Beware of the Car (Береги́сь автомоби́ля, aka "Watch Out for the Automobile") is a 1966 film from the Soviet Union, directed by Eldar Ryazanov.
Yuri is a mild-mannered insurance salesman somewhere in the Soviet Union (the opening narration specifically refuses to state where). He's an ordinary fellow, with a pretty girlfriend named Luba. He's constantly getting yelled at by his boss for missing work, and Luba also wonders about his frequent absences. What neither of them know is that Yuri, in his spare time, is a car thief. Not a regular car thief, though: he specifically targets corrupt profiteers who buy fancy cars with their ill-gotten gains. After he steals the cars, he sells them and gives the money to orphanages. One target, a storekeeper named Dima who traffics in smuggled goods, so irritates Yuri that Yuri tries three times before successfully stealing his car.
The cops know about the serial car thief, and a detective named Maxim is on the case. When he's not catching criminals, Maxim acts in an amateur theatrical group. Also in the amateur theatrical group is, you guessed it, Yuri the car thief.
Anatoly Papanov, who appears as Dima's scornfully disapproving father-in-law, was the voice of the wolf in the iconic Soviet animated series Nu, Pogodi!.
Tropes:
- Actor Allusion: Yuri is playing in his amateur theater group's performance of Hamlet. Actor Innokenty Smoktunovsky actually did play Hamlet on the stage and in a 1964 Russian-language film adaptation.
- Book Ends: The opening narration talks about how "Audiences like thrillers" because they know how they're going to end. Then in the last minute the narrator makes that comment again, right before the end, where Yuri finds Luba again in a No Ending ending.
- Conspicuous Trenchcoat: For all his skill at boosting cars, Yuri is very poor at things like stealth. When he's up to criminal deeds he has a habit of wearing a trenchcoat and fedora that are extremely conspicuous.
- Cutting the Knot: The first time Yuri tries to steal Dima's car, he's foiled by the alarm. The second time, he disables the alarm but is stopped by a bear trap that Dima left in the car. (Luckily not the kind with teeth.) Dima then gets a storage shed and puts his car inside. What does Yuri do? He rents a crane, which lifts the whole shed up in the air, which allows Yuri to drive away with the car.
- Face Framed in Shadow: The first shots of the thief show him skittering across the roof of a mansion. The first shot of his face shows his eyes framed by a beam of light while the rest is dark. He's eventually revealed as Yuri.
- I Never Said It Was Poison: Yuri has a real bad habit of this, like when he's talking with Maxim about the guy who tried to steal Dima's car, and accidentally says that the witness is a round-shaped man.
- Just Like Robin Hood: Yuri steals the cars of corrupt nouveau riche types, and donates the proceeds to charity.
- Let Off by the Detective: Averted. Maxim was going to do this after discovering that his buddy Yuri was the car thief, but after Yuri steals another car thinking it belongs to a corrupt bureaucrat, only to discover it belongs to an innocent professor, Maxim arrests him.
- Low-Speed Chase: Yuri is trying to outrace a motorcycle cop when he enters a residential area, and specifically, a school district. Since he's the nicest car thief ever, Yuri slows down as he approaches the school zone. The motorcycle cop does too, even pulling up next to Yuri and politely urging him to pull over as they go through the school district.
- Medium Awareness: The opening narration starts off by observing that "audiences like thrillers", and so they should like this movie.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Yuri, after the Oh Crap moment below.
- Narrator: A narrator provides exposition and sometimes comments sarcastically on the action.
- No Ending: Ends with Yuri finding Luba again, and gazing at her hopefully, but without answering whether she's still interested in him after he's done time in prison.
- Oh, Crap!: Yuri's reaction when he realizes that, for the first time in life, he stole an innocent person's car.
- The Show Must Go On: Yuri gets arrested, but Maxim has him taken to the theater, under police guard, so that the acting troupe can put on their production of Hamlet.
