The Diamond Arm: Baku as the Soviet Abroad

The film's "Istanbul" is Baku. In the second half of September 1968 the crew filmed the foreign episodes in the historic Icheri Sheher district, and this is where Gorbunkov steps on a watermelon rind outside the pharmacy, falls and cries "Chyort poberi!", the very password the smugglers were waiting for. Gaidai even kept a stray donkey in frame because it added local colour. The walled Old City is the most ancient part of Baku, and a monument to Yuri Nikulin now stands in Icherisheher.

Location precision: The film does not name a street; the pin marks the Icherisheher district where most of the foreign scenes were shot.

Visitor guidance: The walled Old City is open to walk; the Nikulin monument is inside it.

Among the Baku landmarks that pass for Istanbul are the old streets, minarets, fortress walls and the Palace of the Shirvanshahs. The palace is a real 15th-century building, described by UNESCO as one of the pearls of Azerbaijan's architecture, and was declared a museum-preserve in 1964, only four years before the crew arrived.

Visitor guidance: The palace is a museum in the Old City of Baku.

Back in the Soviet Union, the heroes live in a southern port town, played by Sochi and Adler. The Gorbunkovs' khrushchyovka, which the film places at 21 Morskaya Street, was actually shot on Donskaya Street, in the Sochi neighbourhood of the same name, during the May to July shoot in the south. Gorbunkov, a kind and honest senior economist, can only tell his suspicious wife that he is on a secret police mission. In 2010 Sochi unveiled a monument to the film's heroes, showing Gorbunkov saying goodbye to his family before the cruise.

Location precision: The street is known from the film's production notes; the pin marks Donskaya Street, not a particular building.

Gesha invites Gorbunkov fishing, hoping to stun him somewhere quiet and take the cast off his "unconscious body". The scene was shot near Kiselyov Rock near Tuapse, a smooth sheer wall 46 metres high and 60 metres wide. Anatoly Papanov spent long stretches in water of about 8 degrees, and when a retake was announced he shouted "Idiot!" at the assistant. Gaidai kept it in the film.

Dragged out to sea by Lyolik, Kozodoyev ends up "walking on water" after a boy with a net who seems to have a halo. The boy really did walk: a board was fixed just under the surface for him. This scene was not shot at Tuapse but on Sudzhuk Spit in Novorossiysk. In 2010 Novorossiysk put up its own monument to Gesha Kozodoyev.

Location precision: Sources name the spit as the filming location but not the exact spot on it.

Not every home-town scene was shot in the south. The subbotnik scene, in which the Chief finds a box of valuables in the ground, was filmed on a wasteland in Kuntsevo, in Moscow. The flats of the Chief, Gesha and the Gorbunkovs were built in studio pavilions, so those cannot be found at all.

Location precision: The film guide names only the Kuntsevo district; the pin marks the district, not the wasteland itself.