L'arriviste

When there's a momentary break in the fighting between the Whites and the Reds, Ivan Sadovskiy steps outside his house to pick up spilled canned goods. But alas, the fighting resumes, and he and a Bactrian camel are swept away to the madness of the warfare of the Russian Civil War. Carrying back a load of sugar, he's stopped by the Soviet, who argue endlessly about his paperwork while he disposes of it. Captured by the Whites, he's recognized as a relative of a general, and given important jobs. Back and forth, over and over, with the camel the only sane one in the madness in which everyone wants to shoot everyone else and themselves too.

The constant reiteration of the central joke, that when you're with the Reds, you pretend to be.a fervent communist, while when you're with the Whites, you love the Tsar, gets a little repetitious. But that camel -- who, alas, receives no screen credit -- remains the only one to just calmly do what he's ordered to do, even when it's just a matter of walking in a circle.

Apparently the Soviets thought the sequences mocking the Whites were just fine and dandy, but how dare anyone make fun of the clueless Bolseviks? And so, this was pulled a week after it opened in the Ukrane. It was never shown in the other Soviet Socialist Republics; apparently they couldn't complete the paperwork to destroy it.