King For A Day (Original title: Господин за един ден, "Gentleman For A Day") is a 1979 Bulgarian comedy about a poor peasant named Purkonote in 1930s Bulgaria who stumbles his way into one day of a city gentleman's opulent life.
Tropes:
- Big Eater: The "little elephant of Strandja Mountain" is a little pig Purko buys with the promise of it turning huge. The pig has the appetite to show for it, but zero growth rate.
- Bumbling Dad/Henpecked Husband: Purko is naïve and incompetent and his wife hates having to deal with everything.
- Butt-Monkey: Purko is one for the whole village. He constantly gets scammed, has to literally become a statue, his Get Rich Quick Schemes always get thwarted, and he even gets stabbed with a pitchfork when his wife rebuffs the advances of an angry tax collector. At the end of the eponymous "day" in which everyone respects him as a gentleman, he gets stripped to his underpants when it becomes clear he is still penniless.
- Evil Debt Collector: The tax collector. He comes whistling on his way to confiscate the property of dirt-poor peasants who he knows full well can't pay their taxes. He also hates Purko and tries to get with his wife when he comes to collect the second time (although the previous time he was there, she was the one who tried to seduce him so he doesn't confiscate everything).
- Get-Rich-Quick Scheme: Purko has several:
- First he makes big plans about the eggs he gathers from his chicken coop. In an almost classic retelling of the Aesop of the milkmaid and her pail, he snaps out of his daydreams to see the goat trampling the eggs in the basket.
- He also gives a ton of money for a useless "shredder machine" (actually ten or so pairs of scissors placed next to each other and operated by a crank) that can make rags for him to sell. Trouble is, he's dirt poor so he only has so many useless things to shred. And his "helpful" kids shredded his only clothes, too, so he ends up walking around in a night robe.
- He then gets scammed into trading the goat for a small pig on the promise that it'll grow very large. No such thing happens, the pig eats copious amount of food, doesn't grow and then the whole village proclaims it a nuisance because its squeals wake everyone up, and hunt it down, which is when the pig manages to escape and knock over the rickety shack that passes for a pub.
- Finally Purko falls victim to one when a well-dressed gentleman offers him to invest in getting an American passport.
- Mirroring Factions: Two political parties send parliament member candidates to the village to campaign for the upcoming elections. The two candidates, Mr. Totmakov and Mr. Tokmakov, only differ in their names (almost not even that) and appearances (Totmakov is a skinny guy with a fat wife, Tokmakov is fat with a skinny wife). They each unveil a monument of the fallen soldiers, give the exact same speech and have their campaigns ruined by the crowd laughing at something which they think is them (in reality it's something Purko did).
- Law of Inverse Fertility: Dirt-poor Purko has his wife churn out kids like a factory. Lampshaded when he celebrates the birth of his youngest child and the rich man in town passes by, trying to bully his workers into earning their meager pay instead of drinking with Purko. They tell him that "maybe finally there will be a child in [his] home too" if he loosens up a bit and he leaves in anger.
- Mobile Shrubbery: Purko has to hide in a haystack when the tax collector comes. When the collector tries to have sex with his wife (who tries to seduce him the previous time) but she refuses because she's pregnant (actually because her husband is looking), he vents his anger on the haystack with a pitchfork and accidentally stabs Purko in the leg.
- Mock Millionaire: Subverted when Purko returns home as a Sharp-Dressed Man. The villagers immediately start treating him this way and he just goes with the flow, only to wake up in the empty pub to a huge bill and a very angry barkeeper.
- Nobody Here but Us Statues: Subverted. Purko has to play a statue of a soldier, not to hide, but because his pig ate the real statue (it was made of chalk) and the mayor needed the statue to be there for when the local parliament representative visits. Purko spends the morning covered in chalk and trying not to move, but the pig comes to lick the chalk off him. It ends with the representative getting scared shitless when the soldier's statue comes alive and runs off chasing the pig.
- Roll in the Hay: When the Little Elephant starts squealing in the night, couples all around the village jump awake, including one that did this.
- Sharp-Dressed Man: Purko only gets treated respectably when he rents a tux.
- Unkempt Beauty: Purko's wife is still attractive even after giving birth to 7 children and the harsh peasant life. Aside from her husband, attracts both the tax collector and the local wealthy man. However, she loses her appeal to Purko once he meets a well-dressed, powdered and perfumed "American" lady from the city.
- War Is Hell: Played with. Purko has something of a WWI flashback when he hears a loud motorbike, which to him sounds like machine gun fire.
- War Is Glorious: Downplayed in much the same way: when Purko's children chase off the tax collector with stones, they imagine loud bangs as if they're throwing grenades.
