Carnival Night

Lena Krylova (Lyudmila Gurchenko) and the rest of the staff at an Economics Institute have spent weeks rehearsing a New Year's Eve show, with songs, dancing and a jazz band. Then the new director, Serafim Ogurtsov (Igor Ilyinsky), turns up hours before curtain with his own plan: annual reports read aloud and a little serious music from the Veterans' Orchestra. Eldar Ryazanov stages the evening as a crowd of performers working to keep one man off the stage.