Lemonade Joe (Limonádovy Joe)

Regular Feature | Film Reviews story, or "real" history fromthe dangers ofpostmodern filmmakers. Rather than judging the film on its creative merits, such critics will find the spirited use of anachronism, the mixing of high and low culture (Queen and Chaucer), and cultural revision of ancient stories, dangerous. Charles Marowitz, a director who was also lambasted by critics for "recycling" premodern texts, reminds us that the dramatist's job "is to retrace, rediscover, reconsider, and re-angle the classics—not just regurgitate them." We must remember that there really is nothing new under the sun, that all of the "classics" were recycled by great authors who have always anachronistically rewritten stories for their own time and place. Heather Richardson Hayton California State University San Marcos Lemonade Joe (Limonádovy Joe) How odd that now after the fall ofcommunism, communist popular culture is finally being discovered inAmerica. Thanks to Facets Video, cinophiles can now sample Stalinist-era Soviet musicals, several Soviet animated films from the same period by Aleksandr Ptushko, and now a Czech western parody from 1964. Facets has released Lemonade Joe (Oldrich Lipsky 1964) as part ofa Czech New Wave series, but apopular culture moniker would have been more appropriate. Lipsky, a director of satires and comedies, is rarely associated with the new wave and is much less political than directors such as Jiri Menzel or Milos Forman, and less aesthetically challenging than someone like Frantisek Vlácil. Instead, Lipsky was part of a postwar rebirth of popular cinema that included musicals, mysteries, adventures, and animated films. Lipsky came to cinema after serving as artistic director at the Theatre of Satire in Prague. There he had directed a stage version of Lemonade Joe (by Jiri Brdecka) in 1955. The play had premiered in 1944 and was also made into a puppet film (Song ofthe Prairie) by the well-known Czech animator JiriTrnka in 1949. Subtitled in Czech "A Horse Opera," Lemonade Joe spoofs the Western genre with song, slapstick, and lighthearted anticapitalism. The hero, a sharp-shooting drinker of Kolaloka (get it?) lemonade, comes to Stetson City to clean up the Trigger Whiskey Saloon. There he makes common cause with theArizona Revival who push temperance as a key to better gunfighting, since whiskey is bad for the aim. With the help of Lemonade Joe— who it turns out is not only an agent for the Kolaloka company, but the company president's son—the revivalists open the God Bless Kolaloka Saloon. To the undertaker's glee, the town converts to Kolaloka and gunfighting deaths multiply. Doug Badman, owner of the Trigger Whiskey Saloon, fights back, enlisting his brother, the dime-novel villain Hogofogo and the two sides duel until the end, when they discover, in the best melodramatic tradition, that they are in fact all brothers. Capitalizing on the market potential, they enlist in a common cause and come up with a new product, Whiskola, for both whiskey drinkers and teetotalers. Originally released in the United States in 1966, Lemonade Joe was received with positive, but not glowing, reviews. The rarity ofsuch a communistpopular culture film reachingAmerican shores seems to have been ignored, as was the anti-capitalist message. Reviewers received it only in the tradition ofthe western parody and there they found it mildly amusing. The reception in Moscow proved to be even more misdirected. After doing good business for two weeks, censors suddenly withdrew the film. Apparently Soviet audiences could not get the parody and viewed it as a straight western, a type of film that was ideologically unacceptable in the Soviet Union at the time. Westerns were not completely unknown in the Communist world. The DEFA studios of the German Democratic Republic produced a handful, which, like their wildly popular Karl May counterpart films in the Federal Republic of Germany, focused on Indians as oppressed noble savages. The Soviets, on the other hand, embraced gold rush stories with their bare-knuckled capitalist greed. It seems natural then that the Czechs, given their great tradition of satire, took a more light-hearted and farcical approach to the communist western. And anyone who has enjoyed an afternoon in a Czech pub drinking excellent pilsner will appreciate how odd a...