Lemonade Joe

Lemonade Joe (1964)

Limonádový Joe aneb Koňská opera

A satire of the Great American Way, with Lemonade Joe a "clean living" gunfighter who drinks only Kola-Loca Lemonade and convinces everyone else in town (with his gun skills) that all "real men" drink ONLY lemonade!

Date of release
1964-10-16
TMDB
7.1 / 10 (76)
Runtime
1h 39m
Genres
Comedy, Western
Director
Oldřich Lipský

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 1

Lemonade Joe, Or The Horse Opera is a 1964 Czechoslovak New Wave Western musical parody film directed by Oldřich Lipský and written by Jiří Brdečka, based on his novel and stage play.

Production

Stories about the American frontier, such as those by Karl May and Jack London, had long been widely read in Central Europe; May's influence in particular was crucial to the Eastern European imagination of the American West. American Western films had been popular in Czech theatres throughout the history of the First Republic of Czechoslovakia, from its founding in 1918 until the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939.

Jiří Brdečka, a prolific Czech screenwriter and satirist, created the Lemonade Joe character in a 1940 serial, a parody of dime novels commissioned by the popular magazine Ahoj na neděli. As the serial progressed, however, the target of the satire shifted from dime novels to Western epics; Brdečka was a self-professed fan of Westerns, citing Stagecoach, Wells Fargo (1937), and Frontier Marshal (1939) as the films that sparked his interest in the…

The Lemonade Joe stories were adapted as a stage play in 1946, which was a pronounced popular success. The stories also inspired the 1949 stop-motion animation short film Song of the Prairie (where the Lemonade Joe theme song, "Sou Fár Tu Jú Aj Mej", appeared for the first time) as well as two other animated films: Dušan Vukotić's Cowboy Jimmie (Yugoslavia, 1957) and Witold Giersz's Maly Western ("The Little Western," Poland, 1961).

The Stetson City facades were built at the Czech film studios at Barrandov. Location shooting was done near Karlštejn Castle, in a former quarry that had been nicknamed "Amerika" since the nineteenth century for its similarity to the American West. An authentic Smith & Wesson gun, used as a prop by Joe, was borrowed from a local museum and restored especially for the film.

In creating a filming style, director Oldrich Lipský was inspired by silent comedy films, from which he borrowed numerous effects, including film tinting, slow motion, and fast motion. Brdečka's experience as an animator, often in collaboration with Jiří Trnka, led to several effects and ideas derived from animation being incorporated into the film, including animated smoke rings and dotted lines for bullet paths, freeze frames for dramatic effec…

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