It can be said that Leonid Gaidai himself had a "diamond hand" - and he, like King Midas, turned almost everything he touched into gold. In America, he would have been a multimillionaire like Steven Spielberg during his lifetime - thanks to his comedies, which brought a fortune to Soviet cinema. The audience in the cinemas of the USSR on the tapes of Gaidai was about 600 million people, that is, according to the roughest estimates, the box office could be in the amount of 200 million Soviet rubles in prices before 1991. And the "Diamond Hand" in 1995, as a result of a survey of viewers of the RTR TV channel, was recognized as the best. But it was possible not to set such a belated (albeit noble) goal - just look at the results of the film distribution in the USSR for the entire fifty-year history of official statistics and make sure that this picture really excels among all the works of Leonid Gaidai and, moreover, is the highest-grossing comedy. It ranks third among domestic films and overall fourth according to the results of the Soviet rental, if we also take into account the foreign super record holder - the Mexican melodrama "Yesenia".
Someone probably doesn't care which of the tapes is ahead, which is lagging behind (by the way, "Diamond Hand" beat "The Caucasian Captive" by only two tenths of a million viewers!). But it would be extremely interesting to look at the almost memorized comedy from the point of view of the Western "bond" and other spy-adventure pictures, which were filmed in abundance on both sides of the "Iron Curtain". The most anecdotal thing is that Gaidai, together with co-authors on the script Yakov Kostyukovsky and Maurice Slobodsky, was three years ahead of "Diamonds Forever" and a year ahead of "In the Secret Service of Her Majesty" (by the way, the only James Bond film where he marries, however, the young wife is immediately killed).
S. S. Gorbunkov is, of course, not Agent 007 from Intelligent Service, he is not even a KGB major, but a simple Soviet citizen who got abroad for the first time on a tourist trip and immediately literally slipped out of the blue. Having lost Soviet vigilance and caution only for a moment in unconsciousness, a nice guy and a respectable family man, Semyon Semenovich, then more than served for the benefit of his native fatherland, although he was forced to deceive his soul and pretend to his legitimate wife, children, colleagues, neighbors, a formidable woman-manager and a fatal blonde beauty, posing as not who he was after returning from abroad. Isn't this the dream of every Soviet man, gripped by sincere espionage and shy love for all the valiant Russian scouts and fighters of the invisible front?! It's funny how they managed to "drag onto the screen" the ideologically subversive title of the first part "The Diamond is almost not visible", frankly parodying the title of the story "Saturn" is almost not visible" by the KGB prize winner Vasily Ardamatsky, which was filmed in the films "The Way to Saturn" and "The End of Saturn", which were successful a year earlier than "The Diamond Hand".
Gorbunkov in the secret service of the competent authorities is like a kind of Humpbacked Horse who is always ready to help out and help to perform a miracle. This carnival duality of the hero, programmatically stated in his favorite fairy-tale song about hares who "mow the grass at the most terrible hour", was a kind of way out of the limits of regulated social existence, a romantic-parody manifestation of individual courage, as after a friendly drinking party in a restaurant, which is hardly worth giving out for a spontaneous riot (even if it was 1968!) a cog against the System. So popular and always bringing great luck in the film distribution, the formula "a friend among strangers, a stranger among his own" was beaten by Gaidai with rare sarcasm and at the same time with genuine sympathy for the little man who was supposed to become a "caliph for an hour".
By the way, the idea of involuntary substitution, when an inconspicuous character is forced to play a significant role that is not peculiar to himself, was used more than once by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, whom Leonid Gaidai, of course, worshipped all his life. And despite the fact that sometimes he himself appeared in small roles on the screen, his true self-portrait should be considered, in addition to Shurik, also the unforgettable Semyon Semyonovich (that's the real wife of Gaidai played Gorbunkov's wife) - a naive, good-natured and cordial "agent involuntarily", forced to live on the "island of bad luck" and escape from despair, singing: "And we don't care, and we don't care...". That's why "The Diamond Hand" is not only the funniest and smartest, but also the most personal work of a Russian comedian, who, in a comic threesome with Eldar Ryazanov and Georgy Danelia, risked being, perhaps, a Dunce, a hero played by Yuri Nikulin, who, by the way, appeared on the screen and in the image of Gorbunkov.
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