Cinema: Cracking the Code

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It may be time to stop the Czechs. Having established their consummate skill at making tragic and comic cinema using home-grown themes, they have now cracked the code of the West with a solid slapstick spoof, Lemonade Joe. The film is from the same bag as such American satires as Cat Ballon. Yet it holds its own by offering an uncompromisingly wild style and a woolly scenario, plus some of the most unlikely and unmotivated songs since Gene Autry hung up his guitar.

The doors are not the only items that swing in the film's Arizona saloon. In the background, steamy Tornado Lou (Veta Fialova) belts out her numbers in between brawls; in the foreground, the archvillains, Horace and Doug Badman, discover that they are brothers when they spot moles the size of silver dollars on each other's wrists. Enter Winifred Goodman, a piquant blonde who lectures the customers on the evils of drink. She is met with a shower of catcalls and booze. But then appears Lemonade Joe, played by Karel Fiala, an actor who looks like a reincarnation of William S. Hart. He heroically shoots a fly in mid-air and scatters the crowd.

A teetotaler, Joe's strength is as the strength of ten because his drink is pure—Kola Loca Lemonade, for which he is Western sales representative. Though a deadly shot, he aims mainly for a greater share of the market by getting endorsements from notorious gunslingers. Lou and Winifred start lowering their eyes and necklines in his direction, but the Badman brothers start raising hell. In a grand-horse-opera finale, everyone gets plugged and expires in a heap on boot hill. Infusions of Kola Loca magically resurrect them all, whereupon Joe, Horace, Doug and Lou discover that they all have matching wrist moles the size of a silver dollar. The reunited family promptly announces a merger and invents a compromise drink called Whiskola, while Joe and Winifred happily clop off into the sunset.

Visually, Director-Writer Oldfich Lipsky has made his film almost as zany as the plot; when Lemonade Joe enters Death Valley, he jumps down a vast canyon—only to enjoy a landing as soft as his drink. In a shootout, bullets meet in mid-air and cancel each other. A henchman pulls rabbits and bouquets from his holster. Street signs are all in English, but the dialogue is laconically drawled in jawbreaking Czech. "Hands up" is the kind of phrase that can only gain in translation—particularly when the translation is "Ruky hore"

In an era in which there are fastdraw clubs in Tokyo, the western has become a universal myth. Any country with a horse and a revolver can make or fake a western—and most have. But to satirize the myth is another matter. With their astringent Lemonade, the Czechs prove that they not only love the western but understand it well enough to kid the Levi's off it.