User Reviews

I screened the David Bradley collection's copy of this Soviet film 'The Three-Million Caper'.

There are quite a lot of movies in which the main characters go to a lot of trouble to acquire a huge amount of money, often through theft. Most of these films are comedies. (One exception: 'Treasure of the Sierra Madre'.) Although the characters may start out working together, they eventually form rivalries, and the audience are kept guessing as to which will eventually end up with the dosh. I usually favour one character or faction over the others -- in "It's a Mad Mad World", I wanted Mickey Rooney and Buddy Hackett to get the money -- but I'm generally happy to see ANY of them land up with it. What well and truly irritates me is when, after all that work, NOBODY gets the money ... as in "Sierra Madre", where the gold dust is scattered to the winds, or in the original "Ocean's Eleven" where all the money is destroyed (bar the college tuition for Richard Conte's son). In 'Rat Race' the money went to charity, which might have pleased me if it happened in real life, but it seemed a cheat in a fiction movie. In 'Ghost', I couldn't blame Whoopi Goldberg's character for wanting to keep the embezzled funds rather than give them to charity.

On the other hand, in the original 'Ladykillers', I was deeply annoyed that the twee granny played by Katie Johnson got the money; I'd wanted at least one of the thieves to survive and get away with it.

Here we have yet one more version of that premise: as usual, a comedy, but this one somewhat unusual for being a Soviet silent film that filters the premise through Soviet class issues. Anatoli Ktorov plays Cascarilla, a thief of the subtype known as a 'toff': he is elegant, sophisticated and refined, preferring to rob through deceit rather than crude smash-and-grab tactics. (I rather disliked the name 'Cascarilla': it kept reminding me of 'cascara', a laxative.) The toff devises a brilliant scheme for stealing three million roubles from the vault of a Soviet banker ... and, while he's about it, to seduce the banker's pretty daughter. The plan comes off perfectly: both parts of it.

Along comes a much cruder crook: a cheap burglar named Tapioca. (Now THAT's a funny name!) Tapioca is a pudding-head, hilariously played by Igor Ilyinsky. After Cascarilla steals the money from the bank, Tapioca steals the money from Cascarilla. But their methods amusingly mirror their class differences: the theft by Cascarilla was a master heist, whilst Tapioca basically pulled a snatch job. Cascarilla is enraged to find himself the biter bit, and doubly enraged to have been outsmarted by a moron.

Tapioca is too stupid to conceal his possession of the lolly, so he's soon arrested ... and charged with the original bank heist. Cascarilla is furious when the stupider thief gets the credit for the toff's brilliant scheme ... and then Cascarilla gets even angrier when the peasantry start hailing Tapioca as a folk hero for 'liberating' the roubles from a banker.

SPOILER NOW, COMRADES. Cascarilla steals the money back, then disrupts Tapioca's trial to take credit for the original crime. He then tosses the money to the crowds assembled at the trial. The film ends with the peasantry cheering Cascarilla ... who would rather receive acclaim for his brilliance than anonymous wealth.

I disliked this movie's ending, but I'm broad-minded enough to admit that the fault might be mine rather than the film's. I disliked the resolution of 'It's a Mad Mad World', in which the stolen payroll is scattered over the heads of a crowd, with each of these people (but none of the original connivers) getting a small share. And yet, though I dislike that resolution, 'Mad Mad World' remains one of my favourite comedies. Here's a Marxist collectivist version of the same idea: I would have been happy if the film had ended with either Cascarilla or Tapioca getting the money, or both of them splitting it, or the roubles going back to their rightful owner (the bank) ... yet for some reason I was deeply angered (not merely displeased) to see the money given to the common people in this movie. Is there some genuine difference, or am I applying a double standard?

Part of the difference, I think, is that this Soviet movie filters its story through a class system that's far more aggressively wielded than anything in 'It's a Mad World' or 'Rat Race'. This Russian film demonises the banker, treating him as a bloated plutocrat and implying that the money is his personal wealth and his personal loss. One of this film's alternate release titles was 'Three Thieves' ... defining the banker as the third thief. The movie basically states that it's perfectly all right to rob the wealthy, but not all right to rob the poor. (What have the poor got that's worth stealing?) Further, this movie clearly believes that it's perfectly splendid to have the peasants keep the stolen money. But how do we know that the peasants are more honest, or in any way more deserving, than the upper classes? We don't. I've met plenty of dishonest poor people: they stole anything they could grab, and they only remained poor either because they squandered what they stole or because they lacked initiative to steal more than the bare minimum.

'The Three-Million Caper' is very much a communist film: not merely in its provenance but in its perceptions. As much as I despise communism, I want to be fair to any creative works made in that belief system. And yet, viewed as objectively as possible, this movie is no masterpiece: director-scenarist Yakov Protazanov is no Preston Sturges, and his efforts here are little better than workmanlike. I may be overcompensating, but I'll rate this movie 7 out of 10.

Three Thieves (also known on You Tube as The Case Of The Three Million) is one of three known film adaptations of the 1907 novella "I Tre Ladri," by Italian writer Umberto Notari. A previous (lost?) Russian version was released before the Revolution in 1916, a much later Italian remake, designed as a vehicle for the popular comedian Toto, came out in 1954.One can see why the story appealed especially to the Russians as it parallels and then brings together crooked behavior from three parts of society: a poor bum, Tapioca, who lives by stealing; a classy society type, Cascarilla; and a wealthy elderly banker, Ornano.Ornano has just made a shady deal involving a few monks and has three million he stashes overnight, until his bank reopens, at his villa. Tapioca gets wind of this and plans to sneak over and get the money. Meanwhile the banker's wife, Noris, says goodbye to her lover, a military man named Guido, as she expects her husband's return. Ornano complicates things by deciding, after a dream, to go back to the villa and make sure the money is safe. In the meantime a letter Noris has sent her lover, advising him to meet her later that night at the villa, gets exchanged by mistake with one for Cascarilla, who we see playing cards. He decides to go to the villa and besides helping himself to the money flirt with the banker's wife. Tapioca and Cascarilla, who are acquainted from before as fellow crooks, run into each other in the still empty mansion. While Cascarilla occupies himself with the wife, Tapioca hides up on the roof, where he falls asleep and is caught the next morning by the police after Ornano realizes he has been robbed. The denouement hinges on Tapioca becoming a celebrity because of the size of the heist he is credited with pulling off; in the jail he is given special treatment and Noris even comes to visit him, mistakenly thinking the other, more handsome thief Cascarilla is the one in prison A charming touch shows Tapioca's abandoned apartment, where he kept a cat, full of fellow felines who have taken over while he is away! In the climax, a big trial scene, Cascarilla suddenly appears in court, claims he is the real thief, and showers the crowd with the money, In the hubbub he and Tapioca escape together. Cascarilla reveals on the road that the money he distributed was fake and that he has the real bills, which he divides with Tapioca. In the last scene we see Tapioca, now rich and elegant, almost ripped off by an elderly bum who filches a glove from his pocket. Tapioca hypocritically pronounces the moral of the tale, which is not so much that this particular glove is precious, but the principle, that we heard expressed before, that private property is sacred. When we think of Soviet works from this era we usually recall the heavier montage classics by Eisenstein,Pudovkin,and Dovzhenko, but there were also lighter, more entertaining titles like this one, that showed an equal degree of style. The director, Protazanov, had made movies before the Revolution, emigrated to France where he worked on a few films, then returned to Russia, where besides this one he is known for an early science fiction entry, Aelita.

The Trial of Three Million is a slapstick comedy telling the story of three different thieves who all maintain different forms: one as a petty thief, another as a sophisticated international thief and finally a bourgeois banker. A banker sells his land for three million rubles but is unable to deposit his money because it is the weekend. Tapioca, the small time crook, and Cascarilla, the international thief, both learn of the banker's possession and in a string of events, both end up attempting to rob him on the same evening. The end of the film is Brechtian in nature as Cascarilla accuses every person in the courtroom of thievery before dumping the money into the crowd.

The film marks a clear development for director Yakov Protazanov (1881-1945) from his earlier film Father Sergius (1917) where the distinctions between the cinematic and theatrical were ambiguous. Although much of the comedy in the film derives from the exaggerated actor's performances and Chaplinesque blocking, humor also comes from experiments with subjectivity as Tapioca observes the cat with his stolen binoculars. Protazanov uses the same methods as Griffith and those that would later be refined by Hitchcock, such as cross cutting and the use of close-ups to build suspense (but in this case for comedic purposes) such as the sequence with the banker driving home as the two thieves linger in the main room and Tapioca losing his shoe during the heist. The film aligns with the center-moderate view of Soviet film criticism favored by Piotrovksy and Lunacharsky, who demanded films be engrossing while also delivering an ideology. Although not enjoying the same level of innovation of other films of the period, The Trial of Three Million makes a point to show that all three characters are thieves and that ultimately a wealthy banker survives the same way as a petty thief – by taking from others.