Do any of you older readers remember the comic strip "Spy Vs. Spy" in the MAD Magazine? I'm talking either 1950s or 1960s? Anyway, this Russia short feature reminded a bit of that. It's a parody of spy movies and features of lot of the silliness and exaggerations of the lengths spies will go. This is pretty funny stuff as we seeing two main competing spies but others also lurking everywhere. Spies and their equipment pop out anywhere; we see secret meetings will middlemen, all of kinds of stuff and the animation, not just the humor, makes it fun to watch. I kind of like it, too, that they did this in black-and- white.
I read where the Soviets were so nervous about this film that they had one of their general preview it. To his credit, he just laughed and enjoyed it. Still, it wasn't seen in Russia until after perestroika.
Twenty minutes is pretty long for a cartoon but I hung with it because the first half is much better than the second, but by then one doesn't want to quit on this. Overall, it still entertains and kudos to Yefem Gamburg, the man who put this together and obviously had a good sense of humor It is said his ideas for this movie all came from watching Soviet spy films. I wonder if he saw a few of those early James Bond movies, too. One the characters sure looked like Sean Connery.
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