Heart of a Dog (1988 film)

Heart of a Dog (Russian: Собачье сердце, translit. Sobachye serdtse) is a black-and-white 1988 Soviet television film directed by Vladimir Bortko. It is based on Mikhail Bulgakov's novel Heart of a Dog.

Plot

The film is set in Moscow not long after the October Revolution where a complaining stray dog looks for food and shelter. A well-off, well-known surgeon Phillip Phillippovich Preobrazhensky happens to need a dog and lures the animal to his big home annex practice with a piece of sausage. The dog is named Sharik and well taken care of by the doctor's maids, but still wonders why he's there. He finds out too late he's needed as a test animal: the doctor implants a pituitary gland and testicles of a recently deceased alcoholic and petty criminal Klim Chugunkin into Sharik. Sharik proceeds to become more and more human during the next days. After his transition to human is complete, it turns out that he inherited all the negative traits of the donor - bad manners, aggressiveness, use of profanity, heavy drinking - but still hates cats. He picks for himself the absurd name Poligraf Poligrafovich Sharikov, starts working at the "Moscow Cleansing Department responsible for eliminating vagrant quadrupeds (cats, etc.)" and associating with revolutionaries, who plot to drive Preobrazhensky out of his big apartment. Eventually he turns the life in the professor's house into a nightmare by stealing money, breaking his furniture, a water ballet during a cat chase and blackmailing into marriage a girl he met at the cinema. The professor with his assistant are then urged to reverse the procedure. Sharikov turns back into a dog. As Sharik he does remember little about what has happened to him but isn't much concerned about that. To his content he is left to live in the professor's apartment.

Cast

• Yevgeniy Yevstigneyev as Professor Philip Philipovich Preobrazhensky
• Boris Plotnikov as Dr. Ivan Arnoldovich Bormental
• Vladimir Tolokonnikov as Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov
• Nina Ruslanova as Darya Petrovna Ivanova
• Roman Kartsev as Schwonder
• Olga Melikhova as Zinaida Prokofievna Bunina

Details

• This screen version of M. Bulgakov's novel is famous for its attention to the original text: practically nothing was deleted for adaptation. However, there are some differences between the novel and the film (in the novel Bormental didn't meet typist in the cinema and Pyotr Alexandrovich - an important official cured by Preobrazhensky - didn't look like Stalin as it was shown in the film). The episode in which Bormental presents Sharikov who plays balalaika didn't exist in the novel. However, the phrases of Bormental were taken from the diary of Bormental which was in the original novel.
• Some scenes (spiritualism, circus) were taken from early Bulgakov's short stories, not from the novel.
• One of the scientists who witness the transformation of Sharik into a human is called Professor Persikov. He is the protagonist of another Bulgakov's science-fiction novel The Fatal Eggs.

See also

• Cesare Lombroso

External links

• Heart of a Dog at AllMovie
• Heart of a Dog at the Internet Movie Database
• "Heart of a Dog"(part 1) online and part 2