Carnival Night

Carnival Night is a 1956 Soviet musical film. It is Eldar Ryazanov's first big-screen film, Lyudmila Gurchenko's first role and also one of the most famous films starring popular comedian Igor Ilyinsky. Produced during the Khrushchev Thaw, the film became the Soviet box office leader of 1956 with a total of 48.64 million tickets sold. Today it remains a highly popular New Year's Eve classic in Russia and the post-Soviet space. Plot It is New Year's Eve and the employees of a House of Culture are ready with their annual New Year's entertainment program. It includes a lot of dancing and singing, jazz band performance and even magic tricks. Suddenly, an announcement is made that a new director has been appointed and that he is arriving shortly. Comrade Ogurtsov arrives in time to review and disapprove of the scheduled entertainment. To him, holiday fun has a different meaning, he imagines speakers reading annual reports to show the club's progress over the year and a lecturer speaking for 40 minutes about the possibility of life on the planet Mars. And, perhaps, a bit of serious music, something from the Classics, played by the Veterans' orchestra. Obviously, no one wants to change the program with only a few hours before the show, much less to replace it with something so boring. So everyone teams up in order to prevent Ogurtsov from getting to the stage. They manage to trap Ogurtsov by any means necessary so that the acts can perform their scheduled pieces, and celebrate New Year's Eve as originally planned.