Shpionskie strasti

'Passion of Spies (1967)' is something along the lines of an animated Soviet "Get Smart." This 21-minute cartoon by Yefim Gamburg satirises, with barely any dialogue, the clichés of contemporary spy movies. The animation style itself is distinctly Russian, particularly the highly- angular caricatured facial features. The story is a little convoluted, especially when characters keep removing rubber face-masks, but I think it goes something like this: the leader of a foreign intelligence agency plots to steal a revolutionary Soviet dental chair. To carry out the operation, sensitive information is passed from agent to agent in the most ridiculous ways, topped only by the manner in which their enemy surveils them in return. One spy disguises himself beneath an artificial puddle; a submarine surfaces in a swimming pool; a leeching teenager is conned into accepted a nudie magazine and a 40 mega-ton hydrogen bomb; a top spy-dog is cunningly disguised as a cat; the identity of a dubious old lady is revealed only after five rubber masks have been extricated (sounds a bit like 'Mission: Impossible II (2000)'). Gamburg's characters, particularly the Soviet bunch, treat their jobs with the utmost seriousness, and their stone-cold willingness to perform even the most absurd duties is a source of much amusement. One resourceful Rusky, while chasing an enemy agent, even finds the time to stop a runaway locomotive with his bare hands!

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.

1. Rubber masks is a reference to Fantomas French movies poluar in USSR in these times. Fantomas also is referenced in some other Soviet movies, for example, Aniskin and Fantomas.

2."Passions" isn't correct translation for Strasti there. Strasti also means some horrors, in direct meaning and figurativel speaking. For example: "...and there horrors began"