The road of the hero of Lemonade Joe on cinema screens was a tortuous one. But eventually the waiting paid off. This unique literary parody of Wild West stories has at last earned an excellent film adaptation. At the time of its premiere, Czech critics were not unanimous, but abroad it received positive attention. Decades later, it became one of the most popular films of Czechoslovak cinema, finally appreciated by contemporary scholars. The mind behind the stories of a handsome cowboy who prefers lemonade to alcohol and is more successful than others at fighting crime was that of writer Jirˇí Brdecˇka. An admirer of adventure stories, he started publishing his humorous serial already in 1940, and at the end of the war, he adapted it into a theater play. He also inspired Jirˇí Trnka’s short puppet film Arie prerie (1949). Brdecˇka modified Joe and his adventures for the radio and again for the theater. The 1955 production of the play became a foundation for the feature-length film version. Because of the exoticism of the required locations, director Oldrˇich Lipský considered undertaking a co-production with the then-Yugoslavia. But in the end, the sets for the little Western town were built on the Barrandov Studio lot, and the rocky outdoor locations were found near Prague. The rest was taken care of by visual effects. The film was shot in widescreen, but its poetics recalled silent cinema (tinting and accelerated movement in some scenes) as well as some obsolete technologies (background projection and double exposures). Live-action scenes were occasionally combined with animations by Jirˇí Trnka. An exaggerated but tasteful parody was evident in the dialogue, and certain expressions from the film even entered everyday popular speech. The popularity and importance of this film is testified by its renewed premiere in Czechoslovak cinemas in 1984 as well as a volume dedicated to the film by the National Film Archive at the end of the 1980s.

Tomáš Hála