The meaning of Voskovec and Werich’s relationship with the seventh art certainly cannot be denied. Today, that relationship is fairly well known, including the fact that it was precisely the cinema which provided the original inspiration for the protagonists of the Liberated theater [the main activity of the duo, ed. note], incomparably more important than the theater. On the other hand, they knew the cinema so well – not the case with theater – that during the Twenties they even wrote about it (chiefly for the magazines «Prerod» and «Cesky filmovy svet»). This certainly united them with all modernity following Apollinaire: cinema was the first of the peripheral arts: jazz, circus, mystery novels, cabaret… – which the avant-garde appealed to against art with a capital A, in an attempt to replace the academicism of art with the more immediate values of play, of record performance, of lyricism and the intensity of experience. Perhaps because cinema didn’t have a decisive influence on the concrete form of modern poetry? […] In this sense, the art of the two comics also bears witness to a series of direct influences: in the plot of Kat a bláren (The executioner and the madman, 1934) there are themes from the Laurel and Hardy film The Devil’s Brother,1932; the two most essential scenes in Velká Barbora (Big Barbara, 1937) are modified versions of analogous scenes in Night at the Opera by the Marx Brothers (1936); the scene in which Voskovec and Werich cross the factory control station, each with half a hat on his head (Svet patrí nám) echoes an old slapstick routine by Laurel and Hardy (You’re Darn Tootin’, 1928) where the two run from a guard while wearing the same pair of pants.

Petr Král, Voskovec & Werich, Cili Hvezdy klobouky, Praha, GRYF, 1993