Shukshin: Strange People (1969)
"Mille pardons, madame!" — from Strange People (1969)
From Vasily Shukshin, Странные люди / Strange People (Gorky Film Studio, 1969). The novella Rokovoi vystrel / The Fatal Shot, adapted from Shukshin's story "Миль пардон, мадам!" Bron'ka Pupkov played by Evgenii Lebedev.
Description: Bron'ka Pupkov, the village fabulist, tells visiting city hunters the story he has been telling all his life: that during the war he was secretly dispatched to assassinate Hitler, that he had the Führer in his sights at twenty paces, and that at the moment of the shot he flinched. The villagers know it's a lie. The city hunters don't, quite. Bron'ka himself half-believes it. Vsevolod Sanaev as the chudik who reaches truths only through fabrication.