Striped Trip (Russian: Полосатый рейс, romanized: Polosatyi reys) is a 1961 Soviet adventure comedy film directed by Vladimir Fetin, with the acclaimed tiger tamer Margarita Nazarova in the main role.
The story begins in the lobby of an Odessa circus, where Shuleikin, a buffet worker, is greeted by the crew of a ship who jokingly call him a "tamer" and gift him a statue of the deity Hotei.
The only way to do so was to impersonate a wild animal trainer, as the Soviet freighter Eugene Onegin needed someone to accompany ten tigers and two lions being transported to the Odessa Zoo.
As the voyage continued, Marianne staged pranks to attract the attention of the strict first mate, Oleg Petrovich, including faking tiger footprints.
Amid the chaos, Shuleikin, exposed as a fraud, sought refuge in an empty cage, while Marianne courageously stepped in to calm the beasts, ultimately falling overboard in the process.
He and the waitress witness Marianne, now a veterinarian and married to Oleg Petrovich, taking charge of the injured tiger and transporting it through the city for medical care, leaving astonished onlookers in her wake.
[2][3] This motivated all studio executives to start a search for an appropriate screenplay which ended as soon as Viktor Konetsky, a former sailor and a beginning writer, shared his life story with the Lenfilm director, how a bear once escaped from a cage during a sea voyage.
Another addition was a lion Vaska from the Leningrad Zoo who had also made an appearance in Lenfilm's movies such as Don Quixote (1957), She Loves You (1956) and New Adventures of Puss in the Boots (1958), although the tigers didn't get along with him and most of his scenes were shot separately.
[4][6] The animals went through two months of training on the Matros Zhelezniak cargo ship in Leningrad, while the actual movie was shot in the Black Sea on board of the Fryazino motor vessel.
Konstantin Konstantinovsky worked as a stunt double on a number of occasions, most famously during the scene where Oleg Petrovich (played by Ivan Dmitriyev) fights a tiger (revealed during the ending credits).
[7] This myth was dispelled in 2010 by Mikhail Kozlov, a leading research fellow of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and an occasional journalist who dedicated an article to the famous lions of St. Petersburg, calling Vaska a local celebrity.