk with the first khanygs (who turned out to be bandits), in the book reads to them by heart the newly resolved Yesenin (“I read poetry to prostitutes and fry alcohol with bandits”), and in the film – already modern, but also the tragically deceased Nikolai Rubtsov.

And most of all, politics is omitted in the film! Yes, if you read the story of 1963, then it turns out to be a huge number of then fashionable, and at the end of the 1970s not very good-looking references to the “conquests of the 20th Congress”.

For example: Lev Ivanovich – why does the old man put his whole soul into children, raising them to be romantic fighters? According to the book, he had two sons – both were not from the last red commanders and both were shot “in the case of Tukhachevsky.” And Sudar – why is he a cocaine addict (and yelling at the police in the old fashioned way: “Give me a marafet!”)? Yes, because from childhood he walked along a crooked path, like the son of Beria’s closest associate! And so his father was shot in 1953, and the guy was already used to a luxurious life and to drugs too …

And it was precisely these “traces of the thaw” that were carefully “rubbed” in the classic police film. Because, obviously, what in the early sixties was a sign of progressive literature (and “sold” the detective Semenov), in the late seventies would have looked something like mild dissidentism. But was it necessary for the film crew?

They added, however, also a lot: Alla Pugacheva on the TV screen, and tea bags (did you know that they were in the USSR?), And the spectacular chase on the Volga in the city stream. And yet, in terms of “cultism”, the classic police film “Petrovka, 38” failed to get around (and even catch up with) Stanislav Govorukhin’s mini-series with Vysotsky and Konkin, released a year earlier. The genre of “police masks” was rapidly becoming obsolete along with its inspirer, Interior Minister Shchelokov. The new “police standard” will be formed already in perestroika, when it will be possible to say the words “cops” and “thieves in law” from the screens.