About the film
Baron Munchhausen tells everyone that he flew to the Moon and pulled himself out of a swamp by his own hair. His wife wants a respectable husband; he wants to marry Martha, the woman he loves. To get a divorce, he must agree to stop being himself.
Grigori Gorin's script turns the tall-tale baron into a man who refuses to lie by agreeing to the comfortable lies of everyone else. Oleg Yankovsky is magnetic in the title role.
Clever, funny and a little sad, this is a classic of Soviet television cinema, full of jokes that were read as quiet satire on Soviet conformity.
Did you know?
- It was made by Mosfilm for Soviet television.
- The baron's line 'A serious face is not yet a sign of intelligence' is still widely quoted.
- Mark Zakharov was the artistic director of Moscow's Lenkom Theatre, and much of the cast came from there.
